The Forgotten Battle
Reenacting is a deliberate effort to build the next generation of history buffs who might otherwise never encounter a battle that the textbooks largely skipped, let alone the Delaware, Shawnee, Mingo, and Wyandot warriors, and the Seneca-Mingo chief who led them and who fought just as hard to keep it from being fought at all.
There’s a reason a place such as Bushy Run doesn’t just teach history through placards and glass cases and instead teaches it through people willing to sweat through wool regimentals in the August heat, load a flintlock the way it was loaded in 1763, and stand in the clearing where men once fought hand-to-hand for their lives.
Reenactors are living historians, not hobbyists playing dress-up. They translate a paragraph in a textbook into the weight of a haversack, the smell of black powder, the sound of a company wheeling on command. They cannot make the past painless, and they don’t try to.
What they do is make it real enough that a child standing at the tree line can feel, if only for an afternoon, just what it meant to wait through a sleepless night behind a wall of flour sacks.
That is what keeps a battle like this from disappearing into a footnote.
As one of those "history buffs" that was made through a number of reenactments across the U.S., I really enjoyed reading this and wish I could be there in the next few days to see it. Thanks for this story.