An artisan’s craft that’s history in the remaking

ON a display table, Ken Scott lays out a hunting pouch. A purse-sized bag of leather, lined in vintage fabric, this is the kind of essential accouterment a man carried over his shoulder 200 years ago when he ventured into the woods with a muzzleloader in search of dinner. Crowds line up to admire the weather-beaten hide and faded lining. Invariably someone remarks, “I’ll bet that old pouch could tell some stories.”

Scott smiles. Isn’t that the best? Comments like this make his day.

In fact, the leather hunting pouch does have nostalgic stories to tell. But probably not the stories a passerby might imagine.

This is a new bag, handmade by Scott in the studio of his home in Indianapolis and richly aged to look like a museum artifact of the 18th century. In the realm of those who make hunting pouches, game bags, haversacks and “possibles” bags, Scott is among the most accomplished and best regarded -- no small thing considering that there are scores of worthy craftsmen now engaged in the obscure enterprise.

One story his bag can tell, the most obvious one judging from the appreciative audience it gathers, is that crafts from pre-Industrial Age America are booming. And if you are of a mind to scratch a little deeper, the existence of such a bag provides a tangible expression of a phenomenon that is laced throughout America’s history: a reach back to simpler times and simpler ways as a reaction to a contemporary era of accelerating complexity and grave uncertainty.

On a recent weekend as winter yielded to spring, some 9,000 people from across North America gathered at the fairgrounds here in southern Michigan for a curious event called the Kalamazoo Living History Show.

With nearly a third of the crowd outfitted in period costumes, from face-painted woodland Indians to antebellum belles in hoop skirts, from Civil War soldiers with shouldered rifles to French-Canadian canoe voyageurs, the scene resembled something like the backstage at a Hollywood revue of early American life.

People were drawn by the displayed handwork of 100 craft artisans -- blacksmiths, weavers, toymakers, tailors and tinsmiths, plus a “Sutlers’ Row” of an additional 170 purveyors of trade goods from the continent’s past.

Now in its 31st year, the Kalamazoo show serves as a vast wardrobe department for those who are both actors and audience in their own theatrical reenactments of American history. For craft artisans, it showcases what might be called “living archeology” -- the celebration of those hearthstone goods that reconnect Americans with pastoral myths of self-reliance.

The show is an outgrowth of a speakers bureau started by 24 members of Kalamazoo’s Yankee Doodle Muzzle Loaders club. They would dress in period costume and deliver history programs to local schools.

“This became so popular that we had to look for other ways to reach students and the general public,” recalls Larry L. Coin, chairman of the event. “We formed the show so people would come to us.”

Today, Kalamazoo is among the largest and best of dozens of living history expos staged around the country annually, with the peak season beginning in spring. The monthly Smoke & Fire newspaper that serves the living history community lists about 2,000 events and sites nationwide each year where living history is on display, most of them featuring a traders’ row. Generally, these gatherings are unlike Kalamazoo in that they are focused on a single period of history. In California, the Civil War era seems particularly popular, with organizations hosting events throughout the state, including at Fort Tejon just outside Los Angeles.

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Artfully filling a need

ONE of the star craftsmen of this year’s Kalamazoo show, Scott is a former broadcaster who now operates a small advertising agency with his wife. A jocular man with a dimpled chin and an eye for minute detail, he has been an artist for most of his life. His passion for history traces back to his boyhood, listening spellbound to his 100-year-old grandfather tell adventure stories of traveling West after the Civil War.

In about 1973, Scott got interested in black-powder muzzleloading. He needed a traditional bag to carry the assorted workings to load and fire his rifle, so he made one. Today, he has an eight-month backlog of orders for his intricately hand-stitched shoulder bags, which command prices of up to $1,800.

Scott’s work is faithful to an era when Americans had fewer things -- and great devotion to those that became everyday companions. He uses arrays of leathers, ranging from burnished cowhide to exotic beaver tail, cut and sewn to mysteriously appear rustic and finely finished at the same time. Accents of woven straps, fringe, porcupine quillwork, period buttons, and copper cones with red horsehair add the feeling of hearth-made individuality.

All this could be called Scott’s “craft.” The “art” comes when he adds a couple of centuries’ worth of illusory age and affectionate use -- a weathering process that doubles the hours of labor that go into each bag and for which there are no how-to manuals.

“What am I attempting to achieve with such painstaking work? I think of myself as a reproduction artist. I want my work to reflect a quality and a patina that looks like the item is 200 years old and has been loved, used and taken care of as it has been handed down from generation to generation,” Scott explains.

At Kalamazoo, he wears a tricorn hat, waistcoat and everyday frontier-flavored clothing of the style that wildlife artist John Audubon might have worn two centuries ago. At such a gathering, he fits in rather than sticks out.

“My art helps me re-create history,” he says, “... This is America’s history.”

Scott’s bags are on display at several museums, and one was carried by Billy Bob Thornton in his portrayal of Davy Crockett in the 2004 film “The Alamo.”

