When fresh, pemmican has a waxy, gritty texture and a fatty, beefy flavor. While pemmican can store indefinitely if kept dry, its flavor does not improve with age.

Pemmican is a food made of a mix of dried meat and fat. As George Colpitts notes in his book, Pemmican Empire: Food, Trade, and the Last Bison Hunts in the North American Plains, 1780-1882, the name came from the Cree word pemigan and means “he makes grease.” The grease came from bone marrow and was mixed with harder fats by Native Americans to produce traditional pemmican, sometimes referred to as sweet pemmican.

Two types of pemmican were commonly made foods. Sweet pemmican consisted of a mixture of more palatable fats, including bone marrow grease and unsaturated fats, which made it softer and more palatable than its more prolific counterpart, trade pemmican. It was prepared with care using the best meat and fat. Dried fruit was sometimes mixed into it. For instance, in the Red River Valley, the highbush cranberry, also known as the Pembina berry, would have been added.

Trade pemmican, by contrast, was a hurriedly mass-produced food made by Euro-American and Métis fur traders from whatever was most accessible. It contained more saturated fats and was thus much harder. It often contained other ingredients such as fur, bits of bone, or even bark, which inadvertently found their way into the mix during processing. Despite its rough and unappealing taste and texture, the calories packed into every pound of pemmican helped to drive the fur trade.

Fur traders first came to Pembina in the 1790s to hunt beavers. By 1804, they switched to hunting bison for meat and making pemmican to feed fur traders who operated in the far north of Canada. The Métis quickly took over the pemmican industry, dominating in the middle 19th century with their annual bison hunts at Pembina and Walhalla, then called St. Joseph. Pemmican was so important to feeding people working and living in the Red River Valley that in 1814 the Pemmican War broke out between competing fur trade companies and their allies when the governor of the British territory of Assinaboia (modern southern Manitoba and the Red River Valley) tried to forbid its export. The pemmican trade, like much of the industrial fur trade, ended when bison herds were hunted to near extinction in the late 19th century, a problem exacerbated in part by intensive bison hunts of the Métis pemmican trade.

Despite reading about pemmican in the accounts of many writers who described it in varying degrees of admiration or derision, I still didn’t know what it tasted or looked like. So I embarked on some experimental archaeology to find out. Having no easy access to bison bones, I made a version of trade pemmican, though I left out the fur and bark. I used beef fat since the butchers near me did not carry bison fat. Though bison was historically the most common meat base, pemmican can be made with the meat and fat of any animal, even wild game or fish.

I started with dried bison, which to me tasted almost flavorless but slightly gamey. Adding some beef fat, the dish tasted like fatty ground beef with only a hint of the bison, but the texture is that of a wax candle mixed with gravel. That may not sound appealing, but at almost 4,000 calories per pound, pemmican couldn’t be beat as a source of shelf-stable nutrition in the 19th century.

Two pounds of raw meat and a ½ pound of suet. The meat will reduce to a quarter of its weight when dried, leaving ½ pound of dried meat and ½ pound of suet for 1 pound of pemmican.

If you are up for an adventure and want to make your own pemmican, you’ll need only two or three ingredients:

• 2 pounds of raw meat (bison or beef), as lean as can be found
• ½ pound of suet or fat (bison or beef)
• 1 cup of finely chopped dried fruit (optional)

Begin by cutting the meat into strips as thin as possible. Cut against the grain to make the meat dry faster and easier to pulverize later. Lay the cuts of meat on a wire rack. Place the rack on a baking sheet to catch any errant fat drips.

Cut against the grain to dry the meat faster and make it easier to grind.

Set your oven to the lowest possible temperature—for me that was 175 degrees Fahrenheit. Bake the tray of meat in the oven for 10 to 12 hours. The historical method of drying meat was to hang it outside in the sun for one or two days. The hot sun and prairie winds would desiccate the meat and dry it into jerky. Smoke and fire were sometimes employed to aid the drying process. A more hygienic option is to use an oven or dehydrator.

The dried meat should be brittle and tear apart easily. Place the dried meat in a food processor or blender and use the pulse setting until the meat is mostly ground into a stringy powder; a few remaining small chunks are fine. The longer you process the meat, the finer it will become, which will improve the texture of the final product. If you are including dried fruit, now is the time to mix it thoroughly into your ground meat.

