Sanctuary in the Past

The old soap about Americans not caring a whit for their history doesn’t account for one thing. It doesn’t account for the great many who do. It doesn’t account for those untold thousands of people who go marching backward every chance they get. These legions of Americans aren’t just mindful of their past, they read history books as the script to bring yesteryear back to life.

They unplug. They unwind. Against the bewildering onslaught of today, they seek respite by retreating, body and mind, into the smaller, slower and supposedly simpler worlds of long ago. They relive the Civil War. They dance the reels of generations past. They don the tricorn hats of the American Revolution. They fire the muskets of 1812, the longbows of the Medieval Age, the six-shooters of the Old West, the 12-pounders of the square-rigger era.

Or, as happened one weekend a while back, they pitch their tepees in the great Bridger Valley of southwestern Wyoming. They strike steel to flint, sending a spark into charred cotton, which sets tinder smoldering and creates the fire to start their Dutch ovens simmering. They leave behind their wristwatches and cell phones. They park their RVs outside the gates. They slip their feet into moccasins. They pull on buckskins, or Missouri River work duds, or the dangling knit toques of the voyageurs of Canada. Sitting on wooden kegs, they strum their instruments under the open sky. And, oh yes, they empty their pockets--because when you set out in quest of one of the most astonishing epochs of North America’s past, you must remember that pants pockets haven’t yet been invented.

The Fort Bridger Mountain Man Rendezvous is the second biggest annual event in Wyoming. (The first is the cowboy celebration known as Frontier Days.) The rendezvous commemorates the bygone, once-a-year gatherings of Rocky Mountain fur trappers that occurred more than a century and a half ago. Today, as then, the rendezvous serves as a trader’s bazaar. In keeping with the ways of the past, it also has become a showcase for America’s resurgent crafts movement. This being the 21st century, the raucous and ribald has been substantially tamed to account for families, and the grounds include 500 “tin tepees”--the trailers and RVs (parked beyond a fence, behind a hedgerow of trees) that shelter the bulk of the mountain man brigades at this rendezvous. But fun remains the aim--escapism being the blessing of imagination.

Now in its 31st year, the Fort Bridger rendezvous attracts about 40,000 people each Labor Day weekend. This includes both “buckskinners” and those who travel from the far corners of the continent to gape at them. The rendezvous provides something else, too. For those of a reflective mind, it is one of those signposts that stands too low to catch the lens of television cameras or newspaper headlines--a marker on time’s trail by which we can measure where we came from, who we are, how we got here and, most importantly, what we’ve lost in the hurry to get wherever it is we’re going.

The everyday term for such a gathering is “living history.” Some use the word “reenactment.” At first sight, the scene is jarring, even self-conscious. Adherents themselves admit as much: Otherwise ordinary people ornately attired in the livery of another age, assuming goofy period nicknames, talking in a forgotten mountain patois about “buffler” while their buffalo patties sizzle over coals. But you’d miss a point if you regarded these events as nothing more than theater and stagecraft. Hang around awhile and you’ll discover that one of the lessons of pursuing history is that history has a few tricks up its gartered sleeve.

“Remember when you were a kid and you played cowboy or army? Well, we all are doing the same thing. Except we have the wherewithal to do it right,” says Ray Glazner, a rotund trader of period dry goods and a former schoolteacher who lives in Wausau, Wis. On this day, he is costumed as a “Metis,” the name given to the offspring of French fur trappers and Cree Indians in the mid-18th century. He’s a Metis trader, to be precise. That means a tasseled cap, a waistcoat and a gathered calico shirt.

For Glazner and a good many others who have converged at this 22-acre state park, named for the great wandering mountain man Jim Bridger, rendezvous begins with the get-up, but it doesn’t end there. “After people decide what they want to play, they start asking questions,” he continues. “What is this? How was this used? What . . . why?”

