On a hot Fourth of July, as I ate oddly flavored brown stew off a rusty plate and downed fake whiskey from my tin cup, all while seated outside at a wooden table with a crowd of people watching, I started feeling like a capuchin monkey at the zoo. This was all part of my summer job: eating and talking with my fellow soldiers for the entertainment and edification of visiting families, schoolchildren, and history buffs. In fact, almost every one of my daily activities, from mundane chores like chopping wood to more exciting activities such as firing muskets, was on display for people to watch. They often did.
The work was real, but the life on display was a fabrication. This was a paradox that was sometimes difficult to grasp. For a costumed interpreter at Historic Fort Snelling, the worlds of reality and make-believe overlapped in many instances. I donned the uniform of a private in the United States Army of the late 1820s, learned to march, fire muskets and cannons, and generally attempted to live the 1827 life of Private Kelly, an Irish immigrant from Boston.
But often it was hard to tell where the pretending ended. I was never quite sure what visitors thought was real and what they considered fake; as for my fellow historical interpreters, some of them still occasionally called me Private Kelly at the day’s end, when I was once again wearing my T-shirt and sandals.
It didn’t help that all the chores and daily routines from our 1827 show would go on with or without twenty-first century onlookers. Usually, by the time the fort would close for the day, the last visitors had already returned to the world of microwave burritos and Internet shopping. Yet we soldiers faithfully conducted the retreat ceremony—an inspection of the men, followed by a saluting of the flag as it’s lowered—with no one looking on except for others in period dress. An officer would stroll past us men in line, remarking on unpolished brass or stained trousers, doing so in such hushed tones that anyone who had been watching this elaborate ritual would have been somewhat mystified. If it served any conceivable purpose, it was to bring us interpreters closer to believing what we were doing wasn’t just for play, but was real.
Many things were both. For the sake of the fictional Private Kelly, I shaved my red beard into the thick mutton chops that went out of style after Martin Van Buren. Yet, hanging out at bars on the weekends or with friends who hadn’t seen me in a while, I got a few odd glances and many questions. Though the side-whiskers looked out of place without their accompanying high-collared shirt and a pocket watch, I couldn’t exactly say, “These mutton chops aren’t mine.”
Similarly, the weddings performed between soldiers and laundresses were not legally binding, but in at least one case, the bride and groom were actually romantically involved—sweetening each other’s tea, as it were. And when Private Kelly wrote a letter to his sweetheart with a quill pen and ink, I was able to perpetuate my own world of fantasy by mixing in reality, penning a letter to my real-life love interest in the guise of the girl Private Kelly had left behind in Boston.
While camera-toting tourists could maintain a certain distance from the theatrical display (after all, they weren’t stoking a wood fire in pantaloons and a wool vest), the whole thing was a bit more complicated for us interpreters. It became frightfully easy to shift between one’s self and one’s character, or vice versa. When visitors stepped into the barracks, we 1827-era soldiers could speak in historically accurate terms about the jobs we were performing in the twenty-first century: “Are we having inspection today?” or “How did Jones end up on guard duty again?” Was it Private Kelly or me who ventured the punishable, “It’s too hot to chop wood today”? If someone called me a dirty, drunken Irishman, should I take offense (I’m only part Irish, after all), and did the guy behind the soldier’s guise really mean it? Even when we gathered outside the fort, at work potlucks and picnics, most people still referred to one another by their fictional names, and conversations often turned to different types of gun powder or how best to hand-stitch a dress.
Like those monkeys, we were real people living in an elaborately contrived, yet seemingly authentic environment. Do captive capuchins realize that their rainforest ends at the concrete wall just past the flamingos? At Fort Snelling, we costumed guides didn’t have that wall—it was something each of us needed to erect and come to understand for ourselves. This seems like pretty decent advice for life in general.
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