Grind as fine as you wish. Sweet pemmican would have been made with meat pounded into a literal powder. Trade pemmican would have been rougher, which is what I ended up making here.

Next render the fat in a saucepan over medium-low heat. With a metal strainer or spoon, remove any chunks that do not melt so only liquid fat is left. Pour the fat mixture over your ground meat and begin mixing it together with a spoon. Once cool enough to touch without burning your hand, begin mixing by hand to cover everything thoroughly in fat. It is best to wear gloves while mixing. After mixing, but before the fat has set, you may choose to pour your pemmican into a muffin tin or other shaped dish. Let the mixture rest until it has fully hardened.

Pemmican when kept dry has a shelf life measured not in months or years but in decades, though added fruit will shorten it. Historically, pemmican was stored in bags made of bison hide with the seams sewn with rawhide and coated in tallow to keep air and moisture out. A freezer bag or plastic container will suffice to store your pemmican. You may choose to refrigerate your pemmican, but it is not necessary. I made a bag from rabbit fur purchased at the Pembina State Museum store, and my pemmican has kept without refrigeration for over a year. The pemmican is still gritty and a bit unpleasant to my taste buds but completely edible and should remain so for many years.

For added flare, I bought a rabbit fur and sewed it into a pocket to more authentically store my pemmican. You may prefer a plastic freezer bag.

Spring has sprung, and we’ve been busy at the Pembina State Museum. Besides the usual spring cleaning, we are renovating spaces and preparing for spring and summer programs. This summer season promises to be an exciting one as we focus on an expanded schedule for Gingras Days in conjunction with Walhalla’s 175th celebration and on developing new programs that will be available at the museum.

We’ve already finished one of our renovation projects, updating the restrooms, and visitors can enjoy the improved bathrooms when they visit. Since the museum was first built in 1996, the restrooms had been a boring sea of beige. But now they are bright and colorful and so much more pleasant. The new design was inspired by the Hudson’s Bay Point Blanket with its four colored stripes of green, red, yellow, and indigo, an iconic part of the northern Plains fur trade.

This capote at the Pembina State Museum, which was made from a Hudson’s Bay Company Point Blanket, is part of our “Hands on History” display and helped inspire the restroom revamp.

We replaced the stalls, painted the ceiling, and installed new lighting. The lighting was installed first, and that improvement alone was stunning. Once the color was added and the space steam-cleaned by the contractors, the restrooms felt completely new. These pictures show the dramatic nature of the change.

The men’s room before, top, and after the renovation.

With the bathroom project complete, our attention now turns to program and event planning. “Arrows and Atlatls,” a pre-historic hunting program, is slated for introduction later this year. Atlatls, for the uninitiated, are spear throwers. The word “atlatl” derives from the Nahuatl (or Aztec) word for this ancient hunting device, found world-wide during Neolithic times. It was gradually replaced on the northern Plains by bows and arrows, with the bow appearing around A.D. 600. The atlatl had been in use for many millennia, but the bow was around for less than one millennium before Europeans introduced muskets. While visitors to the Pembina State Museum can try out our atlatl at any time weather permitting, “Arrows and Atlatls” will provide an in-depth experience for students and visitors.

Our atlatl, soon to be joined by others, is always available for visitors to try out. Just ask for a team member at the front desk to help you get started.

The objective of “Arrows and Atlatls” is to show students the advantages and disadvantages of pre-contact hunting technologies and to let them try their hand at using the tools themselves. This summer we will have scheduled atlatl demonstrations, where visitors can also participate. A few large animal targets will be available as well. Be on the lookout for a bear or bison decoy lurking around the museum.

The big event of the summer, though, is going to be the Gingras Days at the Gingras Trading Post State Historic Site near Walhalla. We are working with the Walhalla Area Chamber of Commerce to plan an amazing two-day event to coincide with the city’s 175th celebration. This will take place on July 1-2 and will include live music, vendors, and other programs.

Ryan Keplin, also known as “Fiddling Lefty,” will perform in the Walhalla parade on the morning of July 1 and then take his show over to the Gingras Trading Post for an afternoon performance of live music and folk tales. There’s no charge for admittance and anyone interested in Métis fiddle music is encouraged to attend. Vendors will also be on-site. Regional craftspeople will be on-hand selling various souvenirs and gifts.

