Firing a Musket, in Peace and War

The Bunker Hill Monument on Breed's Hill, Charlestown, MA.

In the life of a young museum professional, there's work, and then there's shooting muskets (for work).

Which is what I did on Thursday at the Bunker Hill Monument, because I recently started my third season at Boston National Historical Park. One of the programs offered most weekends at the park is a demonstration of 18th century musket firing, made somehow less cool (or cooler?) by the NPS-issue olive-green overalls and ball cap. I'm sure I either looked ridiculous or awesome with my protective goggles and bright orange ear-plugs, accentuated by a period cartridge box holding 15 black-powder rounds, and a five-foot long replica flintlock.

It was fun either way.

However, much like our colonial forbears who marched to fight the British Army in 1775, I had no idea what I was getting myself into. Unlike our forbears, I had the opportunity to learn musketry without anyone shooting back at me. Nevertheless, after carrying the weapon outside and following the spotter's instructions to load and prepare the piece, I pointed the barrel up at the sky and had a realization...

I'm not sure I could have done it.

I'm not sure that I could have shot at another human being. I'm not sure I could have killed another human being. I'm not sure that I could have coolly loaded and fired what is essentially a low explosive packed into a confined iron tube, with cannonballs and musketballs and all manner of hell raining down on me, watching my friends get blown up and shot and bayoneted. Not for as long, as bravely, or--the embarrassed part of me wants to say-- as foolishly.

And another part of me, the inquisitive, analytic part, wants to know how they did it. How did the rebel Americans-- few of whom had anything like practical military experience-- decide to march to Breed's Hill in June of 1775? How did they decide that they could stand up to the British army, one of the greatest military powers in 18th century Europe? Alternately, how did the British foot-soldiers (many of whom were no doubt intelligent, rational, nervous men) convince themselves that they could cross nearly half a mile of open field to attack a fortified position guarded by other men with the above-mentioned weapons?

When I first picked up my replica musket and pointed it at the sky, I was nervous. After I had fired a second time, and then a third, I was less nervous. It wasn't until the fourth or fifth try that my nerves began to subside, that I realized that I had acquired a knack for the piece. I had learned its secrets. I imagine that the same thing happened in 1775 to the rebels inside the fort on Breed's Hill, and the redcoats they were defending themselves against. The Americans, having largely confined their weapons to the hunting of game, probably had the same sort of hesitation as I did at the thought of using their weapons on other people. Having spent a good part of their career training to do just that, the British soldiers might not have even thought about it, because they had already acquired the knack. Once that happens, do you think about what you're doing, or do you just go through the motions?

No one alive today will ever know what it was like being on an eighteenth-century battlefield. Even modern soldiers--who are better equipped than most of us to understand the mindset of the combatants on Breed's Hill--are not able to fully relate. God willing, none of them will ever have to endure the agony of surgery with nothing but rum to dull the pain, or fight off the inevitable infections without antibiotics. None of them will be used as cannon fodder, sacrificed like human pawns on a chessboard in an era when human life didn't mean what it does today. By most accounts, war today is hell; back then, war was hell without anesthesia.

When we conduct these kinds of demonstrations, we call it living history, but we're not really living it. When our cartridge boxes are empty, the simulation stops and we go back to our modern lives. At best, we're pretending history, and because we can't reproduce everything about the situation faced by these men, the pretending never becomes real. Some things are simply impossible to connect to.

But at least now I know how to fire a flintlock.

A Wild West Business Plan

Making my Museum Mission (M) statement                 

In looking back at my post from a few weeks ago, I see now how foolish it was to assume that I would be able to cover the development of my hypothetical Wild West museum in just two posts, no matter how hypothetical it is. The whole point of this exercise is to examine the challenges that museums of this sort face, from their conception to their construction. To sum up these challenges in just two posts would do a disservice to both the industry and to my better understanding of it. So today, instead of bringing my pipe dream to its conclusion, we will just examine the next chapter on the long, long road towards getting the place funded by a philanthropic billionaire.

This chapter is the museum’s mission statement. Every museum has one. It’s one to three sentences explaining why the institution exists, and what it’s trying to accomplish. For history museums, the mission statement usually provides a brief summary of the place and time period that is being represented. It helps you and your fellow visionaries to focus on the subject that you're trying to cover, and clearly explains exactly how you are different from other institutions doing similar things.

To give you a few examples, let’s turn to the two institutions that I’m channeling most closely; Plimoth Plantation, which showcases a replica of the 1627 Pilgrim settlement, and Old Cowtown in Kansas, an existing Wild West museum. The mission of Plimoth Plantation is to create “powerful, personal encounters with history built on thorough research about the Wampanoag People and the Colonial English community in the 1600s.” Old Cowtown Museum states that they are “an open air, living history museum that presents the history of Wichita, Sedgwick County, and life on the southern plains, circa 1865 - 1880.”

Each mission outlines exactly what it is that the museum is trying to accomplish, what makes it unique. The specifics of how the mission is to be carried out are left undefined, allowing for experimentation and evolution.

