For me, words are a form of action, capable of influencing change.
–Ingrid Bengis, Combat in the Erogenous Zone.
The buckskinners we knew wouldn’t have sent Christmas cards even if we’d known each other’s names and addresses, so our first task at rendezvous was finding out everyone’s news from the past year. Snort was out of work again and trying– again– to make a living as an artist while his wife worked full-time at the refinery. They’d rented out their house and were living in their tipi in the back yard. Fred was taking classes at the junior college while Mimi toiled at the packing plant. Iron Woman had lost a premature baby.
Red had gotten a promotion, and his wife Sandy still worked in the supermarket. That year, Red was club president, and booshway [buckskinner slang for the original French word for the guy in charge, the bourgeois]. The night was half over by the time he worked his way around the circle and sat down near me. I hadn’t yet seen Sandy at the fire, so I leaned over and asked Red, “Where is your devoted wife? Didn’t leave you, did she? I thought she was starting to act liberated last year.”
“She’ll be up tomorrow. Had to work this afternoon and then shop and get the food packed up.” Red grinned at me, knowing what my response would be.
“Gee, Red, I hope you didn’t strain yourself just driving up here.”
“She’ll get the kid from school and he can help her. I brought the lodge.” Red saw the look on my face and added, “I remember it when she’s not yapping at me.” His jaw tightened, but he was grinning as I laughed.
The year before, Red and Sandy had entered modern mountain man legends when he drove two hundred miles to a national rendezvous and realized–- as he pulled into the parking lot-– that he’d forgotten his lodge. Dumping his gear on the ground, he’d ordered his wife to wait and turned around. She sat on the food chest while hundreds of other buckskinners streamed into camp. As snow fell out of the darkening sky, she wrapped herself in a blanket and ate a couple of candy bars. Several people who knew her, and a few dozen who didn’t, offered to stand guard over the stuff or haul it to their lodges. Several men suggested she set fire to the pile and run away with them. Women offered her knives and pistols along with advice on correcting Red’s shortcomings if he ever came back. When Red drove into camp at two in the morning, after two flat tires and a detour around a snowstorm, Sandy still sat on the food chest, huddled in all the blankets they owned. Many of us were watching from our darkened lodges, but none of us ever found out what she said to him.
I shook my head. “I still think she made a mistake, Red. With your gear as a dowry, she could have done lots better.”
“That’s why I ain’t married to one of you liberated women. I trained Sandy right. When I tell her to jump, she asks, ‘How high honey?’ on the way up.”
“I’d come down with my knife in your brisket.” By now half the circle was listening to us, cheering for one or the other.
“Linda, you know women can’t handle complicated thoughts. You’re trying to act against nature. Probably why you’re grumpy all the time. Do it my way, you’d be happier.”
“Let me get this straight, Red. Women are so stupid they should listen to a guy who can’t remember his tipi when he’s planning to live in it for a week?”
Red handed me a wine bottle and patted my shoulder. “Men occasionally make little mistakes because we have to think of everything. Women have all they can handle just cooking and cleaning house.”
Without drinking, I passed the wine over my right shoulder. I never drank the wine after the first time I saw most of the camp hung over after one of these potluck sprees. Forty people “calling buffalo”– buckskinner lingo for throwing up-– is not an inspiring sight.
Then a fist clamped around my wrist. I turned and faced a stranger. He cradled a sleeping child; a big white dog sat in shadow behind him. “Hey, bitch, are you one of them liberated whores that made my wife run away?” the man said.
“I don’t know your wife, but if you talked to her like that, no wonder she left.” I tried to jerk away but my hand went numb as his grip tightened. The dog lifted his lip to show his fangs.
“He’s a new club member.” Red whispered close to my ear. “A teensy bit hostile to women just now.”
He raised his voice, enunciating carefully, “Frank, this is Linda. She’s George’s wife”–- he pointed elaborately at George, who had stopped talking and loomed across the circle– “and a friend of mine.”
Oblivious to Red’s warning, the man leaned so close he fogged my glasses. “Do you think women ought to have careers instead of taking care of their kids, you damned bitch?”
“I think women who have kids ought to take care of them, buster, but if you want to discuss women’s rights, you’ve already called me a bitch once too often. And let go of my arm.”
I straightened up, aware of the Green River knife sheathed against my backbone. Across the fire, George’s blue eyes were cold; I knew if I got in real trouble, he’d be there.
“I’m gonna put my boy down,” Frank said slowly, “then I’m gonna kill you. Guard, Snowy.” He released my wrist and turned to tuck the child against the dog’s white belly fur. I heard a nervous slurp as someone sucked from the wine bottle. When Frank turned, I was holding my knife blade up in front of his nose.
Leaning past me, Red performed one of his duties as booshway. He closed one big hand on Frank’s arm, and one on mine, and spoke firmly. “Linda, I can’t let you kill him because he makes me look good. Frank, let me repeat– Linda is George’s wife. You know George.” He pointed with his chin, without letting go of either of us. “The big guy over there in the bearskin hat, watching you. Linda and me are friends. We argue as a joke. She’s really not too bad as liberated broads go.” He winked at me, and released his grip.