On July 2, the Gingras site will once again be open with activities available all day. We will have “Games of Pembina’s Past” available for people to play both days of the celebration. These include grace hoops, hoop-and-stick, and trundling hoops. (Suffice to say, a lot of hoops are involved!) The house and trading post will be open both days for tours. The storeroom of the trading post will be set up with crafts on July 2. Bring the family and make your own popsicle stick ox cart. The “Red River Rendezvous” hands-on activity will also be set up in the trading room with new features representing life during the fur trade era of the early 1800s in the Red River Valley. Visitors will have the opportunity to try on a capote, a top hat, and snowshoes, and even set a trap with help from staff.

The Gingras trading room during last year’s Gingras Days. This year’s celebration promises to be even better.

These are just the plans solidified so far. More is still in the works, including improved shelving for on-site storage and the much more exciting, and relevant for visitors, improvements and programs planned for the updated conference room. The summer season promises to be very busy and very exciting!

In a quiet corner of Walhalla, tucked among some trees on the south end of town just beyond the local Lutheran church, sits an old log cabin. This structure, known as the Kittson cabin, is about 170 years old, and it looks like it. The walls are slouching outwards, the roof is sagging, and the front door is so bowed it appears it may be the only thing still holding the cabin up. Thankfully, the site will soon become louder as workers begin the process of dismantling the cabin to examine the logs and reclaim what they can in preparation for its reconstruction next year.

The Kittson cabin will soon be restored to a like-new state while preserving as much of the original material as possible.

A lot has been happening at the state’s historic sites in Walhalla the past few years, though it may not seem like it at first glance. At the Gingras Trading Post State Historic Site and now at the Walhalla State Historic Site, where the aforementioned Kittson cabin stands, restoration work has been progressing steadily. Several rotten logs and the roof shakes at the Gingras Trading Post were replaced in 2020. The following year the Gingras house had its roof replaced with fresh cedar shingles. In early September work began to replace the timber siding and windowsills of the house. The next step in the long process of restoring these sites is the dismantling, examination, and reconstruction of the Kittson cabin, which is set to begin in the coming weeks.

In 2020, the Gingras Trading Post underwent restoration work. Courtesy Steve Martens

The Gingras house with a new set of cedar shingles after their installation in late 2021. A year later, the shingles have weathered to a light gray color and look as if they have always been there.

Kobiela Brothers Construction is at work restoring rotten and weather-damaged wooden siding on the Gingras house. With the siding removed, the tenon-and-groove log construction elements are visible. Observe the newer looking logs from the 1974 reconstruction. The siding has done its job in preserving the covered material.

But what makes these cabins so important compared to others in the area? These cabins are among the last remaining buildings from the fur trade era in northeastern North Dakota representative of Red River Frame, a construction style unique to this region. Only four of these buildings still exist. They are the Kittson cabin, soon to be rebuilt, the Gingras Trading Post and house, and the Dease-Martineau House. All of these buildings can be found in Pembina County, located just a few miles from each other.

Red River Frame style is a synthesis of different architectural elements developed by the Métis, a culture born from the descendants of fur traders and their Native wives. Author and archaeologist David Burley, who has studied the origins and expressions of Métis culture in depth, noted in a 2000 Historical Archaeology article that “the ethnogenesis of Métis peoples ... involved a creolizing process in which cultural traits from many different groups were adopted. An analysis of Métis vernacular log architecture ... illustrates this clearly with individual building components derived from a number of different sources.”

Immediately noticeable about this style is that the exterior is built to maintain a level of symmetry. This element is taken from Georgian architecture, which was popular from 1714 to 1830, during the reigns of the British Kings George I, George II, George III, and George IV.

The side of the Gingras Trading Post that leads into the storage area displays characteristic Georgian symmetry.

Underneath the Georgian facade, Red River Frame combines elements of different log cabin construction, including both dovetailed corners and tenon-and-groove assembly around windows and doors. The French called these styles pièce-sur-pièce and pièce-sur-sole, respectively. French influences are strong in Métis culture, and their architecture is no exception.

