As a former high school and college history teacher, John Carson loved to see the reactions when he made his entrance into the plaza at Bent’s Old Fort National Historic Site on horseback.
With authentic looking clothes and moccasins evoking the persona of an 1830s hunter-trapper, Carson for 14 years researched and play-acted living history of the era as a park ranger and interpreter, igniting in visitors — kids especially — a keen interest in the region’s past.
“From the very first day, Bent’s Fort has been known as a dang good living history site, where folks could visit and get an idea of what life would’ve been like here in the middle of nowhere in the 1830s and ’40s,” says Carson, 67 and retired from reenactments. “The place would come alive.”
Now, under a new superintendent only months into the job, Bent’s Old Fort has become the flashpoint of local controversy over potential changes brought on by the site’s badly aging infrastructure, by reconsideration of the role of livestock and, perhaps most pointedly, by shifting perception of the value — and limitations — of living history practices that have enticed participation by many volunteers.
Public concern has intensified as word of changes at the site spread in the wake of an independent consultant’s report that recommended new and more efficient ways to tell the fort’s story, especially regarding the use of living history.
Superintendent Eric Leonard, who began overseeing Bent’s Old Fort as well as Colorado’s Sand Creek Massacre and Amache national historic sites last summer, says he understands the connection many folks — mostly volunteer participants — feel with the park’s living history element.
“But I think the nuanced realization here is we’re at a point now where relying on it as the only tool is not really sustainable,” he says. “It has a lot of built in costs, and it doesn’t reach as many people as we really have an obligation to.
“Bent’s Old Fort is an extraordinary American story,” he adds. “And I think what everyone in these conversations has in common is that people are passionate about it, and they want to tell the story. They want the park to succeed.”
Trimmed-back winter hours and reduced access to parts of the fort already had raised concerns. Talk of reducing the living history aspect has generated more calls, letters and social media chatter — and even moved some public officials to stress the importance of living history and ask the Park Service to reconsider any changes.
For instance, State House Rep. Ty Winter and Sen. Rod Pelton wrote a letter to the National Park Service expressing concerns shared by constituents that have “stirred unease among those who hold the Fort dear.” It added that removing living history elements “may compromise the immersive experience that has set Bent’s Old Fort apart.”
I think what everyone in these conversations has in common is that people are passionate about it, and they want to tell the story. They want the park to succeed.
— Eric Leonard, superintendent of High Plains Group of parks in Colorado and New Mexico
For Carson, whose great-grandfather, the frontiersman Kit Carson, frequently visited the fort as a hunter employed by the Bent brothers, the pushback underscores the strong connection many in southeastern Colorado feel to the historic site.
“Quite frankly, I won’t walk on the place as it’s being run today,” Carson says. “A lot of folks still associate me with Bent’s and it’s embarrassing to be associated with the place as it’s run now. The attitude would definitely have to make a 180 before I’d even think about going back up there.”
Backlash over changes to the park comes amid a broader reconsideration of museums, landscapes and public spaces as vehicles for employing living history, with new attention paid to perspectives that have previously been underrepresented, and sometimes represented by white actors playing other racial roles.
And while there’s common ground on issues like improving representation among all cultural groups, the uncertainty and concern many locals feel about the direction of the fort comes from connections dating back to childhood.
Linda Bourne, 74, grew up with the fort. She was in seventh grade when she first visited the site, which at that point was “nothing but a field with a foundation.” Over time, she saw the fort’s reconstruction, which further spurred her interest and eventually led her to invest time in training to become part of living history events — learning the speech patterns of the period, the dress, every detail to portray first a laborer and later a cook.
“I’ve always wanted to know what was in the past,” Bourne says. “So to me that just brought it to life. And I wanted to share it, because it is an important part of who we are.”
Leonard understands the ties that bind so many to the site and says there will always be a place for living history. The question is just the best and most sustainable way to present it.
“A broad observation about living history is that the people most interested in how it functions are the people that participate in it,” Leonard says. “The general public will come as an audience member, but the sausage making around it is not necessarily something that they’re particularly interested in.”
Fluid culture, sovereignty and commerce
Bent’s Old Fort National Historic Site sits just north of U.S. 50 east of La Junta, marking the structure first built in 1833 as a nexus for commerce along the Santa Fe Trail by brothers Charles and WIlliam Bent and Ceran St. Vrain. It stood as an isolated permanent settlement not under control of Mexico or Native Americans, and did brisk trade with the Cheyenne and Arapaho tribes, largely in buffalo hides.