“I’m very sorry your wife left you,” I said slowly so my voice wouldn’t quiver. “Do you plan to raise your boy alone?”
Frank slumped. “Gonna try. She wasn’t doing much for him anyway. Spent all her time in the bars. What do you do?”
“I don’t have any kids, but I’m a darn good stepmother. I’m a rancher.”
“You believe in women’s lib?”
“I believe women ought to make up their own minds about how to run their lives. But having kids changes your life, permanently. You can’t be as independent as a woman alone. And I don’t go around telling women to leave their husbands.”
The big dog leaned forward and licked my face. Frank said, “Well, if Snowy likes you, you must be OK. He generally don’t care for women.”
“You base your judgments on what your dog thinks?” I said.
Red groaned and mumbled, “Good Lord woman, quit while you’re ahead. George,” he yelled, “can’t you shut this woman up?”
George shook his head. “No, but you’re welcome to try, Red,” he hollered as conversations resumed in the circle around us.
# # #
Copyright 2008 Linda M. Hasselstrom
Rendezvous Stories: Afterword
Reading this narrative thirty years after it happened brings the memory vividly back. I haven’t seen Red in twenty-five years, and never saw Frank again, but their faces are as clear in my mind as their words, because I recorded this entire incident that night in my journal. I probably didn’t advance the cause of women’s liberation much with Red and his friends, but I’m glad to have spoken honestly. I hope Frank was able to raise his son well, and I hope the lad grew to have a little broader outlook than Frank displayed that night. I was glad to have survived the encounter, and that George didn’t have to bring weaponry to bear on the situation. I still prefer to settle hostility with negotiation if possible, though I also favor having access to weapons for emergencies.
An explanation of Rendezvous Re-enactment from Land Circle
Rendezvous was the annual trappers’ meeting during the fur trade days [1824 – 1840]; a few days in summer when trappers brought in their pelts, were paid, and bought their year’s supplies. . . . The muzzle-loading weapons of that age, either cap and ball or flintlock, are still intriguing . . . In modern times, people interested in the weapons have extended that interest to the way of life of the mountain man, and instituted dozens of such rendezvous in the United States, Canada, Germany, and other countries. . . . Everyone’s objective is to reproduce, as nearly as possible, the look and feeling of a rendezvous camp of the period. A place is set aside for the primitive camp, with running water [a stream] and firewood. Those who have authentic clothing but modern camping gear must camp in a spot reserved for modern tents and tin tipis: campers. “Pilgrims,” inexperienced participants or visitors, are sometimes allowed in camp if they make a serious attempt at dressing in period style.
The insistence on authentic attire and accouterments is not mere whim; the camp’s primitive look enhances photographs, paintings, and research, and adds to the enjoyment of people who truly live the period. The mood would be ruined by seeing someone in blue jeans, scorned by modern mountain men because Levi Strauss didn’t start making them until 1851. The rule keeps away folks who aren’t seriously interested; those who are will be treated with friendliness, and almost any buckskinner will take time to help a newcomer learn how to participate. When you put on buckskins or a long dress, you put on a different mood; . . . The whole tempo of the world changes.
— from Land Circle: Writings Collected from the Land
(Fulcrum Publishing, Golden CO; 1991; Anniversary Edition 2008)
excerpts taken from the chapter called “Rendezvous!”
pages 35 through 37 (Anniversary Edition)
Marrying George when I was thirty-five, I knowingly espoused a fantasy life as well. Buckskinners sincerely wish they’d been adults in 1840, when the most elite profession in the West was trapping beaver to be turned into top hats for Englishmen. We participated in the rites of rendezvous every July, when my birthday fell, so all my birthdays were unique.
On my thirty-ninth birthday, we obtained a permit to cut tipi poles in the Uinta Mountains of northern Utah. An eighteen-foot tipi needs eighteen to twenty poles. Since we’d promised a set to a friend, we wanted to cut at least forty trees. While George and his friend Jim searched for perfectly straight lodge pole pine trees to cut, Jim’s wife Mavis and I were in charge of transport. We followed the men as they tramped miles through the deep woods. As soon as they’d cut two slender pine, our job was to haul them back to the van, while Jim and George strolled off in search of more.
The trees weren’t heavy, at first. But we soon discovered an unusual botanical fact: straight trees grow only on top of the highest mountains. A lodge pole pine that reaches thirty-five feet of height in this arid country always stands in a crowd. Mavis and I would each grab a tree butt and lunge in the direction of the van. Approximately thirty feet into the woods, I’d veer around a cluster of trees so closely packed I couldn’t slide between them. Turning while dragging a long, straight object isn’t easy; ask a long-haul trucker, if you happen to have one handy. Each detour hooked my tree’s branches on some protrusion, yanking me to a stop. I’d pull my log hard, and stumble on.
At first, Mavis and I kept track of one another by hollered curses. As our stamina waned, we were too short of breath to swear. Resting, we counted closely-packed rings– a sign of the climate– to determine the tree’s age. At two hundred, we gave up, and realized these slender saplings were mature when the real mountain men camped in these mountains.
Several times I reached the truck with a tree to find the men chatting comfortably, seated on a rock.
“Just drop it,” George would say. “Not enough straight trees here; we’re going to look somewhere else.”
