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By DOUG IRVING
CENTRAL POINT Smoke from an oak fire whips through the hide tent. A pair of riflemen aim their 4-foot flintlocks and fire across the lake. A man in buckskins and a skunk cap steps into the trading post.
Then the Arctic Express starts up at the carnival next door, and the screams from its riders kind of kill the scene.
That doesn't matter to the dozen people who have turned a corner of the Jackson County Fair into a 19th-century fur trappers' camp. This plot of dusty ground suits the Little Butte Mountain Men just fine.
"We try to re-enact the old ways and have fun," explains Phil Hofmann, 46. "(Some people) complain about sleeping on the ground. But it's a kick."
Hofmann, in real life a self-employed woodworker, is spending the fair as a fur-trading mountain man. He's traded blue jeans and baseball caps for breeches and a hat he made from skunk fur.
He's been a Little Butte Mountain Man for 12 years, but this is the group's first year at a fair. The group usually assembles at mountain man gatherings called rendezvous throughout the region.
The group's purpose is to re-create a way of life that died when silk hats appeared on the fashion scene in the 1840s and value of beaver pelts plummetted. Fur trapping hasn't been a viable career since other fashions became the rage, says Chuck Cobun, a retired mechanic and the mountain men's trader.
The Little Butte Mountain Men the group includes women and children, too memorialize the great American frontiersman and woman, says Gale Trapp, official spokesman for the mountain men.
"It grew out of the fur trapper's ability to go wherever he wanted," Trapp explains. "He epitomized the freedom of a man in the West. The sky was his roof."
That sky includes roller coasters and Ferris wheels at the Great Big Ol' Fair camp. But the small collection of hide lodges and tents and trading posts seems ages removed from the other attractions.
"I thought it was a little unusual," says fairgoer Ed Lucero, 49, of Medford. "That's what drew me over here. It's kind of interesting to see all this."
Mountain Man Dave Klein teaches Teri Walker, of Central Point, and her two young children how to throw a tomahawk. Walker swings the small axe over her head and flings it toward a wooden wheel in one motion. It thuds into the wood near the center.
"I stuck it!" she says to her oldest son, 4-year-old Dathon. "Now you try it! That was pretty cool."
Meanwhile, Hofmann stirs the kettle of chili simmering over an open fire. He has been working on it for four hours, but refuses to give the ingredients: "Grandma would slit my throat."
Cobun and his wife, Rose, walk around their trading tent and explain the items for sale to 20th-century folks. Hand-made flint knives. Linen and hemp threads. Beads and earrings. All historically accurate and made by hand.
And their bedroom behind the store also stays true to history, with a hand-built wooden cabinet, a candle lantern and a large, wooden bed.
"Comfortable bed," Chuck says. "I'll go home and sleep on my other bed and my back'll start hurting. This sleeps good."
Everything about the camp is relaxing and calm, Rose adds. It holds onto its rustic charm and old-fashioned pace, even with the screams of the carnival just beyond the gate.
"No phones," she explains. "No television. You just go by the sun. Life is different."
The Little Butte Mountain Men group was founded for that reason, Trapp says. Life was different back when America was young and the West was wild.
The nation can't forget that, he says. Life has changed quite a bit, but a country can't give up its past.
"Once you start to forget your own beginnings as a country, your civilization starts to slide," he says. "We're trying not to forget our beginnings."
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