At the corners of the Dease-Martineau House, you can see how the dovetailed notches of the pièce-sur-pièce style are slanted in two directions, which prevents the logs from slipping in any direction but toward each other, effectively locking the structure together and ensuring its stability. The dollar is included for scale purposes. Courtesy Steve Martens

Another unique characteristic of this style is found in the way windows, doors, and additions are made to fit Red River Frame buildings. Upright beams are attached to horizontal logs with the use of wooden pegs or are set directly into the earth. Slots are cut along the length of the upright beams. Tenons are cut into the ends of the horizontal logs, which are fitted into these slots. This feature is adapted from the pièce-sure-sole style, which had the benefit of allowing buildings to be constructed with few, if any, iron nails. Such buildings could also be disassembled and reassembled with relative ease, much like the Métis’ other famous wooden construction: the Red River ox cart.

This circa 1890 image of the Kittson Trading Post, then located in central Walhalla, shows the upright beams with horizontal logs stacked in between. Each of these horizontal logs has a narrow tenon that is fitted into the uprights. The Kittson cabin stands behind and to the right of the fallen structure in the foreground. SHSND SA C1602-00001

This amalgam of different construction methods developed in the 19th century along the Red River of the North is found nowhere else in the United States, which makes the preservation of these cabins important to local, regional, and state heritage. As such, the restoration process will be meticulous. Every piece of wood and every detail of the design will be recorded as the work progresses. When the Gingras site was restored in 1974, the buildings were first disassembled, and each design aspect as well as the state of the existing material was recorded. Then, new material was acquired, and the building was reassembled on the original location.

In this interior view of the Gingras house, the walls display the same tenon-and-groove construction as the Kittson Trading Post. Notice the original logs on display from the 1974 restoration of the house.

The Gingras house in 1960. It had been abandoned and left to deteriorate. The house was restored after it became a state historic site in 1974. SHSND SA 00101-00062

The same careful process will begin this month at Walhalla State Historic Site, where the Kittson cabin will soon be disassembled and its parts put into storage. The site will stand empty for the winter as the old material is assessed and salvaged and new materials are acquired. In spring 2023, the cabin will be reassembled at the same location with new materials to replace whatever cannot be recovered. Kobiela Brothers, the contractors responsible for the restoration, expect the project to be completed by the end of June 2023. When the dust of construction settles, a cabin that is 170 years old will have been preserved for another century so that people can study and enjoy this unique piece of history.

There is a lot to consider when developing a new program at a state museum. Who is it for? What is it meant to teach? How will that message be conveyed? Where will the program take place? Why is this topic important? On top of all that you must consider what resources are available and what safety guidelines need to be followed. Ultimately, what you want most is for participants to be engaged and eager to learn. In my experience participants seem the most engaged when they are having fun. And what better way to accomplish this than with games?

I am currently working on a program called “Games from Pembina’s Past,” which includes a short virtual element for classroom use and a longer element that will allow visitors to the Pembina State Museum to play various games from the different peoples that settled at one time or another in the region, including the Anishinaabe, Dakota, Métis, Scots-Irish, Icelandic, and others. The program is in the early stages of development. We’re gratefully receiving tribal input regarding the Indigenous games that are included to ensure these are portrayed appropriately and respectfully. Stewart Culin’s “Games of the North American Indians” has also been helpful to my research. The book provides key details such as the Indigenous names for games, designs for the game pieces, and rules for play.

The first game I worked on was hoop and stick. According to Culin, the Chippewa of the Turtle Mountains called it tititipanatuwanagi. It was played by two competitors, one of whom rolled a small hoop ahead of themselves while running. The two competitors would throw their sticks, which had forked ends or were decorated with feathers, at the webbing woven around the hoop. Points were awarded based on where the stick struck in the webbing, much like darts. No points were awarded if the stick passed completely through the hoop.

Students visiting Fort Mandan State Historic Site play a version of hoop and stick. We hope to have students playing the game here at the Pembina State Museum very soon.

The difficulty of the game can be adjusted by changing the size of the hoop. Historically, hoops have ranged from two inches up to two feet in diameter. So far, I’ve made one 12-inch hoop for the museum based on a 1903 artifact from the Turtle Mountain Band of Chippewa Indians. The original is currently held by the American Museum of Natural History in New York City. In the coming weeks, I plan on making a few more hoops of varying sizes.

Pictured here is a hoop and stick set I made for the interpretive program using an embroidery hoop woven with artificial sinew to create the web pattern. The sticks are simple painted wooden dowels, with a feather attached to the end with more artificial sinew.

