At the site is a living history area, with traditional Cherokee housing, games, and daily life displayed and "reenacted" by members of the tribe in traditional clothing for the education of the paying public. In the evening, there was a play, enacted in an outdoor amphitheater to tell the story of the Cherokee removal. That experience has stayed with me for decades, and is probably one of the first times I saw living history.
Likewise I liked visiting Anadarko, Oklahoma, where other tribes were displayed in varying housing. I enjoyed watching the dances performed. The same is true of our visit to Seven Falls in Colorado, where I got to join in with dancers in a round dance.
Later, after college, when working at a place called The Wilds, in El Reno, Oklahoma, I encouraged living history as part of what we offered to the public. We were able to have southwestern gunfights at the barn and corral area, but more importantly, we hosted a small rendezvous for Civil War reenactors. The participants did not pretend to fight in a battle, but they did set up their tents and live for a couple of days like the soldiers they portrayed. They even brought a cannon from the era, which they fired over the ten-acre lake in the center of the property, even doing so at night with a rain of sparks and thundering percussion.
With that said, I recently spent my week at Fort Ticonderoga in Upstate New York - a week of listening to fifes and drums parading in and out of the fort and watching French soldiers drilling and being inspected. Every day it seemed there was something else to see.
As is the nature of tourism, more time travelers soon arrived, some with children and some with dogs. Presumably we were all there to learn and observe. We were transported back to the 18th century to see, smell, hear, and touch a period in the history of our land when the United States was something that still loomed in the future, a time when our first president was still a soldier and when Colonials still fought with the British (rather than against the British as would follow in just a couple of decades). | |