Living history, thus, becomes a doorway to the real thing--exploring our narrative so we can judge whether we’re making any headway with progress. Perhaps it’s time to challenge that old cliche about Americans existing in a state of perpetual and complacent amnesia. Not all of them. Not by far. “For us,” Glazner says, “we approach history much like the mountain man took on this country: Always asking, ‘What’s on the other side of the hill? And the next one?’ ”

A newcomer to rendezvous is given an advance reading list by organizers. When pared down to “just the essentials,” it totals five volumes of history, 1,984 pages. The demands grow exponentially once one arrives, when it seems like half of the casual conversations get around to, “Well, you have to read . . . .”

Joyce Appleby is a doubter. She is a retired professor and former chair of the UCLA history department, as well as a prolific author about early America, including the 2003 biography “Thomas Jefferson.” At home in Los Angeles, she reflects on her experiences with “living history.” Too much play, she says, and not enough study. “Attention to decorative detail is exquisite; attention to factual detail is not.”

Among the throngs at Fort Bridger, there are people to prove her point, and then some. Plenty of folks come for no other reason than to shoulder their flintlocks in black-powder target competitions. A scattered few seem intent only on binge drinking and campfire antics--authentic mountain man behavior, yes, but not much to engage the inquiring mind. And, of course, you can see a scattering of men and women who seem as blankly out of place in the 1830s as they are in 2003.

There are others, however, and no small number, for whom the heart of living history is something else.

“She’s wrong,” says Lyn Clayton, a librarian at Brigham Young University and owner of one of the most beautiful of dozens of tepees erected for the rendezvous. He is dressed in a calico shirt and Scottish beret, for among the mountain men history recounts the presence of at least one Scot. “We may romanticize, yes. But we learn. How can you understand what was going on in the West in this era if you don’t understand the larger context of Jacksonian America? That’s the essence of history: context.”

Besides, even the sternest skeptic must concede: Tiptoeing over sharp rocks in the thin-soled moccasins of our ancestors provides a taste of real life that cannot be simulated on the History Channel.

It was the briefest of epochs. the age of the rocky mountain mountain man began after Lewis and Clark’s voyage of discovery in 1806 and lasted only 34 years. During this period, fur trappers gathered in summer at a rendezvous. They met supply caravans. They traded their bundles of beaver “plews” for whiskey and gunpowder. They cavorted--in the full meaning of the word--with friendly Indian tribes.

Those who today make the journey back in time to those celebrated gatherings make an odd discovery, though. The fancifully romanticized imagery of the lonely mountain man, roaming free through the wilderness, doesn’t entirely hold up to fact. Much of the era’s fur trade was dominated by entrepreneurs bent on riches and market domination. Rather than being free spirits, many mountain men were enlistees in hierarchal corporate brigades. In other words, wage slaves. Their earnings paid for next year’s supplies and the annual debauchery of the rendezvous, but little else. Whatever you can say about the cutthroat state of modern business, it was true then in spades.

“Ruthless price-cutting, wholly ruthless trade-practices, bribery . . . subsidization . . . bribery, piracy and miscellaneous corruption . . . chaotic,” wrote historian Bernard DeVoto in his Pulitzer Prize-winning 1947 history of the era, “Across the Wide Missouri.” He could have added, environmental degradation, human exploitation, fraud and a good many other unpleasant descriptions of the era’s commercial practices, too.

Oh well. What better lesson could history provide, except to remind us of the nature of human nature? Same game, different costume.

Look across the creek that runs through fort bridger: in a double horseshoe, 145 canvas tents are pegged down. They draw crowds of shoppers as intent as those at back-to-school sales at a city mall. This is “trader’s row,” and its existence poses a challenge to another cliche: Americans don’t make things anymore.

Yes they do.

Scratch a mountain man, or a mountain man woman--or anybody else who participates in “living history,” no matter what era--and you’re likely to find someone with restless hands. An old and deep urge can be answered only by turning one’s back on the Industrial Age. Knife makers, gunsmiths, leather crafters, bead makers, tinsmiths, weavers, blacksmiths, seamstresses all stake out territory on trader’s row. So do those who sell the raw materials for the mountain man life: the hides and blankets and bolts of canvas, the bricks of beeswax, the caches of flints.

