Blast from the Past: a Visit to The History Museum

Imagine: You're a voyageur, canoeing through the wilderness of Michigan, carrying your trade goods and maybe a few passengers. It's beautiful, challenging, possibly deadly, and doesn't have the best pay, but there's nothing else you'd rather be doing. 

Our very own voyageurs.

This is the story for most voyageurs in the American fur trade, and the Fort St. Joseph Archaeological Project students know this because we were fortunate enough to get a special “behind the scenes” tour of the Fur Trade exhibit at the History Museum in South Bend, Indiana. My name is Miro, and I’m a student in the FSJAP from Albion College. In our tour of the museum, we got to see the Fort St Joseph exhibit, an exhibit about the history of the Fort St Joseph river valley, and we got to see a large amount of artifacts from the museum’s Fort St Joseph archives that are not currently being shown in the museum (not due to the artifact’s importance, simply due to lack of space or context). We first explored the artifacts that were in the archives, and discussed them at great length. All of these artifacts were found right where we are excavating now: What does that mean for our excavations?

Examining artifacts previously found at the Fort St. Joseph site.

  Hopefully, something awesome. We got to examine artifacts like scissors, knives, cutlery, beads made of glass and bone, kettle pieces and accessories, gun parts, and much more. It was truly fascinating to see such a large array of amazing artifacts in one place all from where we were digging, and it made the idea of our excavations even more exciting, because there is the chance that we will also find really amazing stuff! It was also amazing from the sheer quantity of technology and creativity that went into making all of the objects we were observing. Our theme this year for the field school is technology, and we all were asked questions about our observations, like what different artifacts were made out of, or what they were used for, and how that usage may have evolved. For a lot of the artifacts, the usage was so ingenious that the only thing that really changed in their creation was the materials they were made of. For other artifacts, like the gun parts, the overall concept was kept, in example, the lighting of the gunpowder, but the means by which this was completed changed, from gunflints being used to spark gunpowder to a hammer being used to propel and shoot a bullet.

 After we were done marveling at the sheer number and quality of the artifacts we had just seen, it was on to the Fort St Joseph exhibit. The Fort St Joseph exhibit is a collection of hallways with bright informational posters lining the walls, and one large display case with everything from historically accurate clothing to taxidermied animals to examples of letters from the site. The posters on the walls were easily the most interesting part, and the most prevalent part. Although they didn’t have any examples of artifacts, they had lots of pictures, quotes, and maps, which were really helpful in understanding the context and feeling of the period.  I personally learned a lot of details of events that I have only studied to some extent but never had a lot of context to accompany it. There was information about both the history of the Fort, but also information about the Project and the things we are doing in order to discover more about the Fort.

The exhibit about the history of the St Joseph River valley was much more in depth and all-encompassing than just the Fort exhibit alone. It had history from mastodons to modern technology there, and it was all extremely fascinating. I never realized how influential the St. Joseph river valley was to the history of Michigan and the Midwest. Many different treaties and important laws were signed in the area, and the museum had a vast collection of artifacts from many different eras that was truly astounding. I would definitely like to go back to the museum and explore around more! To check out the museum’s website, go to https://historymuseumsb.org/.