On this day, two hundred and thirty-one years ago, in 1777, when the original Pricketts Fort was only about three years old, Daniel Boone and about a dozen men were ambushed and cut off from the stockade at Boonesboro by over a hundred Shawnee warriors. In the resulting melee, Boone’s life was saved by another legendary frontiersman, Simon Kenton.
It is worth noting that Daniel Boone, according to persistent oral tradition, once stopped in at Pricketts Fort while searching for a lost boatload of ginseng. And as for Simon Kenton, he was well-known to the militiamen at Pricketts Fort, for they all served alongside one another during Lord Dunmore’s campaign into the Ohio Territory just after the Battle of Point Pleasant, when both Cornstalk and Logan, two of the greatest chiefs of this period, made their celebrated speeches, one of negotiated peace, and the other of stubborn defiance.
Our own Native interpreter, of Seneca descent, but adopted into the Shawnee tribe, Aaron Bosnick, was wandering about the fort today, in linen hunting shirt, leggings, moccasins & woodland headdress, as were numerous refugees from another era altogether, the American Civil War, together with several hundred rapt children, wandering endlessly and restlessly, fascinated by the strange mingling of two crucial decades, the 1770s and the 1860s.
My own perspective on the opening day of the Civil War weekend was limited to what I could see from within the Gunshop, where I was posted for the day, manning the Trading Post counter. There were said to be three hundred children on school fieldtrips and who knows how many more who came with their families. All I know is that for much of the day the Gunshop was so crowded a mouse could have passed through the building from one end to the other just by hopping from one head to the next and never touching the floor.
Throughout the day the main attraction in the Gunshop was the venerable Sgt Simmons, veteran militiaman. He was conducting no firing demonstrations today — there were plenty of those going on just outside the fort palisade as bands of the Blue & Gray were loosing potshots at one another — no, inside the Gunshop, Okey Simmons was wowing the youngsters with his fire-starting demonstration. Three or four sharp raps of steel against flint into a ”birdsnest” of tow & birchbark , and one of the resulting sparks caught on a bit of charcloth and began to smolder. Okey folded the nest over the ember, raised it above his face for everyone to see, and began to blow. Soon a dense whitish smoke was pouring out from his fingers, and then one side of the nest burst into flame. Okey passed the burning mass back and forth overhead as the crowd went “Ohhhhhoooooo…..”, then at once he folded the flames in his hands shoved the whole smoking mess into his pocket. Children and adults alike let out a gasp of disbelief as three dozen children began clamoring altogether, “How did you do that?” “Didn’t it burn you?” “That’s impossible!!” “Can you show me how to do that?” “Do it again!!! Do it again!!! Do it again!!!” Seconds later things got very busy in the trading post side of the cabin as ten or twenty little hands reached into the big wooden bowl on the counter holding steel strikers & pieces of flint. “How much are these?” Do you get flint & steel together?” ”Are these made here at the fort?” “Momma, will you give me some money?”
During one of Okey’s demonstrations, as he was blowing an ember into flame, a single wild spark alit on his mustache and, instead of going out, began to brighten. ”Okey, your mustache is on fire!” I yelled, and the kids began shouting with excitement as Okey repeatedly smacked himself in the face. “OK,” I yelled at last, “it’s out!” — and the demonstration continued.
In the quieter interludes small bands of Civil War re-enactors would wander through, as though entering unobtrusively through a time-warp. Pricketts Fort hosts a single Civil War event once in the spring of each year. While a 19th-century event in an 18th-century setting seems a violation of chronology and an affront to history purists, the juxtaposition is not as incongruous as it might seem.
In the first place, no more than about a hundred yards from the reconstructed fort, stands what is actually the oldest building on the property, the Job Prickett House, built just on the eve of the Civil War. It is fully furnished with furniture and domestic items from the mid-nineteenth-century, not a few of them original to the house. The lawn surrounding the house is shaded by two or three great spreading trees of considerable character which in all probability date to before the war, and on these grounds the campaign tents of the Civil War re-enactors seem perfectly at home.
Prominent among the Civil War set-ups on the lawn is a small Union battery clustered around a single cannon. This would be Lee Miller’s battery, the same Lee Miller of the great booming voice described in my blog post of two days ago: Lee Miller of the great booming voice with his great booming cannon . . . Though I am about as far away from as I can be as I stride across the lawn to the fort to take up my post, as I pass through Lee’s line of fire I find I cannot resist the impulse to duck & pick up my pace just a little . . .
Re-enactors are a strange lot. (I can say that, being one myself). What prompts us, often at considerable inconvenience and expense, to outfit ourselves painstakingly and do our best to jam a monkey wrench into the workings of the cosmic clock and step back into time, is a mystery that I am far from comprehending, even in my own case. Some appear to be academic historians with a taste for playing dress-up on weekends. Others are enthusiasts plain and simple, with a boundless love for their subject and varying degrees of expertise. In most such cases, the resemblance between the original pioneer or soldier and his modern-day imitator is slight at best. We lead much softer lives than our forebears, and it shows.
But there are some re-enactors, especially here in Appalachia, who appear to have stepped directly out of a Benjamin West painting or a Matthew Brady photograph, with gaunt figures and faces that are more 18th or 19th century than 21st, who look as though they were raised more on parched corn and venison than McDonald’s and Burger King, and whose eyes, even in a young face, look strangely distant and out-of-time. So completely at ease do they appear in their Civil War uniforms or frontier garb, leaning on their muskets with pouches and powderhorns hanging easily from their shoulders, that it is difficult to imagine them wearing anything else. They don’t look anything like historians or scholars or theatre majors. They look like what they are, native Appalachians who came here generations ago and never left, and who are much more like their pioneer ancestors than they will ever be like the rest of us.
