Rain, cold don’t dampen spirits at Fort Nisqually Christmas

Visitors entered Fort Nisqually Saturday to a hearty welcome: “Happy Christmas!”

Period actors dressed in home-sewn clothing churned butter, cooked over open fires, sang and danced to show hundreds of visitors what Christmas might have been like at Fort Nisqually.

The Metro Parks Tacoma event, called “A 19th Century Christmas,” was set in the 1850s, around the time Washington became its own U.S. territory separate from Oregon.

Wood smoke hung in the damp December sky as the repeated ping of a blacksmith’s hammer pealed through the air.

Noah Peever, a volunteer, role-played the daughter of a snake-oil salesman named Ermintrude de Montmorency.

Peever, 16, said she likes volunteering for the event because the history is “fascinating,” and she likes sewing.

“Part of what we do is try to portray the Christmas traditions of the era,” Peever said.

At the time, Fort Nisqually was an outpost of the Hudson’s Bay Co. and a primary stop in the lucrative fur trade. One cabin at Fort Nisqually included a beaver trap and displayed a few oval pelts for all to pet.

The thick, luxurious beaver pelt left an impression on DuPont resident Paul Hickerson, 10, who said it was his favorite part of Fort Nisqually so far. He seemed surprised that beaver fur hats sold for the equivalent of $200 today, and if he had that much money he would buy his own.

“I like how they’re telling us about how it was like back in the day,” said Paul, who came to the event with his mother, Amy Hickerson.

In the 1850s, Fort Nisqually was a melting pot of Christmas traditions from all over the globe. Men arrived from Europe, Canada or other parts of the United States and her territories to seek work. They were often encouraged to marry Native American women to help smooth business relations with the Hudson’s Bay Co., said volunteer Heather Waetzig.

More than 100 people gathered in the drizzle for caroling and the cutting of the yule log, a thin pine about 20 feet long, stripped of branches and decorated with scraps of fabric. Children of all ages dragged the pine log into Fort Nisqually’s grassy field and later collected sections of it to take home as souvenirs.

In another building, reenactors cleared the room of furniture for dancing. A volunteer directed new dancers move-by-move, who later only sometimes collided as they whirled across the expansive wooden deck to the tune of a fiddle and a recorder.

Judy Bridges of Federal Way brought her family to the event, including her cousin from Hawaii, Michelle Kleid. Both are the great-great granddaughters of French-Canadian laborer Andre St. Martin and his Native American wife, Catherine. The laborer worked at Fort Nisqually from 1838-1842, said Bridges, who was a longtime volunteer at Fort Nisqually and member of the Descendants of Fort Nisqually Employees Association.

But Bridges also felt a calling to become part of native culture and joined the Cowlitz Indian Tribe.

“There are people in the native community who resent the forts,” Bridges said. “It was the beginning of the end of their way of life.”

This story was originally published December 5, 2015 at 9:15 AM with the headline "Rain, cold don’t dampen spirits at Fort Nisqually Christmas."