It is not quite acting when the re-enactors are visible at Fort Vancouver. It can be almost like channeling, and it is based on both knowledge of history and deep appreciation for the old ways. Fort Vancouver is a 19th Century fur trading post created by the Hudson’s Bay Company. It uses volunteer re-enactors to give visitors a feeling they are there in the 1800s.

Matt Dalimato and Reggie Coats are among the hundreds of volunteers a year that keep the fort running and history alive.

Fort Vancouver Blacksmith Matt Lantern
Matt Dalimato using authentic tools while blacksmithing during a Lantern Tour. Photo credit: National Park Services

Dalimato was told by both his father and his doctors at the veterans’ administration hospital that he needed a hobby. His father had been a knife maker, so Dalimato had a beginning appreciation for all things metal. When he heard that Fort Vancouver had a functioning blacksmith shop, he was intrigued. He visited the site and found a plethora of tools like he had never seen in one place before.  He was determined to get involved.   He was put under the guidance of a mentor, and now he has been volunteering at the fort for four years, two or three days a week, as a blacksmith.

“I learned a lot about local history and about fort archeology,” Dalimato said. Some of what they make in the shop is taken from the artifacts they find in the archeological digs at the fort. “We can recreate many of the objects they used there.”

He is using a lot of basic smithing skills, too, such as sensing the temperature of the metal in the forge by its color and learning it is not the size of the hammer that counts in smithing, “Steel at 2,000 degrees moves just like clay,” Dalimato said.

Still, becoming an expert blacksmith, or reaching master level, can take a lifetime of working iron. After four years and two mentors Dalimato is still learning and considers himself still at an apprentice or beginning journeyman level.

Dalimato explained that “blacksmith” refers to a craftsman who works with the “black” metals such as wrought iron, and that the profession was carefully controlled by a guild in England back in the Hudson’s Bay Company hey-day.  The fort originally had four classically trained black smiths, working sun up to sun down six days a week, and probably three to five “middlemen” or laborers employed under them. As expert as they were, they were not allowed to use the professional guild markings on their products.

At that time the bituminous coal, iron and steel were brought over on boats from England by the Hudson’s Bay Company, and those ships returned with beaver pelts and other goods from the local area. These are the details that Dalimato enjoys learning along with new techniques every year.

Fort Vancouver
Fort Vancouver Chief Factor’s House by Candlelight. Photo credit: National Park Services

At Campfires & Candlelight in September each year and the Lantern Tours that run October through February, visitors walk through the fort and can see the re-enactors moving about their work areas as their predecessors might have done in the early 1800s.

Dalimato is getting used to being watched by visitors.  “People ask modern questions. That’s really hard because we have to know both the past and the present,” he said.

During these and other events a tour group might be led by Reggie Coats.

“I’m a costumed living history interpreter,” Coats said.  He represents a French Canadian voyageur (boatman) and an 1845 gentleman’s clerk. In period dress he provides third person narration as the groups move from building to building.

Fort Vancouver
Reggie Coats dressed as a gentleman clerk from 1845. Photo credit: Jase Clow

Coats was once a high school English teacher living and working in Hawaii.  He came to Vancouver, looking it over as a community to retire in.  He was especially excited to find the fort.  “It’s unusual to have a national park in your back yard in an urban setting,” Coats said of Fort Vancouver.

He knew he had found home when he discovered that one third of the original skilled workmen at the fort had been recruited by the Hudson’s Bay Company from Hawaii.

Coats wanted to be involved and started volunteering answering phones for the fort.  He took it upon himself to use the multiple libraries there and talking with volunteers to build his knowledge of the fort and the Hudson’s Bay Company. Now, after five years of volunteering most weeks, Coats can offer interesting information about each of the buildings at the fort among other things.

“It’s my job to thread the needle, put the story in historical perspective,” Coats suggested.

Coats and Dalimato are just two of many volunteers. Many have special skills, music playing or dancing, or practical skills such as gardening, carpentry, sewing or open fire cooking.  Many, like Dalimato and Coats, learn as they go.  Coats points out that there are always openings for more volunteers. Lots of youth are involved, too, as well as senior citizens and family groups.

Campfires & Candlelight is an annual event that offers a “Timeline of History.”  Visitors walk along the timeline and see camps with costumed reenactors portraying different time periods from the site’s history, including World War II, World War I, the Indian Wars, the Civil War, the Oregon Trail and the Fort Vancouver village. Meanwhile inside the reconstructed fort, re-enactors portray a specific night in history, re-living dramatic moments from the perspective of those working the fort during the event.

The Lantern Tour offers a chance to see the fort at night by hand-held lanterns with a tour conducted by a park ranger through the key buildings of the fort including the counting house, fur store, chief factor’s house, kitchen, and bake house.

“My joy is just getting people excited about the past, waking the past and making history come to life,” Coats finished with a smile.

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