“Don’t you want to load this one?” I’d pant.
“No. We’ll wait till we have enough for a whole set.”
We changed locations twice, abandoning five trees we women had hauled a couple of miles through the underbrush, before I managed to get back to the van before the men. I shoved my tree crosswise through the two front windows, and sat behind a bush to catch my breath.
“Hmmm,” said George. “I think the women are getting testy.”
“I expected it,” Jim declared. “We better make do with the trees here.”
As the van lumbered back to camp that night with forty tree tops sweeping its tracks from the road behind, I mentioned my weariness with this strenuous birthday.
Most women my age, George replied without missing a breath, were not in my superb physical shape because their husbands didn’t love them enough to provide such exercise. The day’s workout, he added, put roses in my cheeks. His deft combination of compliment with rationalization left me speechless until a neighbor singing birthday greetings came to our camp fire carrying a single cupcake lighted by one fat candle.
* * *
The summer of my fortieth birthday, George arranged to go fishing in Canada with friends, as a change from rendezvous and a surprise. I’ve written and revised many times the story of that birthday celebration, but it’s still unpublished. Even in this permissive age, some episodes– involving fly-fishing, northern mosquitoes, and mayonnaise– are apparently too revolting for most markets.
* * *
I turned forty-one the month we set up our lodge at nine thousand feet on a Colorado mountain with several thousand other buckskinners. Each morning, George dropped a handful of fresh grounds into the coffee pot, softly waking me to the scent of brawny campfire coffee. Each afternoon, gentle rain tapping on the canvas lulled me into a nap, cooling the air. Each evening, we wandered among glowing tipis until we found music to suit our moods, whether it was bagpipes, fiddles, or mouth harps.
On my birthday, we went out to lunch– to a leanto where two sweaty women sold Indian tacos. Unfortunately, right after lunch, George reported that the latrine closest to our camp was overflowing, an unnecessary announcement since he was holding at arms-length a four-year-old boy who’d fallen into it head first. The child’s mother shrieked, snatched the child and headed for the creek.
“If he was mine,” said George, “I’d have pushed him on down. Easier to have another kid than clean that one up.”
Both George and I were dog soldiers– camp police– so providing a new latrine was part of our job. “I can’t ask you to help me,” George said, “since it’s your birthday. But digging is healthy outdoor exercise.”
First we removed the canvas privacy shield, along with the toilet seat and the open-ended fifty-gallon drum supporting it. We shoveled dirt over the remaining human wastes, and found a site for the new facility in a grove of aspen, where three trees served as a framework for the canvas wall.
Then we dug a deep hole in the Rocky Mountain soil. That name isn’t just a metaphor. We dug awhile, borrowed a pick to shatter bedrock, and shoveled some more. Operating a spade while wearing moccasins is painfully authentic to the mountain man era.
When the toilet was finished, we reflected on the thousands of people excreting in the vicinity, and considered the dog soldiers who were neglecting latrine duty. We swore an oath to tell no one the location of the new toilet. “Let ’em scout for it,” said one dog soldier, “like real mountain men.” Turning to me, he added, “You did a damn good job of diggin’, fer a girl in a dress!” I thanked him modestly, resisting the urge to curtsy. His was a compliment compared to other remarks I endured as one of the first female dog soldiers. Still, women who wear belt knives every day and beat their husbands at tomahawk throwing get considerable respect.
Then we closed the tipi door, knowing our gear would be safe in camp, and headed for Linda’s Birthday Revenge, a reunion of my mother’s family, a group of sober, law-abiding folks who drive recreational vehicles, shave, never drink liquor, and probably iron their camping clothes. My theory was that George, wearing a beard and shoulder-length locks that almost hid his earrings, might be nearly as uncomfortable for a day as I was for a week on his fishing trip. For maximum effect, and because we couldn’t find our civilian clothes, we wore our rendezvous garb– my long leather dress and his fringed leather suit. I didn’t think to remove the businesslike Green River skinning knife I used in camp.
As soon as we entered civilization and stopped for gas and cold drinks, I encountered a modicum of trouble. Relishing the chance to use a flush toilet and wash my face with hot running water for the first time in nine days, scrubbing at hands blackened by cooking over an open fire, I may have taken a wee bit too long. When the door handle rattled, I called politely, “Just one minute.”
I dried my hands and was grasping the doorknob when the door began to shake with violent pounding, in counterpoint to a woman’s voice yelling abusive curses of a distinctly vulgar nature.
Startled, I pulled the door open, snatching a short, red-faced woman into the small bathroom. Crashing into me, she lurched sideways, swearing. Then she jumped back and tripped over the toilet, perhaps startled by my attire. She grabbed at me, probably an instinct to keep from falling. Convinced she was attacking, I shoved with one hand, and grabbed at my knife with the other. She fell behind the toilet, jammed against the wall with her arms over her head. Her eyes bulged when I commented on her indiscreet language, and she breathed deep and tried to stand. I stepped out the door as she slammed and locked it.
