CALICO ROCK — A Calico Rock celebration immerses residents in the traditions of early 1800s settlers and Native Americans.
The Mountain Man Rendezvous and Native American event will take place Sept. 9 and 10 at Rand Park in Calico Rock. The event will include live demonstrations of knife and tomahawk throwing, bow making and more, along with celebrating the dress and other practices of that time period.
The festival began four years ago when museum officials brainstormed and planned a Native American exhibit and decided to include the history of mountain men with it.
“We want to let people know that the Native Americans were good people and that the mountain men worked together with them, and that was all a good thing,” said Gloriaann Sanders, executive director of the Calico Rock Museum Foundation and Visitors Center.
Pioneers and settlers in the early 1800s lived away from civilization and survived on what they grew, crafted and traded. When they sought the company of fellow settlers, they camped out and fellowshipped and dubbed such a get-together a “rendezvous.”
Event attendees are encouraged to camp mountain-man style throughout Rand Park.
“The mountain men would actually gather in certain locations, and it would change year to year,” Sanders said, “They would stay for maybe a week, and they might trade furs and trade materials and whatever they needed.”
The Mountain Man Rendezvous will include a celebration of “old-time traditional” crafts, dress and activities, Sanders said. New this year to the event will be the Beyond the Circle Dancers, a group of Native American dancers from Missouri.
“Their idea is not just to dance but to teach the history of their Native American culture,” Sanders said.
There will be a Mountain Man and Mountain Mamma Competition, which will require participants to complete a certain number of tasks within a designated time frame to win the title.
For the first time, the event will include a Trail of Trees walk, which will start at 8 a.m.
in Melbourne and enter the museum in Calico Rock by noon. Sanders said the walk will focus on trees and how Native Americans used nature as guidance. At noon, the walk will then become a Walk of Remembrance for those who walked the Trail of Tears. The Walk of Remembrance will travel from the museum to Rand Park.
“We’re so forgetting the past, and the past is what we need to remember,” Sanders said. “Without the past, we can’t move on.”
The celebration will also include an opportunity for attendees to get a taste of what it was like preparing meals during that time period. The event’s Mountain Man Stew Off, which will begin at 5:30 p.m. Sept. 9, requires participants to make a mountain-man stew with only meat, vegetables and seasonings over an open fire. The first-place winner will take home $100.
For many of the event offerings and demonstrations, there will not be a specific schedule.
“We found that when we actually did schedule events, that didn’t work out well,” Sanders said. “The Early Arkansaw Reenactors Association are our mountain-man people. They’ve found that when a group of people come to an area, that’s when their schedule begins.”
Sanders said learning about history doesn’t have to be boring or tiring.
“Learning how difficult it was for them to provide their needs and learning how they do what they do and how they do it — that’s been an important factor for the museum as a whole,” she said. “It can be fun. It doesn’t have to be drudgery, and it doesn’t have to be difficult.”
Sanders said that each of the past two years of the event drew about 1,000 people, and museum officials hope the number grows beyond that this year.
“We want them to take away that it’s a learning experience, that they learned something,” she said. “Whether they learned how to start a fire or how to make something with a piece of wood, as long as they take away that they’ve learned something — that’s what we want.”
Staff writer Syd Hayman can be reached at (501) 244-4307 or shayman@arkansasonline.com.