Back to the frontier: want to fork hay, play vintage baseball or try your hand at tanning deer hide? At Conner Prairie, Indiana, Living History is the main event.(DESTINATION AMERICA)(Travel narrative)

Publication: Smithsonian

Publication Date: 01-MAY-08

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COPYRIGHT 2008 Smithsonian Institution

INSIDE A LOG CABIN on the Indiana frontier, a rugged-looking man in a rumpled linen tunic, trousers of rough homespun and heavy black boots sat at a crude table piled high with pelts. He looked up as I stepped inside.

"Welcome," he said. "What furs do you have to trade today?"

Just outside, a fire smoldered near two bark-and-reed huts, the dwellings of local Lenape Indians. In a nearby clearing, a deer hide, dangling inside a wooden frame used for skinning and stretching, dried in the sun. A log shed next to the cabin housed a bark canoe, hung from the rafters.

Only 40 minutes earlier, I had been driving in an air-conditioned car, radio blaring, cellphone at the ready. Now, in backwoods along the White River--only 15 miles northeast of downtown Indianapolis--I had wandered into McKinnen's wilderness trading post (c. 1816). It was, for the trader "McKinnen" and me, all in a day's role-play at Conner Prairie, an 850-acre living-history museum in Fishers, Indiana. Conner Prairie re-creates the everyday life of 19th-century settlers in the Old Northwest Territory (roughly present-day Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Wisconsin, Michigan and Minnesota).

McKinnen's trading post...

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