Catching my breath, I heard a murmur in the darkness near my knees. A small boy trembled there, his eyes on my knife. I reached to pat his head, but he shrank away howling something about being scalped. More oaths gushed from the door, but it stayed closed. The kid was on his own. I slipped down one aisle as the manager rushed down another. George was peering over shelves, unruffled. Another man trotted a few steps toward the bathroom, and glanced nervously at us, but retreated from the wailing child. We departed in armed peace.
Once we got to the reunion, we found that the only family members attending were members of a single religious faction notorious for its sobriety. Not only was the camp free of beer, they hadn’t even brought coffee.
Various unidentified relatives of mine gathered around the van as we opened the doors, asking us merrily what we thought about “what the Democrats did this morning,” I explained that radios aren’t allowed in rendezvous camp, so we had no idea what the country was doing.
The benefits of missing two weeks of national news outweigh the flaws, in my opinion. However, once when we checked into a motel after a rendezvous, George headed for the shower while I snapped on the TV. When Richard Nixon’s face filled the screen, I yowled, “My God, it’s the revolution! He’s back!” Roaring, George thundered out of the bathroom, ready to defend me against a mugger.
Now, at the reunion, one of my cousins yelled, “The Democrats nominated a WOMAN for vice president!” The crowd whooped with laughter.
“Right on!” I cheered, waving my knife in case anyone disagreed.
Following a moment of horrified silence, they all laughed at my hilarious joke, and the survivalist in-laws gathered to look at our knives. The men pressed close, testing the balance of each blade and asking George how he polished the bone hilts. They shaved heaps of hair from their bulky forearms, and allowed as how George knew how to get an edge, so maybe he was an acceptable relative.
Whipping out their own concealed and semi-concealed weapons, they muttered about food caches, and the best places to be when The Big One drops. After awhile we opened the van door to show them the weapons and buffalo hide we’d put in the van in case buckskinners weren’t as honest as we thought they were. Long into the night, we all compared fire power and sharpening stones, and debated ballistics.
We were sober and clearheaded the next morning for breakfast, and the pancakes were delicious. But on the way back to camp, we stopped seven times for coffee, and proclaimed it one of my most unusual birthdays.
# # #
Copyright 2008 Linda M. Hasselstrom
Rendezvous Stories: Afterword
This story is a slightly different version than what appears in my book Between Grass and Sky, in the chapter called “The Second Half of Life” (pages 145 through 150).
An explanation of Rendezvous Re-enactment from Land Circle
Rendezvous was the annual trappers’ meeting during the fur trade days [1824 – 1840]; a few days in summer when trappers brought in their pelts, were paid, and bought their year’s supplies. . . . The muzzle-loading weapons of that age, either cap and ball or flintlock, are still intriguing . . . In modern times, people interested in the weapons have extended that interest to the way of life of the mountain man, and instituted dozens of such rendezvous in the United States, Canada, Germany, and other countries. . . . Everyone’s objective is to reproduce, as nearly as possible, the look and feeling of a rendezvous camp of the period. A place is set aside for the primitive camp, with running water and firewood. Those who have authentic clothing but modern camping gear must camp in a spot reserved for modern tents and tin tipis: campers. “Pilgrims,” inexperienced participants or visitors, are sometimes allowed in camp if they make a serious attempt at dressing in period style.
The insistence on authentic attire and accouterments is not mere whim; the camp’s primitive look enhances photographs, paintings, and research, and adds to the enjoyment of people who truly live the period. The mood would be ruined by seeing someone in blue jeans, scorned by modern mountain men because Levi Strauss didn’t start making them until 1851. The rule keeps away folks who aren’t seriously interested; those who are will be treated with friendliness, and almost any buckskinner will take time to help a newcomer learn how to participate. When you put on buckskins or a long dress, you put on a different mood; . . . The whole tempo of the world changes.
— from Land Circle: Writings Collected from the Land
(Fulcrum Publishing, Golden CO; 1991; Anniversary Edition 2008)
excerpts taken from the chapter called “Rendezvous!”
pages 35 through 37 (Anniversary Edition)
Humans can learn to like anything, that’s why we are such a successful species. . . . You can drop humans anywhere and they’ll thrive– only the rat does as well.
–– Jeannette Desor, Smithsonian, 1986.
The gravel road over Dead Indian Pass, northwest of Cody, Wyoming, hadn’t improved in the year since we’d driven the route. As usual, we were stuck in a cloud of dust behind a slow-moving vehicle. Ahead of us, an attractive blonde woman driving a pickup truck with a bumper sticker that read, “You haven’t lived until you’ve loved a sheepherder.”
And as usual, we stopped on the top of the pass to collect a few geodes, just for the metaphor; we never tired of splitting them to see the crystals inside. We drummed into Mike’s head that life is like that: a boring old rock on the outside, full of glory. On the bare summit, wind-whipped, we peered ahead to see the Sunlight Basin Bridge and the plateau where we always camped. Joked that we couldn’t see the grizzlies, though. Then we climbed back in the van for the last leg of the trip.
Mike spotted the first crude red tipi drawn on particle board, tied to a tree where the trail left the gravel. The meadow where we’d rendezvoused for several years lay empty, but we spotted the canvas walls of several hand-dug privies among the trees. We set up our tipi as far as we could get from the parking lot. Though we were the only ones there, we hustled anyway. The rules said vehicles had to be moved out of camp within fifteen minutes, and we wanted to stay in practice. We were organized enough so that when other club members started pulling in, we were already set up. We helped pile camping gear on selected camp sites, making sure everyone observed the custom.
