Fort Atkinson - The People Who Keep It Alive

 The fort is still standing. And so are the people who keep its story alive. 

In the final episode of our Fort Atkinson summer series, we go to the source: the volunteers who show up on the first weekend of every month, put on the uniforms, and bring the 1820s back to life for everyone who walks through the gates. 

A soldier. A blacksmith. A tinsmith. A weaver. And Andrew, our guide through this whole series, is back on the bluff where it all began. I asked them all the same questions: What do people get wrong about life at this fort? What moment from a visitor has stayed with you? And why does this story still matter? 

Enjoy. 

Fort Atkinson Living History Weekend runs May through October, the first weekend of every month. Fort Atkinson State Historical Park, Fort Calhoun, Nebraska. Free with a Nebraska State Park entry permit. 

For photos, maps, and glimpses of the past, follow @rootedintheplains on Instagram. 

Transcript

SPEAKER_05 0:07

I've visited Fort Adkinson before, but it's been a while. Coming back now, after weeks of research and two episodes deep into the story, I walked the grounds with a completely different understanding of what happened there. The names that came up in the conversations that day, the people connected to this place, read like a who's who. The longer you listen, you'll recognize them too. It's like our own version of the six degrees of the Great Plains. The further you go down this road, the more those connections start to appear everywhere. And that's what I hope this podcast does for you. That the history stops feeling like a list of dates and starts feeling like a web of people in places you already know. Let's go to the fort. As you'll be able to hear in the background, these are people who make this place live and breathe. The volunteers who show up on the first weekend of every month, put on the uniforms and the authentic dress, and bring the 1820s back to life for anyone who walks through those gates. I checked in with a soldier, the blacksmith, the tinsmith, and one of the weavers, and our very own rooted in the plains friend Andrew. And here's what they said.

Private Beasley

SPEAKER_05 1:33

How long have you been volunteering here?

SPEAKER_00 1:35

This is my third year, a little over two years.

SPEAKER_05 1:38

Have you always been in this role?

SPEAKER_00 1:40

Yes.

SPEAKER_05 1:41

And what made you decide to start doing this?

SPEAKER_00 1:44

So my wife is a weaver here. It was really my wife that got us into it. We have six kids, and so for kind of for our and we homeschooled, so kind of for our homeschooling, this was a good like history class and a chance to interact with some other people that are interested in history. And uh, wife's friend convinced her to be interested in it, and then I just like, well, I'll just come along for the ride. And I don't know, been getting into it, learn more and more about it.

SPEAKER_05 2:05

What is one thing about life at the fort that people get wrong?

SPEAKER_00 2:09

I would say that people think that it's newer time period, I guess, than it is when I always thought about Fort Atkinson. When I was coming here, you always think about, okay, it's probably like Civil War era, Pony Express, Oregon Trail kind of time. But this is well before that. And just the drill that we do as soldiers. It was nothing that I was familiar with when I was coming here. And just how old the fort is is just, it's really, you know, it's 1819 to 1827. And so that's before a lot of the westward expansion, very early on in America's history. And that was at least the thing that I would always get wrong coming here and just expecting things to be a lot newer, a lot more modern. And so we don't have as much technology as they would have had on like Oregon Trail or Westward Expansions of Civil War, where which is a lot of the forts in this area. A lot of the other ones are kind of that era.

SPEAKER_05 3:01

What's a moment or reaction from a visitor that has stayed with you?

SPEAKER_00 3:06

You know, I always like when there's visitors that ask a lot of questions, especially kind of about the military history. I don't know that there's one that really sticks out to me, but really anytime people want to really talk about the time period and about the tactics of that time, I really enjoy talking about that because I've done some research on it. And it's it's nice to just be able to share knowledge with people that are really interested.

SPEAKER_05 3:26

And why does the story still matter?

SPEAKER_00 3:28

Well, it's just part of our history as Americans and as Nebraskans. This was the first post um you know, west of the Missouri River in this area. And really it also, it was set up to help protect the fur trade and help develop good relationships with Native Americans. They only had one battle over the eight years here, and that was way up in South Dakota. And so it was really an example of showing peaceful relations with the Native Americans and just allowing the path for westward expansion to continue as the years went by.

Blacksmith Slader

SPEAKER_02 4:04

My name is Dean Slater. I'm one of the blacksmiths here.

SPEAKER_05 4:08

And how long have you been volunteering here?

SPEAKER_02 4:10

Since 1976.

SPEAKER_05 4:12

Have you always been in this role?

SPEAKER_02 4:14

Pretty much. There were two other gentlemen and myself that Steve Kemper, the superintendent of the Ford at that time, knew that we were into blacksmithing and Rod Olsen was into gunsmithing. And how did you guys like to do the armor shop? And I looked at Rod and Rod looked at me and we said, okay. And so it was uh two and a half years of hewing logs and so on and so forth. I know every log and every brick and every piece of stone in this building intimately.