Fifteen years ago, Kenny Robertson and his wife, Teri, were machine operators at a valve and lifter factory near Belmond, Iowa. After Kenny’s first rendezvous, he set out to make some buckskin pants for his son.

“Everybody oohed and aahed,” he recalls. “So I started making things to sell.”

Today, Robertson is one of the preeminent craftsmen to travel the rendezvous, black-powder and long-rifle circuit. He makes scrimshawed powder horns and one-of-a-kind, hand-stitched elk-hide “possibles bags”--which contained everything to make survival possible and are now used to carry laptops and Palm Pilots. With a process that he perfected by experimentation, he adds centuries of aging to his $200-and-up bags, making them indistinguishable from museum pieces. He was commissioned to make several for the forthcoming Disney film “The Alamo.”

People will loiter in his tent for an hour, sometimes more, fingering the leather, studying his technique. Robertson encourages people to attempt their own. He understands the impulse: So few things can be called unique anymore. So rarely are they crafted with longevity in mind. Seldom can we say, “This I made.” He will give them tips.

Working on the family dining room table, Teri cuts the bags during the day and Kenny stitches and finishes them at night--long shifts during which the coffeepot stays hot around the clock. At home they assemble the inventory for the 70,000 miles of road trips they make each season. The enterprise supports three children. The oldest operates the business Web site, www.triplejtrade.com. “Yeah, I like the TV and the computer,” Robertson says. “But if I had the chance, I’d go back in time. In a minute.”

“People who think the same way eventually meet and congregate,” says Kash Johnson, explaining what draws people to this mass camp-out. Johnson has been attending for 21 years, missing only one rendezvous--the fault of an abscessed tooth, a half-rotten artifact that he now wears dangling from a cuff on his ear. He has served as the Fort Bridger “Booshway,” or boss. He is on the board of directors of the nonprofit group that organizes the event.

He recalls his stint in 1980 as proprietor of a hunting and fishing lodge in the mountains south of Fort Bridger. It was a contemporary approximation of the life of the mountain man, far closer to the real thing than what surrounds him now. “I used to laugh at these kind of people here,” he allows. Then, through the mist of the lodge window, he saw a man walking toward him in full buckskin regalia. “I felt a chill. It was something to see. We talked. He told me I should be doing what he was doing.”

Today, strolling the campground, smelling the smoke of wood fires, watching the wind dance of telltale streamers high up on tepee poles, Johnson pauses. Furrows deepen across his weathered face. “It was a life-changing thing--I don’t know how to explain it.”

Usually people here don’t have to. One of the reasons you seek out like-minded people is so you don’t have to explain yourself. If pushed, a modern buckskinner will probably utter something about freedom. But in truth, today’s mountain men and women answer to as many rules here as they do at home--actually more after sunset, when “dog soldiers” patrol the fort to remind anyone not attired in pre-1840s costume that it’s time to leave. No, it’s a different kind of freedom that draws them here: the intermittent escape from career ambitions, from the din of mass commercialism, from people whose freedoms impinge on theirs. Costumes, it turns out, are a perfect foil to that most persistent and judgmental of urban questions: “So, what do you do?”

Only after you begin inquiring about “living history” are you apt to realize just how deeply its attractions have taken root and spread through our culture. That woman you have worked with for 15 years might laugh knowingly at your mention of a mountain man rendezvous. She tells you that her son, who earns his living in Seattle’s high-tech industry, spends his free time as a Roman archer in the Society for Creative Anachronism. That organization drew 12,500 participants to its national get-together last summer at Slippery Rock, Pa., re-creating pre-17th century European life.

It is no small freedom, it seems, to be silly in these serious times--even to the extent of being serious about it. The writer Walker Percy observed that Americans have a special capacity to transform their hobbies into something resembling religions. It is the secret club of our childhoods, open only to those who are willing.

In a speech she delivers to audiences around the country, UCLA’s Joyce Appleby argues that history and historians have a special place in society today. A violent uprising such as terrorism, she says, “concentrates our attention on meaning--meaning behind actions, meaning of life, meaning to collective identity.”

With its persistent focus on yesterday, the Fort Bridger Mountain Man Rendezvous accomplishes something of the same. There is plenty in this short epoch to chew on.