For several years, we’d belonged to this Wyoming muzzle-loading club, mostly so we could attend the annual rendezvous. The muzzle-loaders brought together widely divergent people who enjoyed pretending they were living in 1840.
We were early, but the Forest Service was ready for us. Next to the parking area was a stack of bottoms from blue fifty-gallon drums. The whole plateau is a potential archaeological site, so the boys in green don’t want us digging there; we build our fires on the metal shields on top of the ground. The rangers would visit us in a day or two to be sure we were obeying the rules, and to remind us that the grizzlies in the area might be more aggressive than usual, because this is where rogue bears that rip up property or tourists in Yellowstone Park are released.
By the time the rangers dropped by, we’d have the ugly blue tin camouflaged by piles of rocks made into elaborate fire pits. And they knew from experience we’d leave the camp site cleaner than we found it, removing every trace of our camps, even scattering rocks and leftover firewood among the surrounding trees.
When buckskinners–- the preferred term for those of us who shoot the old front-stuffer rifles and enjoy sleeping in tipis–- began asking for permits to camp in wilderness, forest officials were uncooperative. After all, they’d just civilized the wilderness, kicked out all the Indians, the backwoods trappers and squatters who actually dared to cut down trees and kill wildlife. Why should they admit a bunch of modern folks who think it’s fun to create an imitation of the old days by camping as far as possible from highways and towns? Several generations of mountain men, and some hefty damage deposits, convinced them that we were among the best of the “multiple users” of the woods.
The original rendezvous occurred during the autumn days of the 1840s and 1850s in the West, when mountain men, who had spent the winter trapping beaver, mink, and other animals with valuable pelts, brought their hides to a meeting with merchants, somewhere in the Western mountains. The trappers rarely saw cash, but they could sell or trade their winter’s catch for supplies for the coming year. Many of the rules and customs of rendezvous come directly from the culture of the mountain man, and the cultures preceding it, that of the American Indians. However, the originals, after months alone in deep snow, drank and partied and probably left their camps a mess. We modern folks behave better– usually.
[Storage chests inside the tipi.]In camp, we set up canvas tipis, moving in our bedrolls, wooden chests containing (and concealing) our food and clothing, and our muzzle-loading weapons, knives, and tomahawks. We cook in iron pots over open fires, dressing and living as much as possible as we would have in the mountains in the last century. Every tipi is furnished with various comforts, depending on the inclination and budget of the family who owns it. We generally use our storage chests to sit on, padding them with old blankets or animal hides.
The first rule of buckskinning is to prohibit anything that couldn’t have existed in an original mountain man camp, including vehicles, back-packing tents, ice chests and cold beer, tennis shoes, denim clothing and electronic gadgets. The second rule of buckskinning is to resist authority and disobey rules.
A few fanatics–- and George and I were often among them– actually adhere to this rule, designating their rendezvous as “primitive” to make their intentions clear. Still, even the primitive buckskinners cheat on the rules. White women, for example, were not part of the original buckskinning experience, but most modern practitioners are married. And most enjoy beer. So a primitive camp almost guarantees a challenging camping experience along with a few good arguments.
Meanwhile, most people who call themselves buckskinners observe more practical customs. Gadgets that didn’t exist in 1840, or wouldn’t have gotten to the Western prairie rendezvous, are kept covered in camp. So most of us have a flashlight for midnight trips to the privy, keep it hidden in a sleeping bag until it’s needed, and then carry it inconspicuously. Cameras, are usually covered with a piece of leather or carried in a cloth bag. People who want beer hide a cooler under a blanket, and pour the beer into a large tin cup to carry it around camp.
Residence in buckskinning camps is usually limited to members of a particular club, or is by invitation only. That way the group can enforce rules that make the camp more comfortable and safer, or rules that apply to a specific region or group of people.
Still, the general public is often fascinated by the idea of fur-trapping and rendezvous, and because the camps are so authentic and photogenic, people want to see us. Some rendezvous organizers allow properly-dressed visitors to gawk on specific days during the gathering. This club had never permitted such tourists, because so many folks who wanted to see what we were doing had no idea how to behave politely in camp.
Since tipis have canvas doors, for example, one can’t knock for admittance. Polite behavior requires that a visitor scratch on the canvas, and wait for an invitation to come in. Folks who walk through an open door risk being shot, disemboweled, or tossed clear over the campfire by large and irate buckskinners who may be doing something for which he prefers seclusion in what is, after all, the privacy of their own home–- even if it is canvas. We especially enjoyed our rendezvous with this group because we never had to worry about people walking into our tipi as if it were a public place or coming home to find someone inside snooping through our trunks and supplies–- events we recalled from more open camps.
Because we are a long way from medical help and law enforcement, modern buckskinners have devised methods for dealing with emergencies. Doctors and nurses discreetly identify themselves to camp leaders, so they can be summoned in an emergency. But self-sufficiency is encouraged; if you haven’t sliced an artery, you’re expected to bandage the wound yourself.