SPEAKER_05 4:47

Very nice. Well, then that might answer the next question of what made you decide to start doing this.

SPEAKER_02 4:52

My degree was in teaching, and it was history, social science. And uh I graduated from Dana in 1966, taught for 35 years. History seemed to be the major part of it. Uh, got into black powder shooting and built three or four of my own guns and decided I wanted to do the iron furniture, butt plates, trigger guards, so on and so forth on uh those guns, and got a hold of a forge and a black and an anvil, and never made another gun. Blacksmithing became the major focus.

SPEAKER_05 5:35

That's cool. What's one thing about life at the fort that people get wrong?

SPEAKER_02 5:39

One of the items is that and it's pretty common, of course. We're doing the 1820s. This is the first thing that was here after Lewis and Clark came through. And they always ask questions, well, where were all the civilians? And it was, there weren't any. Everybody who was on this post was connected with the U.S. Army. 15 miles, every direction from that flagpole was U.S. military reserve. And you weren't here unless you were supposed to be. And you were bona fide and you had the paperwork. It's like Ashley and Henry that was were moving up the Missouri in 1823-24 to go fur pelt in the Rockies. They had to be licensed and they were searched and they were screened because that's one of the reasons, major reasons that um Fort Atkinson was here. It was to control that fur trade. Fur trade at that time was what the oil industry is today. A lot of people don't read realize that. Big money.

SPEAKER_05 6:52

What's a moment or reaction from a visitor that stayed with you?

SPEAKER_02 6:55

They're myriad. It's probably things dealing with just the daily life at Fort Atkinson, part of the way that everybody lived. Many of the younger soldiers that came from the east to join the army had grown up on farms and so on, they were looking for something to escape the drudgery and the hard work of working to farm at home, and they saw the military as, hey, we have can go on an adventure out west. They were marooned out here. It was, okay, you gotta supply your own food, you gotta you gotta crop it. You know, they they had over a thousand, fifteen hundred acres that was in in crop. So they wound up behind the plow again out here on the frontier. To kind of adventure part out of the service in the military.

SPEAKER_05 7:50

So why does the story still matter?

SPEAKER_02 7:52

If, and this is Winston Churchill, if they don't realize the mistakes, you're gonna keep making the same mistakes. So you have to know your history. And the way I taught it is kind of a you see when it's in the book, okay, now I'll tell you the real story. And that's what we do a lot of here in at Fort Atkinson is to give the real story. One of my prime examples, if you've ever seen the movie The Revenant, well, that movie is Hollywood's story. We have the end of that story, the real end of that story that happened over in that South Gate at Fort Atkinson. I won't go into the story. Okay. I'll tell you that later.

SPEAKER_05 8:44

Okay, sounds good.

Tinsmith Hagemann

SPEAKER_03 8:51

Chris Hageman, and I'm a tinsmith and I represent uh one of the soldiers who was a tinsmith here at Fort Atkinson.

SPEAKER_05 8:58

How long have you been volunteering here?

SPEAKER_03 9:00

32 years. I've been out at Fort Atkinson back as far as 1980. But at that time there wasn't any living history program, and I wasn't focused enough to know better anyway. In the early years when I first came out here, I was putting on a demonstration up at the council house with a teepee to show people uh Indian life. And then uh I kind of liked it, and then I realized that I wanted to do something more out here. And I but then at that point I discovered tinsmithing and I thought that found out there was a tinsmith out here, so then I was able to become a tensmith. So and it all fit in because I liked working with my hands rather than marching up and down the square, so which made a big difference.

SPEAKER_05 9:41

So maybe that kind of answers the next question of why did you decide to start?

SPEAKER_03 9:46

Well, I've always been involved in history. My very first job when I got out of high school was working at Colonial Williamsburg during the bicentennial. And so I've been used to communicating uh history to people for decades before I even came out to Nebraska. And then when I was in here, when I came to Nebraska, well then I wanted to find some other places where I could continue this process. So everything sort of fit together.

SPEAKER_05 10:14

What's one thing about life here at the fort that people get wrong?

SPEAKER_03 10:17

People get to understand um what tin plate really is, okay, for example. I mean, it's another material which we take for granted. And the other one is how it's put together. And and and there's a lot of common uh folk tales out there, like like, for example, lead solder, and which is not really necessarily true. But they've been led to believe that there was a lot of lead solder being used. So I try to correct them on that process and have them understand that yeah, it was used, but it wasn't used that much, and there are a lot of other things that you're gonna carry along before you die of that or something. So that's that's that's one of the things.

