Center visitors brush up on butter churning, blacksmithing

Something is cooking on the Oregon Trail. Mike Bainter checks the progress of a buffalo stew he and his wife, Debbi, prepared for visitors during the 19th century visitors day at NHOTIC.

Pounding on an anvil until you’ve made enough links to forge a chain.

Baking hardtack. Churning butter. Carding wool. Helping your kid make her own rag doll out of strips of old fabric.

Visitors to the National Historic Oregon Trail Interpretive Center got to experience that first-hand Saturday during what the center billed as “19th Century Activities Day,” a series of demonstrations at the wagon encampment and talks inside the center.

Another name for the event might have been, “Just Be Glad You Were Born When You Were Day.”

Portland’s Daniel Klug may be a 21st century man, but he makes his living in a throwback profession — blacksmith.

He even kept in character as he went about his hot, dirty work, explaining why he had little time for chit-chat.

“I’ve got orders to fill this morning,” he said, gesturing to a small blackboard outlining his day’s work: “Widow Johnson, 4 wall hooks, 2 cookin’ hooks. Clem Jones, length o’ chain. Capt. Martin, 1 knife, 2 bacon turners. No mule shoein’ today.”

“Mules and ex-wives,” Klug said with a smile. “They all kick the same.”

But Klug did indeed answer questions when he didn’t have to concentrate on his work too hard. The fire he started with flint and sandstone would soon reach 2,100 degrees in his forge. His fuel of choice is a mixture of coal and coke provided by a Kentucky company.

“Every neighborhood in Portland used to have a blacksmith shop,” he said. “They were indispensable. They made tools for wood workers, wagon wrights, millwrights. It’s a thousand-year-old tradition.”

Klug also wanted to clear up some misconceptions about blacksmithing. Blacksmiths worked at the fringe of town, he noted, so that their fires wouldn’t set their neighbors’ thatched roofs ablaze. Their shops were dark so that the blacksmith could discern shades of metal colors and thus know when they were just the right temperature to be pounded into shape.

“People thought blacksmiths were in league with the devil, because what they could do with metal was magic,” Klug said, and then he shrugged. “I guess if you can take metal and turn it into stuff, it is magic.”

“You’ve gotta strike,” he said, hammering on his anvil as he hammered home the most famous of blacksmith sayings, “while the iron’s hot.”

Rachael Nickens, a visitor information specialist at the center, stayed up until one o’clock Saturday morning baking hardtack for visitors. She also showed them other typical pioneer fare: brown sugar shaped into what looked like a hockey puck, tea that came in blocks to be chipped away as the trip west wore on, and twisted strands of tobacco that could be flaked away and inserted directly into Pa’s pipe.

Nickens also came to Flagstaff Hill Saturday with hundreds of fabric strips so she could help young people — and the young at heart — make their own rag dolls.

“Keep on wrapping,” she advised, as visitors layered the strips, then pinched and tied them to form the neck and the doll’s appendages. “For a while, it will look like an octopus, but that’s OK.”

Other volunteers brought along characters and let them do the talking Saturday. Dave Jason’s alter ego is Albert Fenner, “Supplier to the Compleat Miner,” and you could tell from his good-looking period suit and pristine white overcoat that Fenner’s Baker City-based business was prospering by the 1870s.

“Some merchants were unscrupulous, but most were quite honest, and I’m one of those. I’m an honest man and I run a square business,” Fenner told the crowd.

Fenner reached Oregon Territory not by the overland route, but by way of the Isthmus of Panama, “a terrible, terrible place” full of disease, long lines of prospectors waiting for passage and rip-off artists.

Like many others, once he reached Oregon Territory, Fenner tried his hand at mining, then found he enjoyed supplying miners more than he enjoyed finding gold.

“I know what it is to be hip-deep in the frozen water,” he told the crowd, offering them a gold pan on sale for a dollar. “Why,” he said, “you can make five or eight dollars a day with one of these, but I’m a little long in the tooth to be doing that kind of work every day.”

Fenner had an impressive array of goods for sale — Civil War surplus canteens, also a dollar; Old Crow whiskey “the kind that Pres. Grant himself drinks”; long Bowie knives forged in Great Britain; even a bottle of gold-colored oil some snake oil salesman sold him. As Fenner explained, it was a potion promoters used to pour over their heads and clothing to make it look to skeptical gold-seekers like gold dust from area mines was so plentiful it was literally sticking to them.

“I would never sell you something like that,” Fenner sniffed.

Outside, Dave Noble brought his mountain man character to life and demonstrated pre- and post-Civil War firearms and bows and arrows. He showed children arrows he’d fletched himself with turkey feathers and bragged to visitors about what a deadeye he is with a bow and arrow.

“I’ve killed more bales of hay from 30 yards than I can count,” he said with a mountain man-sized smile.

More NHOTIC events, workshops and programs can be found at this Web site: www.oregontrail.blm.gov.