[Booshway warning to thieves.]Each camp has a “booshway,” buckskinner slang for the original French word for the guy in charge, the bourgeois. He is as much of a leader as these independent cusses will allow; he’s usually forceful and organized, but smart enough to lead by example and discussion. He appoints dog soldiers, residents who act as an informal police force, and whose job is to keep order, as we understand and interpret it, for the length of the rendezvous.
One general rule is that what you do in the privacy of your own lodge is no one else’s business, even if it’s against the law of the communities outside ours. Conversely, if your actions will harm the temporary community, it becomes the business of all of us. Action is taken by consensus, and the dog soldiers act as a police force. This standard allows for more liberty in behavior than one finds in the outer society, but because most buckskinners bring their families, the temporary village is still a lot quieter and safer than the average city street.
Though the people who come together in camp for a few days or weeks may know little of each other, we share a love of this serious game of dressing-up. Late at night, as the central fire dims to coals, while a whiskey jug slowly moves from hand to hand, we talk about what we would do if the rest of civilization vanished while we were here. Most of us declare that we would remain in the woods, because we’re considerably better prepared to do so than the majority of people who visit any wilderness area. And we already are a community.
I vividly remember my first experience in a buckskinning camp, when we camped with the Yellowstone Mountain Men for the first time.
Near dusk, George drove his old blue van into a circle of tipis near Cody, Wyoming. As he backed up to a level spot where we could erect our lodge, we realized the entire camp population– men, women and children– were sitting in a half-circle by a campfire. They’d been visiting until we drove up. Now they were watching us.
Even before George and I were married, I’d entered enthusiastically into his idea of a vacation. After burning down his first lodge on a winter trapping expedition with his friend Jerry, George had just bought a new tipi. He had never set it up, and we had never set up a tipi together. We’d camped together a couple of times in a leanto, but this was a new experience.
George set up the central tripod of pine poles and started pulling the rest of the thirty-foot lodge poles off the van’s carrier while I unloaded sleeping bags and clothing trunks.
When we bumped into each other behind the van, he whispered, “Where’s the book? Can’t remember which pole comes next.”
He meant the buckskinner’s bible, The Indian Tipi: Its History, Construction, and Use, published in 1971 by Reginald and Gladys Laubin, still the primary source for anyone who wants to live correctly in a Plains Indian lodge. I scrambled inside to look for it as a voice boomed from the campfire, “Hey pilgrim! Next pole is number four. Page 45.”
“Oh God,” George whispered, “Don’t embarrass me.”
“Watch your language, dear; we’re still on our honeymoon. I haven’t embarrassed you yet.”
I was exaggerating; in that September of 1979 we’d been married seven months, after five years of loving, splitting up, and getting together again. I was enthusiastically learning how to be a real buckskinner, a person who sincerely longs to have been an adult when the most elite profession in the West was trapping beaver to be made into hats for Englishmen. Since we can’t travel back in time, “skinners” gather in camps where we pretend it’s 1840. George often wondered if, transported to the past with all his gear, he’d have survived. Maybe, but most modern buckskinners wouldn’t.
Laughing and talking, the group called out advice while we raised the poles and leaned them into the central tripod. When George picked up the eighteen-foot canvas lodge and carried it to the lift pole, I heard someone mutter, “That pilgrim’s a big boy, bigger than Snort.” Unrolling the lodge, George whispered, “I think I hurt myself.”
“Shall we tell them now?” a child yelled.
“Not yet,” a man yelled back.
“Tell us what?” I yelled.
“Stand on the bottom,” George snapped, “while I lift it.”
A man yelled, “Hey pilgrim! Don’t forget to tie those poles first!” while several people tried to shush him.
Another called, “Way the wind blows down this cut you’d be back in South Dakota before morning.”
“Sumbitch,” George mumbled, “I’ve never forgot that before.” He grabbed the rope dangling from the tripod and began to walk around the outside of the leaning poles.
“Run, pilgrim!” everybody bellowed. “Bad medicine to walk!” Somebody banged a drum and the group clapped in rhythm as George lumbered in a circle, breathing hard. His trachea narrowed by radiation treatments for Hodgkins’ disease, he had trouble sucking enough thin mountain air to move very fast.
A tall man with a black beard took the rope and tied it off, saying, “I’m Snort,” as he helped George hoist the lift pole. By the time I located the bag of lacing pins, strangers swarmed around us, carrying gear inside. Men pounded stakes, while women showed me how to fasten the liner inside.
A hawk-nosed man with brown eyes said, “I’m Fred. We do that to everybody the first time they come to camp. If they can’t take a little hoorawin’, they shouldn’t stay here. You shoulda heard my wife, Mimi. ‘Fred! Where’s the god-damn book?’ A nice Catholic girl like her!” He shook my hand. “I used to be a cop in Philadelphia.”
An imposing woman with a friendly grin hugged him, “Fred broke me of being nice long before I met this crew.”
That night, we sat by the campfire for hours, singing and passing everyone’s personal jug. I accidentally passed my bottle of good Scotch and it came back empty. After that, I took peach brandy to rendezvous; no one else would drink the stuff. Teenagers giggled as they sampled jugs, but I noticed that after they’d had one or two illicit sips, all the jugs began to detour around their group. That may have been the first time I witnessed unspoken cooperation among buckskinners.
