Outdoor skills and tools of the fur trade celebrated at Lake City Shooting Range
Kansas City, Mo. –
Trading furs, camp fire cooking, and shooting black powder rifles are skills alive
and well in these modern times. But those skills had a special heyday in the
early 1800s fur trade era. People who still practice those skills will offer
displays and demonstrations at the fifth annual Lake City Rendezvous 10 a.m. to
2 p.m. on Saturday, April 7. This free event is for all ages at the Missouri
Department of Conservation’s (MDC) Lake City Shooting Range, 28505 E. Truman
Road, Buckner, Mo.
The Rendezvous
will feature black powder shooters, fur pelt displays, blacksmith
demonstrations, campfire cooking and many more outdoor and camping skills.
Traders will offer hand-crafted goods to visitors. Re-enactors in period dress
and gear will be present and welcoming visitors to their trapper camps, answering questions about gear and skills.
Visitors will be able to try BB gun and archery target shooting.
A root beer
stand will offer refreshment. Children (and grownups too) can reap sweets from
a “candy cannon” that will be fired every hour on the hour.
The Kansas City
area and towns such as Independence have strong ties to the fur trade era of
the late 1700s and early 1800s. Native American and French trappers harvested
beaver fur and other pelts in the area. Explorer and bureaucrat William Clark established
Fort Osage in eastern Jackson County to trade goods for fur with the Osage
tribe. The area was an outfitting and stopover point for trappers and traders
using the Missouri River to venture onto the prairies and into the Rocky
Mountains. Famous mountain man Jim Bridger spent his elder years in Kansas City
and is buried in Independence.
MDC’s Lake City
Rendezvous will celebrate the nature craft, ingenuity, and artistry found when
Jackson County and western Missouri were on the American frontier. For more
information, call 816-249-3194 or visit http://mdc.mo.gov/lakecity.
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