                

Working with this format, let’s decide what we want to do with our yet un-named replica frontier town. Here are a few goals that I would like our museum to strive for.

1. To present a detailed look at life in a western frontier town of the late 1800s.
2. To examine the people who lived in the town or nearby; who they are, what they do, and why they came to the town.
3. To present the frontier life from as many different viewpoints as possible, utilizing historically accurate personalities, trades, and diverse ethnicities.

Vague, but it’s a start and we’ll work with it. As with other museums of this sort, our living history museum will also demonstrate period crafts, skills, and folkways. In order to keep all of these interpretations as accurate as possible, research will be carried out pretty much continuously, so as to remain current with recent scholarship. As we don’t have a location yet, or even a name, we can’t pin down these elements, but based on our goals we can craft a working mission statement that looks something like this:

“Nameless, faceless Wild West Museum aims to connect the public with the history of time and place, using recent scholarship and advanced interpretation techniques. NFWWM will furthermore explore the myths and realities of the Old West and the different people and groups who occupied it.”

As we continue to develop our vision of the museum, the mission statement can be edited, specified, and changed to more accurately reflect what we want to accomplish. Next time, we'll try to pin down exactly where and when we want our living history to live.

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Are you a philanthropic billionaire, or an easily persuaded one? Do you have a good-for-nothing frontier town lying around that refuses to get a job? All of these comments and more can be left in the comments section below.

The Pipe-dream, and Problems that Arise from it

THE IDEA

At Plimoth Plantation last November, several friends and I were between visitors and very bored. Massachusetts in the late fall doesn’t really encourage one to wander around outside, even in replica Pligrim clothing. Once the sun starts to dip towards the horizon and visitation dries up, everyone starts to congregate in three or four houses throughout the Colonial English village, and compete to see who can huddle up closest to the hearth without actually setting their clothes on fire. This particular day, a group of us started talking about what we would do if we were to find ourselves suddenly handed a blank check and told to use the money to create our own living history museum. Ideas were thrown around. Things got messy.

Fake John Alden suggested a first-person Pirate museum, somewhere down in the Caribbean. His fake wife Priscilla liked the idea of a Victorian house designed to showcase the history of the Spiritualist movement, complete with a séance. Someone else wanted to design a Revolutionary fort. Having just days before watched the classic Sergio Leone film “The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly,” I began to think about the possibility of a Wild West living history museum, where the first-person interpreters would all portray cowboys, gunslingers, and saloon keepers.

THE PROBLEM

This all started out as idle conversation, of course. But as November dragged on, we Pilgrims found that we would get a large rush of school groups in the morning, all of them eager to talk about Squanto and the first Thanksgiving. By the afternoon, these groups would be back on their warm school buses, and we would once again be huddled around our fires, talking to pass the time. And we began to expand on our original ideas. Given the opportunity, how would we organize these museums? How would they teach us about history? How authentic would they be?

This last question is one that living history museums struggle with constantly. The whole idea behind first-person interpretation is to immerse the visitor in a different world, a different time period. You’re half historian, half actor, and you play your role without a script. You dress, work, and eat the part, doing most activities in the same way that the people you represent would have done them. But sometimes the 17^th century is just too… extreme for a modern person. A New Plimoth resident in 1627 would have relieved themselves into a clay pot the size of a tea kettle and then chucked the contents into the streets. If a museum today tried to be that authentic, the Department of Sanitation would close it down and chuck the staff out into the streets.

A Wild West museum comes with its own set of problems; some very similar, some completely unique. Chamber pots and outhouses would still have to be present, for the sake of appearances, but the Muzees would probably choose to use modern facilities, cleverly hidden in a barn or something. There would still be the conundrum of nineteenth-century prejudice; how authentically should the interpreter portray period attitudes towards women, African Americans, Native Americans, and other frontier minorities? How much affected bias can you get away with for the sake of education? How much should you be able to get away with?

Then there’s the constant balancing act between authenticity and the pop culture perception of a period. I guarantee that if this Wild West museum ever becomes a reality, every male staff member I hire is going to have seen the same Clint Eastwood films that I have, and they’re all going to want to be the Man with no Name. Given the chance, everyone is going to pass up roles as blacksmiths, telegraph operators, missionaries and common laborers. They’re going to dress up in a white hat and a poncho, and spend their days playing poker and ogling prostitutes at a saloon. A Most visitors would probably want their Wild West museum to have a daily event where gunslingers face off in the main street at high noon. Tumbleweeds blow by, revolvers are drawn, in a life and death contest to find out who’s the faster shot.

These are issues that every living-history museum must face, where the educational experience you’re trying to present must compete with the expectations of the public that finances your operations. And they’re issues that must be revisited, year after year, to determine whether your mission is focused more on changing a perception, or catering to it.

Come back in a few days to read more about my vision of a living history museum devoted to the Wild West. If you can’t wait that long, visit this site to see how an existing museum in Kansas has recreated one of the most recognizable periods of American history.