Only a dunderhead can ignore the fact that the fur trade serves as a disastrous case study for those who view nature’s bounty as boundless. Long before the shocking pillage of the buffalo, the Western mountains were wantonly stripped of beaver. Today’s rendezvous participants have little choice except to acknowledge the old and repeatedly forgotten lesson that greed is the self-defeating side of unrestrained freedom.

On the other hand, the life of the mountain man challenges some of the simple-minded myths about this continent’s heritage.

The mountain man’s relationship with American Indians, for instance, was far more complex and cooperative than the stereotyped story of conquest. Condescending 19th century attitudes prevalent in the cities of the East served the mountain man not at all in his life-and-death dealings with those who occupied the plains and mountains. Even a casual participant in the rendezvous discovers that, during this brief chapter in the American story, the mountain man lived among Indians in the manner of Indians, sharing skills and technology, pleasure and hardship. Indians were not a people but many peoples, some allied with the hair-faces and others brutal enemies. Sex had not yet been regimented by missionaries, and accounts of the day suggest that it, too, was exchanged exuberantly.

Even something so charged as race relations between blacks and whites bears a reflective thought in light of the mountain man. Those who attend modern rendezvous are overwhelmingly white, with a few American Indians joining in. Yet you cannot go long in conversation at Fort Bridger, or very deep into the accounts of fur trade history, without being reminded that the mountains offered black Americans unexpected freedom and esteem without qualification. Often this nation does not live up to its cherished self-image as the place where individuals are judged by what they do instead of who they are. But during this short period, while slavery flourished elsewhere in the land, black Americans rose to legend among the ranks of the fur trappers. One, James Beckwourth, is remembered as among the gaudiest and bawdiest of them all.

In one important respect, however, past and present cannot be reconciled. The modern mountain man simply must compromise with history when it comes to mountain women.

The first white women did not arrive in the Rockies until 1836, near the end of the fur trade era. That’s when a wagon train carrying two missionary wives, Eliza Spalding and Narcissa Whitman, drove into a trapper rendezvous. By contrast, today’s Fort Bridger gathering draws as many women as men. They assume various roles--pioneer settlers, Indians, traders and full-fledged, tomahawk-wielding, gun-shooting buckskinners.

“Many of us do it because someone we know does it,” concedes Karen South Arnold of Montrose, Colo. After the introduction, though, women like Arnold have become enthusiasts, not just tag-alongs. She, for instance, made a study and published a book on the games that were popular during the era. “The great thing is that this is such a melting pot,” she says. “I have two bachelor’s, two master’s and a PhD. Nobody here cares.” It wouldn’t be accurate to say the same thing about her being a woman--but no one objects, either.

Dusk in the Bridger Valley. Lantern light in tepees. The soft melody of fiddles; the picking of banjos carried off by blustery winds. These are old tunes, simple tunes--you know them, but where in the world did you learn them? Lightning in the distance. Wood smoke in your face. Melancholy in the heart: Humans are social beings. Without television or telephones or the Internet, people seek the company of others. Friendships made at rendezvous, like campfire bonds everywhere, are intimate in ways that are difficult to achieve elsewhere. This is the best of moments. This is why the rendezvous go on, year after year. You don’t need an invitation to drop by Kash Johnson’s tepee. You don’t need a reservation at Frenchy’s.

Michel Peret was once the proprietor of a seafood restaurant in Brentwood. At 40, he retired. He moved to the mountains of Montana, to the town of Polebridge, near Glacier National Park. For the last 15 years, he has followed the rendezvous circuit during the summer. With a ponytail, a 10-inch spade beard and droopy knit cap of the French-Canadian voyageurs, “Frenchy” now prepares buffalo-pie breakfasts, steak suppers and all-day cowboy coffee at his 12-seat cook tent.

“I left France in the 1960s,” he says. “I followed the American Dream--the big car and all that. After that, it was time to live my childhood dream.”

It is the dream of simplicity, of open spaces, wild spaces, freedom and old friendships periodically renewed. A dream as real as make-believe.