“It’s a borderland where, often for historic purposes, we try to draw hard lines,” Leonard says. “Those lines were very fuzzy at the time. During the period of its operation, this was a very fluid landscape of culture, sovereignty and commerce.”
It also served as a staging area for explorers and U.S. Army detachments before a cholera epidemic prompted William Bent to move his operations, eventually to the location known as Bent’s New Fort near the current town of Lamar.
Although the original fort was destroyed in 1849, the site came under National Park Service control in 1963. Eventually, the fort was reconstructed with the aid of historical depictions and diaries — a project that aligned with the nation’s bicentennial in 1976, as well as Colorado’s centennial celebration.
Leonard notes that at the time of the reconstruction, living history was relatively new and “cutting edge,” and was mentioned in the fort’s 1975 master plan. By the 1980s, he adds, the fort embraced living history as the primary tool in the site’s storytelling toolbox.
But as the gatherings of reenactors evolved into social events that produced what he describes as “legendary stories” around alcohol use and weapons, the program adopted some stringent standards. For instance, the participant manual for a 1987 event covered 125 pages of policy, procedure, logistics and historical background.
Challenges remained, particularly around the recruitment of non-white people to fill critical roles reflecting the cultures that converged at the fort. Issues also emerged on a national scale. At Antietam National Battlefield in Maryland, Leonard notes, a federal court case over a female volunteer who was denied participation as a Civil War soldier in a re-enactment changed the dynamics of living history. She took the NPS to court and won.
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In December, consultant Melissa Prycer delivered a report assessing the Bent’s Old Fort staff and interpretation and recommending a number of changes with regard to living history — perhaps most significantly, shifting living history from being the primary interpretive tool to a supplemental role.
“When faced with the limitations of living history,” Prycer wrote, “many people default to the idea that more training will solve the issues. In all honesty, I believe that living history is a fundamentally flawed method of interpretation, especially when telling diverse, complicated stories.”
The report also noted that living history can be expensive and cause conflict, even between costumed participants and uniformed Park Service rangers. It suggested the fort “begin taking steps to sunset the living history program as it’s known today” and build a “culture of experimentation.” It encouraged management to “look at these current shifts as opportunities, not problems.”
Leonard notes that the consultant “gets to ask hard questions, write a report and then walk away. And that report doesn’t actually require us to do anything. It’s just an outside review that raises questions and provides a series of recommendations for consideration.”
Communication gaps
Steve Keefer, a retired district manager with Colorado Parks and Wildlife who lives near Las Animas, has many questions — 20, to be exact. He submitted them to the park service on Feb. 7 in the hope of better understanding the review of the site and all of the concerning information floating around the community.
“The rumor mill has been going wild out here,” Keefer says, “and some of it has been accurate and some of it hasn’t. But communication would help a lot.”
Keefer figures that the issues around livestock and living history have raised the most concern in the community — and is on board with the idea that the fort’s story needs to be told from multiple perspectives.
“There’s probably not as much of that as there should have been, but there has been effort in living history to show some of the Native American side of things, some of the Hispanic side of things — and those are good things,” he says. “And I think it should be done, personally.”
Carson recalls that in his experience working on the living history events it could be difficult to recruit non-white participants to fill some roles, such as enslaved people like Charlotte and Dick Green, who were prominent figures at the fort, or many others headed West in search of a better life.
“Believe me, the 14 years I was working there, we tried,” Carson says. “I think the way we look at those kinds of roles in the modern world, people aren’t going to be coming out there for a weekend if they were subordinate to somebody else.”
Scott Magelssen, professor and head of theater history and performance studies at the University of Washington, explored issues surrounding living history in his book “Living History Museums: Undoing History through Performance.” He contends the practice is going through an awkward transition as institutions experience a historical reckoning with injustices of the past. At the same time, he adds, there’s an enormous boom in experiential entertainment — from escape rooms to immersive Van Gogh exhibits.
“Museums and historical sites, if they can find a way to tap into this, to be accessible and keep up with these other forms of immersive experience, I think there’s a willing and ready audience out there for them,” Magelsson says. “But it’s a struggle right now.”
While the boomtimes of the 1970s and ’80s reflected a hunger for U.S. history bolstered by the bicentennial and television shows like “Little House on the Prairie,” the model that drove that interest has disappeared, he adds. Families don’t pile into the station wagon for road trips pursuing heritage tourism, prompting museums and historic sites to question the value of living history.
