H is for Historical Reenactment

I'm back home from our brief and delightful vacation, with just one more vacation post.

We spent one day in the town of Elizabeth. You'd be surprised how much time you can spend, and enjoy, in a tiny place like this. It's got a cool little historical downtown, just one block long. It's surrounded by farms, including many homesteaders like Joyful Acres, Holloway Farms, and the Galena Log Cabin Getaway, which despite the name mostly exists to raise alpaca.

Elizabeth is the site of Blackhawk War, another dreadful blot on American history, in which, as usual, European and East Coast settlers helped themselves to Native lands, ignored entreaties to negotiate an equitable settlement and then murdered women and children when the native peoples objected. I learned about Black Hawk as one of the great villains of American history, callously attacking peaceful settlers; I'm happy to report that the history now taught, as written out in the local history museum, seems much more balanced and fair to the native peoples.

Anyway, we were there on a reenactment day, and one of the things they reenacted was a funeral, including a walk to the local graveyard, where the two white victims of the Black Hawk War are buried. No one knew where the 700 Indian victims are.



I got (H is for ) heat stroke.