Culin groups different North American Indigenous games into broad categories, which prompted me to compare Indigenous games with games played by European settlers that fit into the same categories. I mentioned that hoop and stick shares some similarities to darts. Other comparisons can also be made. One that I make in the virtual element of the program is to compare a category of game played on an icy track that Culin “included under the general name of snow-snake” (which is also the name of the game itself) to the sport of curling.

Snow snake was played by almost every tribe in the colder climates of North America. The game was played with long, slender pieces of wood carved with heads resembling snakes. Another similar game that Culin includes under the umbrella category of “snow-snake” is ice gliders, also called bone sliders by Culin. Ice gliders were made with animal ribs and decorated with feathers. Snow snakes and ice gliders are slid with an underhand motion along an icy track, which has been prepared beforehand. The Chippewa often built these tracks by dragging a log through the snow and sprinkling the resulting trough with water to create an icy playing surface. Points are awarded to the player whose snow snake travels the farthest in each round.

Culin classifies snow snake as part of a category of games in which game pieces are “hurled along snow or ice.” In the case of snow snake, the pieces are often similar to darts or javelins. This type of game has obvious comparisons to curling, a team game played by sliding a large stone down an icy track toward a target area. I hope to help bridge a cultural divide for students by comparing something familiar, like curling, to something that isn’t, like snow snake or the ice glider game.

A set of ice gliders, or bone sliders, made by the staff of the Lewis and Clark Interpretive Center.

More familiar to many North Dakota students than curling (and immediately recognizable to the Scottish settlers who built Fort Daer in Pembina in 1812) would be field or floor hockey, also known as shinny. Shinny refers to any game of field hockey where players use curved sticks to bat a ball through goalposts. The name shinny comes from an older Scottish Gaelic word, shinty, which is a game related to hurling and is of prehistoric Celtic (Irish/Scottish) origin.

European and Indigenous field hockey are uncannily similar, which may be why the Indigenous game bares the European name in Culin’s book. The Assiniboine name for the game is tah-cap-see-chah. Shinny was a common tribal game throughout North America. During the game, a buckskin or wooden ball is batted about with curved sticks by two opposing teams. According to Culin, the buckskin ball, weighted with clay or filled with cloth scraps, is the most common ball used by Plains tribes. Players are prohibited from holding the ball but in some versions of the game rules permit the swatting or passing of the ball with the hand. The object of the game is to pass the ball through a goal, usually a pair of stakes set at either end of a flat playing field.

Currently visitors to the Pembina State Museum can play hoop and stick, the hand (or stick) game, a type of guessing game, which we purchased from Turtle Mountain Band of Chippewa Indian artists, and double ball, another field sport like shinny which involves passing two balls bound by hide or string back and forth using sticks. Like shinny, the goal of double ball is to get the ball to a goal at either end of a playing field. We also have a few settler games available including hoop trundling, which involves rolling a hoop along with a stick. (Children would often race each other as they rolled the hoops.) Visitors can also try their hand at jacks and marbles, which though sometimes played today has waned in popularity. Research continues into what other types of games were played in the region both by Indigenous people and those of European origin. While we don’t have the facilities to include curling among our offerings, we do intend to add field hockey in the very near future.

This handcrafted stick game set came from the Turtle Mountain Band of Chippewa Indians and is available for visitors to play at the Pembina State Museum. In this guessing game, one team of players hides both black and white pieces in their hands. The other team must guess which hands hold the black pieces. Score is kept by passing sticks between the teams until one team wins all the sticks.

While many of the European games like curling, field hockey, and darts are still played today, their Indigenous counterparts have been mostly forgotten over the past centuries as tribes were expected to adapt to Western culture. But there are many efforts to revive these games. One example is the Ojibwe Winter Games held annually since 2012 at Camp Nawakwa near Lac du Flambeau in Wisconsin. The games were started to educate students about the history of Native sports. Snow snake, hoop and stick, atlatl throwing, and many more Indigenous sports are played by school students during these winter games. In some small way, I, too, hope to spark interest in Indigenous games at Pembina State Museum through the development of our new program. After all, sports and games are universal pastimes that unite people around the world.

