I have always been fascinated by history. Who are we; how did we get here; what mistakes did we make?

 

From learning about knights in armor to cowboys, I read everything I could get my hands on. After watching Gettysburg, I became fascinated by the American Civil War and quickly shifted my focus. When my family moved to southeast Wyoming, there wasn’t much to do with the Civil War directly, but when I visited Fort Laramie National Historic Site, I got to meet historical interpreters dressed in period clothing talking to visitors. I knew immediately that was what I wanted to do one day.

 

As I would come to learn, there wasn’t a direct Civil War connection, but there was a far more fascinating tapestry woven before me, and I had but grasped the first thread. Soon my focus spread into the Indian Wars and the westward expansion- a blending of peoples, cultures, ideologies, and material culture. As luck would have it, I eventually got my first job as a park guide for the National Park Service there. I spent many fond summers and special events dressing in historical clothing and talking with visitors, leading tours of the site, and doing various demonstrations for park guests.

 

I participated in my first reenactments back east while continuing to do programs for the public but dabbled in modeling for Western artists. As the years passed, my skills and interests grew to include not only the Civil and Indian Wars, but the Spanish-American and First World War, but also the lives of cowboys, miners in the various gold rushes, frontier scouts, fur traders in the Rocky Mountains, native peoples fighting to keep their ways of life, homesteaders and sheepherders, townsfolk bustling across the west, and the beginning management of America’s first national park. I took delight in creating the most accurate impressions based on my historical research from primary documents.

 

As funding and time allowed, I created a wardrobe to outfit the numerous impressions and time periods that helped tell the stories of people that many forgot or never learned about. It is my goal to experience as much as I can through experimental archaeology and historical reenactment to flush out the stories that I have read and researched. With this personal experience, I can pair it with the original stories to better educate the public about our past through richer interpretive programming. May the stories be told for their history and knowledge, not simply a date in a book.