The fervor that period artisans have for their craft often amazes the casual onlooker. Some of the best crafts practitioners have spent years traveling a circuit of museums and research libraries. Materials, techniques and designs are expected to be authentic, and verifiable, down to the natural-fiber thread.

No small number have written books and pamphlets, published by small presses for limited circulation, with titles as wide ranging as “Thoughts on Men’s Shirts in America 1750-1900” and “French Cooking in Early America.” Far out of the mainstream, these living historians have become the custodians of a vast trove of the continent’s how-to heritage.

In her wholly original inquiry into the material products of early American life, “The Age of Homespun (Objects and Stories in the Creation of an American Myth),” Harvard’s Pulitzer Prize-winning historian Laurel Thatcher Ulrich recounts the story of 1690 Massachusetts pastor Edward Taylor, who “found spiritual meaning” in the working of a loom.

“To him, weaving was a metaphor for the guiding hand of Providence on the human soul. Although one might not be able to see the design while it was in process, at the end of life it would become visible.”

She concludes, “Taylor’s metaphor could also describe the way hindsight allows us to see patterns in history.”

At the least, living history is absorbing escapism -- blending some of the romantic pastoral illusions of pre-Industrial Age life with a fair measure of contemporary ethics. Thus, Native Americans fare far better in this crowd than they did in the 18th century. Aristocratic slave owners are virtually never idealized, while frontiersman and pioneer woman often are, right down to their primitively uncomfortable footwear.

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Vietnam era revisited

TODAY’S interest in traditional handmade goods mirrors a similar boom that occurred a generation ago during the social unrest of the Vietnam War, a craft era defined by the “Foxfire” series of books that offered how-to instructions on such agrarian skills as butter churning and log cabin building. Back further, the dawning of Industrialism in the mid- to late-19th century triggered a sweeping nostalgia for homespun life and the goods it produced. In this new millennium, the combination of relentless technological change and economic dislocation has sent many back to the certainty of the past.

For Don Newsom, it happened suddenly and for the most commonplace of reasons.

An aerospace toolmaker, he was laid off by Boeing in 2000. He retreated to a vacation plot in Deer River, Minn., where he now crafts oak buckets, canteens and rum kegs, most of them priced under $100. For events such as this, Newsom outfits himself as an eerily convincing 18th century woodlands Indian, complete with piercings and tattoos.

With a foot in each of two eras, he is free to pick what pleases him: from modern dentistry and automobiles to Indian gardening and wild-rice harvesting. Boeing has called him several times to return to his job. No chance.

“I’m kind of amazed, really, that it worked out,” he says.

By contrast, Nancy Dawdy has been weaving for three decades, beginning in the counterculture days of the 1970s. Thanks to a contemporary resurgence in this old craft, Dawdy now counts herself among 400 members of her local weavers guild in Boulder, Colo. In the interval, she was employed as an engineer and an adjunct professor of mathematics, but these days her heart lives in the 18th century world of brightly colored sashes, fine-threaded shawls in period patterns and sturdy wool blankets. A full-sized summer shawl woven of thin cotton thread brings Dawdy only $70 -- a return less than the minimum wage for her time but priceless in satisfaction.

There are many parallels between today’s rise of traditional crafts and renewed interest in all types of crafts. But Dawdy, an elfin figure in a billowing polonaise-style gown and period bonnet, sees a distinction too.

“I think the basic difference between me and someone who knits sweaters is, when I attend a rendezvous or do a demonstration at a fair or a school, I am living my craft.”

For those who like to view trends in a larger context, Joe DeLaRonde offers an intriguing example of the past reborn.

Barely a generation ago, blacksmiths were as quaint as typewriter repairmen are today. Back then you couldn’t have gotten even odds betting on their career prospects. But the hot fire and the clanging noise and the alchemy of shaping iron into useful objects was nonetheless irresistible to DeLaRonde. In 1972 he met an immigrant blacksmith from Germany who was retiring. DeLaRonde dropped out of college a semester shy of receiving his degree in zoology and talked the man into teaching him the trade. He then bought the smith’s century-old shop.

Forget the wheeze about blacksmiths dying out. DeLaRonde has made a living at it since, and now finds that thousands of others are too. One U.S. blacksmithing association began with 47 members in 1973, grew to 2,500 in a decade with chapters coast to coast, and has been adding 300 to 400 members each year since.

At his shop in Mancos, Colo., DeLaRonde hammers out forged belt axes of the Lewis and Clark era as well as tomahawks and Damascus steel trade knives in 18th century style, along with custom ornamental ironwork for camp and home. Rough-finished camp axes evoke a timeless utilitarianism for $70 while the many-layered blades of his Damascus Belduque knives fetch many times that.

At Kalamazoo, DeLaRonde wears the garb of an out-of-work cavalryman in 1860s Texas, so authentic that you’d think you could shake dust out of him. He is specific about the out-of-work part.

“I was asked what I would do if I could do anything. That is, if I had no concerns about making a living, if life was just a vacation,” he explains. “I replied, ‘Well, I’d probably want a little blacksmith shop out back.’ Then I said, ‘Come to think of it, that’s just what I’ve got. I guess I’ve been on permanent vacation for 34 years.’ ”