The common perception of the fur trade frontier from the 18th century to the mid-19th century may be one of a vast and harsh wilderness, where traders and indigenous people had to constantly battle the elements. In reality, the people who participated in the fur trade had at their disposal many of the comforts of a growing global trade network. The traders were responsible for exporting the furs used to make hats and fine clothing to the European market as well as importing luxuries from foreign markets to the prairie to exchange for those furs. Indigenous people participated in this economy by demanding and purchasing goods of the highest quality in exchange for the furs they acquired. Some of these items are on exhibit at the Pembina State Museum. There are original pipes, metal utensils and dishes, as well as shards of original stoneware and china on display. These items tell a tale of globe-spanning importance.

This 15-inch, long-stemmed clay pipe at Pembina State Museum is an example of a type of pipe popular from the late 17th century to the late 19th century. SHSND 85.36.18

One of the most popular luxuries was tobacco. Traded by both French voyageurs and the British Hudson’s Bay Company, tobacco was a highly demanded consumable commodity. An especially prized variety was Brazilian tobacco, which the Hudson’s Bay Co. imported from Portugal. Because of the Navigation Acts, which required all trade to be routed through London, the cost of foreign tobacco was high, as much as three times the cost of British tobacco. The Hudson’s Bay Co. sought to reduce the cost of shipping tobacco to Rupert’s Land, which encompassed all the land that drained into Hudson’s Bay, including Pembina and the Red River Valley. They accomplished this by importing tobacco from Virginia, then an English colony. However, they quickly discovered that their Native customers had developed a taste for Brazilian tobacco while trading with the French and would not buy their inferior product. To keep their customers happy, the Hudson’s Bay Co. switched back to importing the Brazilian variety at a premium price and even purchased tobacco from French and Dutch merchants in Europe when no other supply could be found.

Along with the tobacco, pipes, like the one in the museum gallery pictured above, were a common trade good. These clay pipes were manufactured in England and shipped in mass quantities to North America, not just to Rupert’s Land but to the Thirteen Colonies as well. These pipes were considered disposable, with the stem broken off after each use until only a stub remained. Both long and short-stemmed pipes were common. In Europe long-stemmed pipes were used by the upper class while workers preferred short-stemmed pipes which were easier to grip between their teeth, leaving their hands available for work. In Rupert’s Land the long-stemmed pipe was more common and used recreationally. By the mid-19th century, pipe stems could range from 18-to-24 inches long.

Tobacco was shipped in many forms. Tobacco carrots, the pieces wrapped in cloth and twine, were preferred for their ease of packing and the protection they provided against the elements on long canoe voyages. These examples pictured above are reproductions that visitors may interact with when they visit the Pembina State Museum.

Ceramics were another luxury imported by the Hudson’s Bay Co. in large quantities. At first these products were meant to be used by company employees at the trading posts and were not for exchange. But as the Métis, indigenous people descended from European fur traders and their Native wives, and other independent traders established themselves, the demand for these products increased. Primarily of English origin, by the 19th century, ceramics were popular with a rising middle class seeking ways to display its wealth to others. To satisfy demand, the Hudson’s Bay Co. would import as many as 3,600 pieces of pottery in a year from a single supplier in England. According to its shipping manifests, the most popular color was Royal Saxon blue. The patterns printed in this color were inspired by the oriental patterns of the fine china Europeans had imported since the late 15th century. European potters would subsequently incorporate other colors and patterns inspired by Italian Renaissance paintings and English flora.

Ceramics and other fine pottery were a key luxury imported by the Hudson’s Bay Company. These replicas are part of the new “Red River Rendezvous” interpretive program which explores the process of exchange and material culture of the fur trade era, circa 1800.

In addition to fine pottery, trading companies also imported glass, stoneware, and metal dishes of pewter and tin. Other luxuries imported by the Hudson’s Bay Co. included ivory in the form of combs, alcohol, and sugar. Brandy was the preferred beverage of choice during the 18th century. The Hudson’s Bay Co. also imported rum from the Caribbean. They imported molasses from the Caribbean to make rum locally in Rupert’s Land as well, though rum was never as profitable as brandy. Sugar was not usually traded for furs but rather imported by the company from the Caribbean to keep its employees happy in their frontier posts.

