Back to the 1800s : Mountain-Man Rendezvous Offers Opportunity to Recreate Feeling of Another Era, Family Style

Through an encampment of white canvas tents and tepees strode groups of rough-looking men dressed in buckskin and furs. Accompanying them were sturdy women sporting bonnets and ankle-length cotton dresses. From the other side of a nearby pine forest, rifle shots that sounded like cannon fire reverberated off the sage-covered hillside.

At a mountain-man rendezvous, they walk the walk and talk the talk of one of the most colorful periods of American frontier history. At least they do until the weekend is over and they have to go back to work.

“Basically, all we’re doing is playing dress-up, trying to relive what our forefathers went through,” said Tom Squires, range master for the Bridgeport Mountain Man Rendezvous held last weekend in the Eastern Sierra foothills of northern Mono County. “This event is just for enjoyment and recreation more than anything else.”

Enjoyment, recreation and escape.

“It gets me out of the 20th Century for a while,” said buckskin-clad, fur-hatted John Hudick, 54, an electrical engineer from Santa Cruz County. “Basically, we try to keep with the theme of the pre-1840s.”

Mountain-man rendezvous have developed into something of a subculture. They are patterned after the original mountain-man rendezvous of the 1820s and ‘30s, in which American and French-Canadian fur trappers gathered once a year with traders and Indians along the west slope of the Rockies to swap furs for supplies. The original rendezvous were raucous affairs at which trappers blew off a year’s worth of steam with boozing, brawling and womanizing before heading back into the harsh, lonely mountains.

Their modern-day counterparts are considerably more modest, dispensing with most of the uncivilized behavior in favor of black-powder rifle contests, knife- and tomahawk-throwing matches and good-natured joshing. In typical mountain-man drollery, a list of rules handed out to rendezvous visitors included the commandment: “No hollering, fighting, eye gouging or ear biting after 11 p.m.”

“You’ll hear some hooting and hollering out here at night, but what you see at these things is really a family-oriented kind of thing,” said Jake Jacobsen, the Mono County undersheriff and one of the organizers of the second annual Bridgeport event. “You’ll see a lot of wives involved, kids involved.”

A mountain-man rendezvous circuit has evolved, with events held frequently throughout California and other Western states.

“We’re liable to have people here from just about anywhere, although I imagine the brunt of these folks are from California, Nevada and Oregon,” Jacobsen said.

More than 500 people showed up, more than doubling last year’s attendance.

Fred Danner, 48, an irrigation company employee from San Diego, was wearing a buckskin jacket and cradling a .54-caliber cap-and-ball rifle.

“I go to five or six of these rendezvous a year,” he said. “I really enjoy black-powder shooting, and I like going to these to get back to the ‘real world.’ ”

Most rendezvous participants are aficionados of pre-1840 America, especially the mountain-man period of 1820-40. Some novices come in RVs and wearing street clothes with maybe a buckskin belt or pouch tacked on. But real devotees come draped in fringed buckskin and furs from head to toe, knives and tomahawks dangling from their belts, prepared to camp out in genuine 1800s style.

One part of the Bridgeport encampment was designated a primitive area, where pre-1840s dress was mandatory and any material or appliance that was not around before 1840 was forbidden.

The hard-core buckskinners used canvas tents with wood and steel tent poles, tin plates, gourd canteens, cow horn combs, wool or fur blankets and the like. A few exceptions were made for necessary gear, such as plastic coolers to keep food for the weekend, but they were required to be kept covered and out of sight.

Bridgeport is actually a fitting place for a rendezvous because in 1833 a contingent of about 50 mountain men under the command of fur trapper Joseph Walker left the historic Green River Rendezvous and traveled through the area. They trekked through Bridgeport Valley, then crossed over the Sierra into Yosemite Valley and on to the Pacific.

The rendezvous usually revolves around black-powder shooting matches. Last weekend, competitors fired a variety of black-powder firearms in separate events: flintlock, smooth bore, black-powder cartridge and pistol. Each event was divided into subclasses--men’s, women’s, junior and pee wee--with separate prizes for each class.

“Flintlock!” a shooter yells to alert bystanders before firing, because the rifles often shoot flames and debris out one side. The primitive guns operate by scraping a sharpened flint fixed in the gunlock against a metal piece, which drops sparks into an open pan filled with gunpowder. When the gunpowder ignites with a flash, it fires a steel ball out of the barrel.

Hudick explained that the rifles require special skill to fire accurately.

“A flintlock’s a little fussier because you have to keep your flint sharp,” he said. “It also takes a little longer to go off, about a 10th of a second, so you have to follow through, just like in golf.”

Another shooting event was the trail walk, during which groups of competitors followed a course through the pine forest, stopping every 25 yards or so to fire black-powder weapons at silhouette targets.

At the end of the trail walk was knife and tomahawk competition, where contestants threw at a sawed-off log from about 15 feet away, getting a point for each knife or tomahawk that stuck.

One trail-walk team included Kathy Cooley, her son Jeff, 18, daughter Cindy Karr, 22, and son-in-law Russ Karr, 26, all formerly of Northridge and now living in Reno. This was the first mountain-man rendezvous for Cindy, a pizza parlor employee.

“It’s also the first time I’ve ever fired one of these guns,” she said. “I just love it. I love being outdoors and doing adventurous things, and this definitely is adventurous. But it’s really hard--I’m having a hard time keeping steady enough to hit anything.”

When questioned about their costumes or firearms, mountain men and women would frequently drop whatever they were doing and explain them in detail, usually including a brief lesson in period history.

Asked to explain how his rifle worked, Hudick launched into a short course on flintlock terminology that has long since become part of the language.

“Sometimes, when you pull the trigger, you get a flash in the pan , nothing happens,” he said. “You can put your gun on half cock, which is the safety, or full cock to shoot, so to go off half cocked means you can’t shoot. A complete gun is made up of the lock, stock and barrel --that’s the whole gun.”

Darrel Declusin, president of the Sonora Smoke Polers, offered some helpful advice to a first-time rendezvous visitor.

“If someone offers you some apple pie tonight, don’t take any,” he said affably. “It’s actually a drink, made from Everclear--190 proof alcohol--mixed with apple juice and cinnamon. It’s real smooth--actually tastes just like apple pie--but if you drink a glass it will take you a couple of days to get back to normal.”

In fact, alcohol was not sold anywhere at the rendezvous, and it was forbidden in all of the shooting areas.

In a clearing not far from the shooting range stood the small tent village known as trader’s row, where early 1800s wares were sold--knives, tomahawks, flintlocks, buckskins, fur hats, powder horns, cow-horn spoons, steel pots, wool blankets. Alongside them were stacks of history and how-to books.

Steve Zihn, a gunsmith from Wellington, Nev., was selling flintlock rifles he had made by hand. They were fashioned out of maple, steel and brass according to authentic designs of early American gunsmiths, and most sold for about $1,400.

At other booths, American Indians sold handmade jewelry and beadwork.

Jacobsen and Squires said that the Bridgeport Gun Club, which conducted the rendezvous, plans to use the proceeds from the weekend to build a new shooting range.

“Part of the idea behind this is to make some money for the town of Bridgeport,” Squires said. “The deer hunting isn’t what it used to be here, and we aren’t getting near the hunters that we used to get. So this is the last opportunity to boost the local economy a little bit before winter sets in.”