They’re faced with asking the question: What’s the role of living history programming at historic sites when we’re not getting the numbers?
— Scott Magelssen, professor and head of theater history and performance studies at the University of Washington
“They’re faced with asking the question: What’s the role of living history programming at historic sites when we’re not getting the numbers?” Magelssen says. “And the numbers we are getting are the grandparents who are remembering the heydays and the people who think about what they saw on their school field trips.”
With that, he says, comes another question: Whose story are we telling?
Generally, Magelssen says, it’s been the account of the white, landowning gentry, the Founding Fathers of the U.S., the pilgrims or — moving West — white pioneers in forts that tell a story that doesn’t match up with “the current political complicatedness.”
Living history is always going to fall short in traditional measures of success, such as return on investment, because it doesn’t pay off in the same way that other kinds of interactive exhibits or touch screens do, he adds. Plus, touchscreens don’t take vacations, so they’re readily available year-round instead of just occasional weekends.
“So when I’m being a realist, I think to myself, maybe living history did see its climax in the ’80s,” Magelssen says. “But the romantic in me, and the theater person in me, I think would really regret if living history programming went away.”
Leonard notes that early in his career he, too, spent part of his work time in period costume, but concluded that no tool is perfect for every audience. For roughly the past quarter century, he says, the big living history events at Bent’s Fort have occurred four to six times a year. In 2023, four events were spread out over six operational days, to a total audience of roughly 1,000 visitors, while the yearlong attendance approached 20,000.
“Large-scale living history served less than 5% of our visitors in 2023,” Leonard says. “And that’s not an anomaly. That’s the practice over decades at this point.”
That has led him to consider a shift to more frequent but smaller programs. While he acknowledges there’s an enthusiastic audience for living history programming, he also points out that the park has an obligation to tell its story to as many people as possible, and to do it effectively and sustainably.
In a region with a history of fuzzy cultural delineation, Leonard says, the fort also needs a fluid definition of what living history entails, one that would also include scaled down reenactments.
To illustrate, he tells the story of the park’s retail store manager, who hatched an idea put into action the last two summers by which kids could register to receive replica trade beads, which they then use to negotiate trades with other participants.
“I would argue very strongly that that’s an immersive living history program because you’re engaging in that commercial activity that took place here,” he says. “We’re trying to provide opportunities for the public to create their own meanings here. We’re telling you the story so you can come to your own conclusions about what it means to you.”
Failing structural elements
Another issue stoking public concern — the physical condition of the fort itself — has its roots in the early days of the historic site, when Bent’s Old Fort was reconstructed with a blend of period architecture and modern construction. Some of the methods employed in the mid-1970s — the use of concrete, in particular — have come back to haunt the structure.
Essentially, Leonard says, it’s a modern building that mimics the original appearance and design. But all that concrete has yielded some unintended consequences that began to show up even before the reconstruction was completed in 1976, as the material’s moisture retention — in contrast to the original adobe, which permits moisture to pass through — has led to structural and safety problems, including the presence of asbestos.
That led to the closure last fall of the fort’s second floor. Leonard says that selection of a contractor is in the works and he hopes to have a sense of how addressing the immediate safety concerns will impact operations later this spring.
But the larger, longer-term structural viability of the fort still needs to be addressed, and federal law around historic preservation could push that back to at least 2026, when the site’s potential eligibility — the reconstructed fort would hit the 50-year threshold — could open the door to long-range solutions.
“What we’re doing is sort of holding the line on the condition of the structure, we’re not actually improving it,” Leonard says. “And we have an obligation to make sure that the building can last and be safe.”
He anticipates that discussions could start late this year around plans to make the site sustainable for the next 50-100 years, and those would be critical “to tap into the love that people in southeast Colorado and throughout Colorado have for the place.”
In the meantime, some of those emotionally invested in the fort appear reluctant to buy into a reimagined culture for the historic site.
“That tension always exists around museums, so it’s not new,” Leonard says. “And at the end of the day there’s an opportunity here, and what we hope to do is turn this passion into something productive.”
Keefer, the former CPW manager, counts himself among those who also hope that differences can be resolved.
“I’m not really trying to be a rabble-rouser as much as trying to figure out how we can fix the problem,” he says. “I want to see it succeed.”
