A few minutes after 6 p.m. on a Thursday night, William “Wild Bill” Wing hollers out to a packed barroom.

“Hey everybody, thanks for coming. It’s time for Meat Draw,” Wild Bill yells to cheers and applause. “Let’s get some meat.”

Wild Bill strolls down the center of Headquarters Tavern, the only watering hole in the tiny town of Mineral. It’s an old place with buckboard floors and a long wooden bar.

Each week, Headquarters hosts a raffle. The prizes? Meat.

“Ribeye steaks, New York steaks,” Jack Brown said, looking over a wide table covered in packages of raw meat. “We have turkeys and hams, you know, for the holidays. You know meat’s going sky high right now, but they like the big steaks.”

Brown doesn’t work at Headquarters — he’s a longtime regular who helps buy the piles of meat every week.

The meat draw is simple: People pay a dollar per ticket, the tickets go in a bucket, and then throughout the night, they pull out the winners. Players can buy as many tickets as they want, and everyone has the chance to go home with dinner for as little as a dollar.

In this rural area, the meat draw is the big night of the week. Everybody from all the nearby towns pack into the old bar.

“It gets the community between Ashford, Elbe, and Mineral all together on a Thursday night,” Brown said.

Mineral has fewer than 200 residents, according to the last Census. The state Department of Labor says many people here work for the government, the biggest employer in Lewis County.

Specifically, the big thing that looms just over the treeline: Mount Rainier National Park. Those jobs have been hit this year by DOGE layoffs and the federal government shutdown.

At a recent meat draw night, a parks staffer was hanging out at Headquarters the day the government re-opened.

“Definitely anticipated shut down sometime, but nothing this extreme —not for six weeks, not for three pay periods,” she said. “Didn’t anticipate that this would last this long.”

She didn’t want to share her name, out of concern of retribution. During the shutdown she was considered an essential worker and had to work without pay.

That was tough, but she didn’t want to give up the position she loves.

“It’s a dream job. This is exactly what I wanted to do out of grad school, and so I perfected my resume for 10 years in order to get this position,” she said. “It doesn’t feel as reliable as it was several decades ago, like in my parents’ generation.”

People in Mineral stepped up for her and others, she said, during the past month when the government furloughed park staff.

“Everyone knew who works for the park and who’s being affected by this,” she said outside of the bar. “So everyone was doing different things to help different people, like spaghetti dinners, making sure that everyone was getting fed, and making sure they had gas and heat. It’s been nice to see that.”

That’s the spirit of the meat draw inside the bar. The raffle is run by volunteers, people who’ve been coming in for a long time. The employees at the bar are too busy pouring drinks to pull raffle tickets out of the bucket.

“For me, it means a lot of money. It’s my support system,” said bar manager Julie Rutledge.

Rutledge started coming to the place four years because of the meat draw.

“This one night is the one night for the entire week that really keeps us going,” she said.

It’s about community — but it’s also a bit of a party every week. It is a bar, after all.

Many regulars have nicknames, some people swap their prizes after the draw, and there are a lot of meat innuendos.

One fun part of the meat draw is that not every prize is a juicy steak, Rutledge said.

“We’ll get, like, ground camel, kangaroo steaks, cow eyes, or a bag of fat,” she said. “Then they’re like, ‘Oh, I don’t want that.’”

In recent years, the area has been rocked by economic uncertainty. Inflation, the rising cost of living, and, most recently, the shakeups at the nearby national park have hit this town that depends on government jobs and tourism.

When times get tough, that’s when neighbors step in, said Wild Bill, master of ceremonies of the meat draw.

“Small town community is like, if anybody needs something — anybody will be there,” he said. “So it’s a little more than just an event. It’s more of a town coming together.”

One regular is Margot Page, who comes every week and buys $20 of tickets. She was striking out that night until Wild Bill yelled out her name to the loud bar.

It’s fun to win, Page said, but that’s not why she comes.

“You walk in this door and everybody’s welcome and everybody’s OK,” Page said. “And having a place for all of us to gather in this little town for 20 bucks a week is a steal.”

At the end of the night, people leave Headquarters with packages of ground beef and frozen turkeys under their arms. The leftover money will be used for next week’s meat draw, when this little bar will fill up again.

Casey Martin is a reporter with KUOW. This story comes to you from the Northwest News Network, a collaboration between public media organizations in Oregon and Washington.

It is part of OPB’s broader effort to ensure that everyone in our region has access to quality journalism that informs, entertains and enriches their lives. To learn more, visit our journalism partnerships page.

News Source : https://www.opb.org/article/2025/12/02/this-small-town-near-mount-rainier-comes-together-for-community-and-meat/