The moon had gone down and I was thinking of my warm sleeping bag by the time I heard brush crackle just outside the fire’s light. A heavy man with a bushy beard towered at the edge of the woods like a tired grizzly. A broad-brimmed hat shadowed his face. His buckskin shirt was grimy, and his knees showed through holes in his leather pants; his belt suspended a huge skinning knife.
“Charley’s here!” someone yelled, handing him a gallon jug of whiskey. Several voices called, “Ashley’s Men!”
“Can’t a man at least wet his whistle?” he boomed, raising the crock to his lips and swallowing twice. He wiped his mustache on the back of his hand and grinned, showing a black gap two teeth wide. “That’s better.”
He sipped once more and his back straightened. In a clear tenor voice, brandishing the jug in rhythm with the trembling of the fringe on his shirt, he began to sing. Song after song pealed like clear flame into the trees. He took a swig from the jug at every pause. In the middle of a line, he folded and rolled into the center of the circle. One leg landed across a smoldering log.
“George,” I whispered. “Do something.”
“That’s Charley; they won’t let him burn.” When his leather pants started to smoke, Fred and Snort rolled him out of the fire and arranged him face down under a tree. They were playing cards on his back, broader than the average card table, when George and I stood up to leave.
Fred walked us to our lodge. “Don’t worry about Charley,” he said. “Sober, he’s fine and he sings like the Mormon Tabernacle Choir. When he’s drunk, he’s a gentleman.” He tilted his head, thinking. “But don’t mention hippies or ask him to sing peace songs.”
This was my introduction to rendezvous, and our first camp with the Yellowstone Mountain Men, a muzzle-loading rifle club whose membership was by invitation only. George hadn’t told me much about what to expect, but he had mentioned the unique fellowships which develop in a week-long rendezvous. Crazy Dog and Iron Woman, for example, may have camped near one another for years, sharing fires and passing a whiskey jug back and forth as they told stories in the shelter of darkness. They overhear family feuds through the tipi walls. Yet they may never know each other’s full name, or the job each holds in the outside world, or see each other anywhere but at rendezvous.
“None of that outside stuff matters.” George said. “I only care what people do in camp. I don’t want to sleep next to people who dump gasoline on a slow fire.”
Having lived through the era of free love and seen several pitiable attempts at communal living, I was skeptical of everything involved in buckskinning, starting with the macho attitude of most of the men involved. But I enjoyed the quiet so much, the freedom from telephones, television and other noisy interruptions, that I swore to adapt.
During those years, club members often drove over Dead Indian Pass to camp in a level meadow in Sunlight Basin on the shoulder of a mountain in the Shoshone National Forest northwest of Cody, Wyoming. Scattered boulders furnished materials for seats and fire pits, but newcomers were warned about the steep cliff that circled half the camp. On many nights, someone who had hunted these mountains would tell tales at the campfire about hunters who blundered over the precipice, insisting the corpses were found the next spring gnawed by grizzlies.
[Linda washing Mike’s face.]In camp, I began each morning by walking through sunflowers to the cliff’s edge. Eyes closed, I’d inhale the scents soaring up from the valley bottom, feeling the abyss vibrate sound and color. My skin felt the texture of the wind pushing me back even while the void before me beckoned. A little shaky, I’d sit down to consider that seduction. After finding me there several times, Michael began calling me Sunflower, and I adopted it as my camp name. I like to think I recall each moment of the time we spent in that place, not only because of its serene beauty but because those camps reinforced what I’d learned about the way an ideal community functions.
We went alone the first year, but after that, usually took George’s son Mike with us. As soon as we arrived in camp, we’d unload the gear, and send him to collect firewood while George took the van back to the parking lot. An unwritten rule required getting vehicles out of camp in a half hour and he obeyed it even if no one else was present.
While George staked the tipi cover, I turned our pile of supplies into a temporary home. I hid our modern sleeping bags under the buffalo robe so our feet pointed to the door, and placed food and clothing trunks around the edges of the circle for seats. I always left space by the door for dry kindling, and placed Mike’s tall trunk as a divider between his bed and ours. The lodge’s medicine bag hung on the rope at the lodge’s center, and I hummed as I hung the liner.
[The back of the tipi.]A traditionalist, George decorated our lodge according to his vision, painting the bottom third deep blue for the sky, interrupted by a line of yellow circles representing the sun, moon and stars. The conical top was plain yellow. When we married, I added red dragonflies copied from petroglyphs near my grandmother’s ranch.
On our first evening in camp, we were sometimes too tired to dig a firepit and build a fire, so we ate sandwiches and went to bed early, sleeping past dawn the next day. Then George would dig the firepit outside, build a fire, and set coffee to boil. Then he’d come inside, and I’d wake to see him digging a smaller pit in the center of the lodge, so we could cook even during the usual afternoon thunderstorm.
By the time the coffee had boiled and we’d filled our cups, the camp was buzzing with kids playing and adults cooking breakfast. I kept making fresh coffee, knowing folks would be strolling past with empty cups, an established rite among ‘skinners who know each other, or want to.
