Mountain-man makeover - Western Wanderings - Fort Bridger Rendezvous, historical reenactment - Calendar

Sunset, August, 2003 by Peter Fish

Spending the weekend in the 1830s is no piece of cake, as Linda Hicks can attest. "It takes two ) days to get packed," she tells me. "Then another full day to set up the tepee and the wickiup." Behind her, Hicks's husband and son fling their tomahawks into a tree stump, the thwack of flying tomahawks being a common sound at the Fort Bridger Rendezvous in Fort Bridger, Wyoming.

The West has no shortage of historical reenactments, but Fort Bridger is in a class by itself. Every Labor Day weekend, thousands of people like the Hickses (who most of the year are ordinary Salt Lake City residents) converge on this trading post in southwestern Wyoming to celebrate and imitate Jim Bridger and his fellow mountain men. Think of it as an outdoorsy variant of the television show Extreme Makeover: you start in the 21st century but end up sitting in a wickiup in the 19th.

"Talk to any mountain man, and he says, 'I was born in the wrong era,"' says Kash Johnson, who served as the booshway--the fur-trapper CEO--of last year's rendezvous.

Ole Jensen and Ferrell Peterson, friends from South Jordan, Utah, have been attending the rendezvous for years. "We're losing the memory of what our ancestors did," says Peterson. "How can you go out in the cold and not die? How did the guy do it with no polar fleece?" Elaborately dressed in trapper clothes of their own making, Jensen and Peterson belong to American Mountain Men, the most hard-core of such groups. Their sole concession to modern life is sunscreen--says Peterson, "We maybe primitive, but we're not stupid."

Jensen and Peterson looked authentic to me. But they told me that if I wanted to meet a serious mountain man, I had to hook up with Crazy Coyote, aka Roy Hansen of Arimo, Idaho. Hansen acquired his new name after living for two years in a tepee with a coyote cub. "My mom started calling me crazy," he says. "And she knows me better than most."

Touring the rendezvous with Crazy Coyote is like attending a fashion show with Coco Chanel: his eye is brutally discerning. "I can tell somebody who bought their outfit from somebody who made it, by the amount of pride they have in it," he says. "That gentleman, he's a hodgepodge. That bright orange leather--he bought that at a hobby shop. That great big fur hat? In summer? No mountain man would ever have done that. Fried their brain."

By now my brain was frying too, from so much rendezvous: the tomahawk throws, the muzzle-loading competitions, the drumming. There were women dressed as Sacagawea, or as Sacagawea would have dressed if she were headlining in Vegas; a fur trapper cradied a rifle in one hand and a teacup Chihuahua in the other. And all of it to celebrate a short-lived era: when Fort Bridger was established, in 1843, the fur trade was already on the wane.

I said good-bye to Crazy Coyote and wandered toward the exit. On the way out I ran into a man dressed as Abraham Lincoln, who was pretending to be a statue and watching people leap when he moved. "That was fun," Lincoln said after I jumped, and he handed me a copy of the Gettysburg Address.

What the heck. Mountain men were notorious for liking a good time, and that's what the rendezvous provides. If they knew that 150 years after their demise people would still want to be them, they would be pleased. The next time I go to Fort Bridger, I'll be more prepared. I often feel I was horn in the wrong era, and if some buckskin pants can help, I'm willing to give them a try.

Fort Bridger Rendezvous: Aug 29-Sep 1, Fort Bridger, Wyoming; www.fortbridgerrendezvous.net or (307) 782-3842.