SPEAKER_05 10:55

What's a moment or reaction from a visitor that stayed with you? Thank you very much.

SPEAKER_03 11:00

I didn't know that. Or it's uh they they enjoy learning about how things go together and how things work. Sometimes it's I didn't realize that they were doing it then. And and you try to explain to them that the technology really hasn't changed. What has changed is the method of manufacturing. You know, we have easier ways of putting things together. That's that's a critical part.

SPEAKER_05 11:23

Why does the story still matter?

SPEAKER_03 11:25

This is an important aspect of our history, and and to understand why we are where we are today, we should understand where we have been in the past. And without knowledge of the past, you cannot live the present in the proper frame of mind, nor can you look towards the future. So if you have no past, you have no present and you'll have no future.

Weaver Jones

SPEAKER_04 11:52

Donna Jones. I'm the Fort Weaver.

SPEAKER_05 11:54

And how long have you been volunteering? 14 years. Have you always been in this role?

SPEAKER_04 11:59

Yes. What made you decide to start? We used to bring our children here back in the 90s, and then one point their weaver retired, and the spinner knew me and asked me if I would come and be the weaver, and I did. And told my husband, if I'm coming, so are you. He's the Cooper. What's one thing about life at the fort that people get wrong? They think it's very pretty and idyllic, but back in the day, the natives said you could smell the fort three sleeps away because there were 1,500 soldiers here. So a lot of outhouses. They might bathe once a week if they're lucky, a lot of animals. So it it wasn't as idyllic and pretty as the fort makes it today. What's one moment or reaction from a visitor that stayed with you? Oh, this one's sad, it might make me cry. There's a little boy that would come every year for like three years, and he loved weaving, and so I told his mother and him what kind of little loom to get so he could learn. And he started learning how to do it, and then one summer he was hit on his bike in Blair and killed. And his mother brought me his weaving the next year, and so I'll never forget that.

SPEAKER_05 13:25

Why does this story still matter?

SPEAKER_04 13:27

You can't go forward if you don't know where you've been, you know. So you need to know where you came from, how things started, so we can preserve it for the next generation.

SPEAKER_01 13:45

I'm

Private Gaghagen

SPEAKER_01 13:46

Private Gehagen. I portray a private in the 6th U.S. Infantry.

SPEAKER_05 13:50

How long have you been volunteering?

SPEAKER_01 13:52

Uh, this will be my 10th year. Have you always been in this role? Yes.

SPEAKER_05 13:56

And what made you decide to start?

SPEAKER_01 13:59

It's a lifelong love of military history. And this is a very similar atmosphere to being in the military, so it's why I love it. We march, we drill, we shoot, everything. Everything I love. And the liquor ration.

SPEAKER_05 14:14

Um, what's one thing about the Fort Life that people get wrong?

SPEAKER_01 14:18

That's a good one. This is a tough one for me because there's a lot of reenactorisms, we call it, in the hobby. So it's it's uniform discrepancies. But I'm trying to think of big general, broad topics that that people just don't understand coming up here. Oh, one that comes to mind is flag etiquette. That's a huge one. Today, we treat the flag with the utmost reverence. Back in the day, it was just a banner. Things nowadays about the flag touching the ground or folding it into a perfect triangle. Those concepts weren't around at that time. It's not to say they disrespected it, but it didn't have that level of reverence yet.

SPEAKER_05 15:00

What's a moment or a reaction from a visitor that has stayed with you?

SPEAKER_01 15:04

In general, it's the children that come up. Because when you can put a shaco on their head and hand them a musket, that is wonderful. And I hope that someday there's a child like me that out there who that will inspire to continue on learning the history and maybe someday be a soldier up here.

SPEAKER_05 15:25

Why does this story still matter?

SPEAKER_01 15:27

This story in particular, it matters to Nebraska because it's some of our earliest history, but on a national scale, it matters because it was the beginning of westward expansion.

SPEAKER_05 15:45

I hope you were able to take advantage of this great opportunity to learn from these volunteers. And if not, you still have until the first weekend of October. Just remember, this isn't the only state park that offers interactive events like this. Check out the ones near you. I arrived just before 10 a.m. to catch the opening roll call in Canon. The drumming you heard at the beginning of the show is what brought the regimen to the flagpole to post the colors and lineup for inspection. And at the very end, you can hear the cannon. Let's just say I laid the mic in the grass and was a few feet back and it was still loud, but so cool. The things I do for you. Thanks for listening to Rooted in the Plains. For photos, maps, and behind the scenes look at what we've got in store for you this summer, follow along on Instagram at Rooted in the Plains. And if you enjoyed this episode and want to dig a little deeper, check out your local historical sites or reach out to me. Until next time, stay rooted.