Sitting on a stump, squinting in campfire smoke and jawing with "Badger" Twyman and "Crazy George" Passon about the advantages of using brains to tan deer hide is about as close as you can get to a time machine.
The crusty geezers, in their homespun shirts and leather leggings, take you straight back to 1855.
"They call it historical re-enactment, but this is what we do," Passon said. "We live it."
"You drop any one of these guys out in the woods for a week with no supplies and they'll come out happier and fatter and healthier than when they went in."
In real life, Passon, 63, is a retired construction worker from Portland. His sidekick, Bob Twyman, 81, is a former metal fabricator from Rathrum, Idaho.
But this weekend, they're part of a great migration of fur-trading era history enthusiasts who have set up camp at the Fort Nisqually Living History Museum in Point Defiance Park.
More than 100 volunteer re-enactors, along with the regular museum staff, have turned the fort and an adjacent meadow into a historically correct "Brigade Encampment."
The encampment is intended to replicate an unusual event in 1855, when the Hudson's Bay Company called its trappers and traders back to the Puget Sound fort to deliver pelts and skins and pick up trading goods.
But it's also a rare chance for the public to see what everyday life was like in the early days of white settlement in Washington.
"It's a bit of history that's being lost," Twyman said, "especially the crafts and the things that went on back then that so many people nowadays don't even know existed."
The two-day festival features demonstrations of everyday 19th century activities such as blacksmithing, moccasin making, churning butter and spinning wool into yarn.
But it also features experts in more arcane 19th century frontier skills, such as using natural pigments to decorate leather, cooking turkeys on a spit and communicating in Northwest Coast Indian sign language.
"It's only our great-grandfathers' time," Passon said. "It's not so long ago. That's like ancient history to everybody now, but it's really not."
Peggy Barchi, a special-projects coordinator who works at Fort Nisqually year-round, said the Brigade Encampment is one of the two biggest events at the museum each year.
The other is the annual Candlelight Tour, which takes place in October and features nighttime tours of the fort with only stars, campfires and candles to light the way.
In addition to the craft demonstrations, the Brigade Encampment recreates some of the activities typically participated in by the gathered mountain men, trappers and Hudson's Bay Company employees.
"This was kind of their vacation time," said Darryl Hall, a Fort Nisqually employee decked out for the weekend as the manager of the fort's store.
Some of the activities, such as foot races and a Punch and Judy puppet show, are historically accurate, Hall said.
Other events, such as an obstacle course for kids in which they tote bags of flour, crawl under wooden benches and start a fire with flint and steel, are loosely based on history, he said, but mostly are for fun.
Rob Carson: 253-597-8693 rob.carson@thenewstribune.com
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