About sixty of us usually settled around the central fire at night for the annual meeting to pay camp fees, explain the rules to newcomers, and catch up on the year’s news. Since most of us were seasoned buckskinners, the business meeting was short.
[The front of the tipi showing the dragonfly decorations.]Then someone would snatch a blanket off a case of cheap fruit wine. “We soaked the labels off, so it’s potluck,” someone always announced, tossing the caps in the fire and passing the bottles into the circle. Jugs sloshing and winking in firelight, conversations surged and ebbed around children dozing in the shadows.
Despite the presence of the cheap wine, despite the fox hats and leaping firelight, the knives and tomahawks at every belt, the scene always reminded me of the way my neighbors visited around the long tables at annual community dinners during the county fair. They were armed too, but that fact only made the fellowship stronger; we knew we could count on one another.
# # #
Copyright 2008 Linda M. Hasselstrom
Rendezvous Stories: Afterword
Note that many of these rendezvous essays have quotations at the beginning, indicating that at one time I had the essay slated for inclusion in a particular collection of essays. I’d decided that a unifying factor for the essays would be succinct quotations at the beginning of each one, an epigraph directing the reader’s attention to some element of the story they might have missed. I had great fun finding terrific quotations from intelligent folks.
I still consider epigraphs a great way to introduce an essay, and they give the writer a chance to look at the broader implications of her work and try to match it with a pithy quote.
An explanation of Rendezvous Re-enactment from Land Circle
Rendezvous was the annual trappers’ meeting during the fur trade days [1824 – 1840]; a few days in summer when trappers brought in their pelts, were paid, and bought their year’s supplies. . . . The muzzle-loading weapons of that age, either cap and ball or flintlock, are still intriguing . . . In modern times, people interested in the weapons have extended that interest to the way of life of the mountain man, and instituted dozens of such rendezvous in the United States, Canada, Germany, and other countries. . . . Everyone’s objective is to reproduce, as nearly as possible, the look and feeling of a rendezvous camp of the period. A place is set aside for the primitive camp, with running water and firewood. Those who have authentic clothing but modern camping gear must camp in a spot reserved for modern tents and tin tipis: campers. “Pilgrims,” inexperienced participants or visitors, are sometimes allowed in camp if they make a serious attempt at dressing in period style.
The insistence on authentic attire and accouterments is not mere whim; the camp’s primitive look enhances photographs, paintings, and research, and adds to the enjoyment of people who truly live the period. The mood would be ruined by seeing someone in blue jeans, scorned by modern mountain men because Levi Strauss didn’t start making them until 1851. The rule keeps away folks who aren’t seriously interested; those who are will be treated with friendliness, and almost any buckskinner will take time to help a newcomer learn how to participate. When you put on buckskins or a long dress, you put on a different mood; . . . The whole tempo of the world changes.
— from Land Circle: Writings Collected from the Land
(Fulcrum Publishing, Golden CO; 1991; Anniversary Edition 2008)
excerpts taken from the chapter called “Rendezvous!”
pages 35 through 37 (Anniversary Edition)
Red had gotten a promotion, and his wife Sandy still worked in the supermarket. That year, Red was club president, and booshway [buckskinner slang for the original French word for the guy in charge, the bourgeois]. The night was half over by the time he worked his way around the circle and sat down near me. I hadn’t yet seen Sandy at the fire, so I leaned over and asked Red, “Where is your devoted wife? Didn’t leave you, did she? I thought she was starting to act liberated last year.”
“Let me get this straight, Red. Women are so stupid they should listen to a guy who can’t remember his tipi when he’s planning to live in it for a week?”
He raised his voice, enunciating carefully, “Frank, this is Linda. She’s George’s wife”–- he pointed elaborately at George, who had stopped talking and loomed across the circle– “and a friend of mine.”
On my thirty-ninth birthday, we obtained a permit to cut tipi poles in the Uinta Mountains of northern Utah. An eighteen-foot tipi needs eighteen to twenty poles. Since we’d promised a set to a friend, we wanted to cut at least forty trees. While George and his friend Jim searched for perfectly straight lodge pole pine trees to cut, Jim’s wife Mavis and I were in charge of transport. We followed the men as they tramped miles through the deep woods. As soon as they’d cut two slender pine, our job was to haul them back to the van, while Jim and George strolled off in search of more.
“Don’t you want to load this one?” I’d pant.
As the van lumbered back to camp that night with forty tree tops sweeping its tracks from the road behind, I mentioned my weariness with this strenuous birthday.
Then we closed the tipi door, knowing our gear would be safe in camp, and headed for Linda’s Birthday Revenge, a reunion of my mother’s family, a group of sober, law-abiding folks who drive recreational vehicles, shave, never drink liquor, and probably iron their camping clothes. My theory was that George, wearing a beard and shoulder-length locks that almost hid his earrings, might be nearly as uncomfortable for a day as I was for a week on his fishing trip. For maximum effect, and because we couldn’t find our civilian clothes, we wore our rendezvous garb– my long leather dress and his fringed leather suit. I didn’t think to remove the businesslike Green River skinning knife I used in camp.
When we bumped into each other behind the van, he whispered, “Where’s the book? Can’t remember which pole comes next.”
Notes from a Western Life 