These broken bits on display in the Pembina State Museum were once valuable global commodities. The blue pieces are examples of the Royal Saxon blue color that was popular with Hudson’s Bay Company employees. Also shown here are remnants of pipe stems, glass beads and bottles, buttons, and metal utensils. SHSND 90.288.1-90.288.92

Today what remains of the network of trade that linked many different people together in the 18th and 19th centuries are broken pieces of items discarded long ago. These pieces, found at trading sites like Fort Pembina built by the confluence of the Red and Pembina rivers in 1801 or at the Gingras or Kittson trading posts constructed near St. Joseph’s (modern Walhalla) in the 1840s, represent what their owners likely would have considered to be garbage. Still, an interpreter can use these items to shed light on the nature of a globally linked economy and how local people participated in and influenced that economy. Despite its frontier location, Pembina and the rest of what would become northeast North Dakota represented a key spoke in the wheel of global trade.

When I started work as the Pembina State Museum’s outreach coordinator in February, one of the first tasks I was assigned was to develop a roving interpretive program intended to teach school students and museum visitors about the fur trade and how the business of trading furs was conducted.

This program would take the form of a fur trading game with players assigned to either a fur trade company team or a fur trading family team. The company teams will attempt to gain furs in exchange for their goods while the family teams will have to assemble a list of items purchased from the companies to complete certain tasks with their limited furs. Among other things, players will learn how goods were exchanged on credit, how trade companies kept records, how the hunting season was conducted, and get a chance to interact with replicas of the fur trade’s material culture.

As a regular Dungeon Master who likes to make his own games, I was excited to take on the project. I had to resist the urge to break out my Dungeons & Dragons (D&D) rulebooks. D&D character creation sessions alone can run more than three hours, and our fur trade game is meant to be shorter, capable of fitting into a 1 1/2-hour time slot. But I could still draw on my experience building fun and immersive campaigns for my D&D players while developing a fun and immersive interpretive experience to be taken to classrooms and for visitors to our museum.

Immersion is key to a fun experience. To aid immersion at home I often employ props and costumes to help my D&D players visualize something. The fur trade game is like that but taken to the next level. Everything short of hunting beavers will be represented by some sort of prop, some we already have, and others we are in the process of either purchasing or making ourselves. There have been a few challenges along the way to make our ambitions a reality.

Scope is one challenge. While I would love to purchase a fully stocked trading post like at Fort Garry in Winnipeg, space, budget, and our ability to transport the game won’t allow it. Instead, I have to temper my ambitions and, in some cases, stretch less into more. We have purchased two musket flints, but two single flints do not make for a stocked shelf. So the flints will be part of an interactive display while the shelves (to be built) will be stocked with props representing the items. For gun flints, a pile of small rocks wrapped in brown paper and twine will do.

It would be nice to have shelves as well stocked as these at Fort Garry, but we have neither the space to store nor the ability to transport so much material for a roving interpretive game.

Another problem we often run into is historical accuracy. Perfect replicas of everything, like my fully stocked shelves, would be nice but aren’t always possible. We have several small pieces of printed cotton fabric. This is meant to represent calico cloth. The prints aren’t accurate, but they don’t have to be. Like props for a game of D&D, they’re meant to help players visualize something. In the case of our “calico” cloth, it’s intended to help our players visualize the wide variety of colors and patterns that were available at fur trading posts.

Purchasing large volumes of authentic calico or gun flints is unrealistic. Instead we have to find creative ways to represent these items in bulk. For instance, we’ll wrap the fabric pictured here around foam cores to give the appearance of large bolts of cloth.

Anachronisms are unavoidable when developing certain props. To aid immersion I often use handwritten notes and letters. I intend to use them for this game as well. While not everyone who participated in the fur trade was literate, and many spoke languages such as French or Michif (the language of the Métis), our game’s participants are literate, and they overwhelmingly speak English. I will not be giving them instruction letters in other languages nor will I use period-appropriate cursive, which can be illegible to modern readers. Instead, I’ll use a cursive-like font for easier legibility. By allowing some inauthentic touches, we save on limited time.

Handwritten notes like these will add a touch of authenticity while communicating game objectives to players. They are also fun for me to make.

There’s still a lot of work to do before the game is ready for a trial run. There are certainly more challenges that await me, but I hope when the game is finished that the players have as much fun playing it as I have had making it. Hopefully, they’ll learn a thing or two as well—I know I have!