OJAI : Rendezvous Offers Taste of the Old West

The Ojai Valley hills crackled with the sound of black-powder gunshots as Norman (Lodgepole) Doyal showed a fellow trader how to tan deer hide.

It was high noon on Friday, and hot enough to make the San Diego landscape surveyor sip whiskey and water from his canteen before giving quick instructions to Daniel Two Bears.

First, Doyal said, you buy some cow brains and mix them with water. Then you rub the mixture into the stiff white sheet of raw hide, and pull on it for a while.

“Then it’ll soften right up won’t it?” asked Two Bears of Prescott, Ariz., listening closely.

After tugging the hide, Doyal said, you have to smoke it over a low-burning fire. Doyal put a soft, brown beaded bag, crafted from the finished product, to his nose and breathed in.

This was the stuff that brought these self-described mountain men, dressed in leather pants and moccasins, to the 21st annual Sespe Rendezvous at the Ojai Valley Gun Club.

During the five-day festival that is expected to have attracted 300 people by Sunday, enthusiasts re-enact the historic gatherings of fur traders in the 1830s and 1840s, setting up tepees and primitive canvas tents, cooking on open fires, drinking whiskey and reminiscing about their Old West forefathers.

After the hide-tanning lesson, Two Bears fingered a leather gun belt displayed on the front of Doyal’s car. The belt was just too small for Two Bear’s healthy waist.

“I’m asking $75 for ‘em, but I’ll trade,” Doyal said.

In the end, Two Bears, who is Cherokee, Choctaw and Irish, bought two sheets of hide for $20 each. He walked away happy.

These are two of the “Rendezvous people.” Some forever forfeit their city clothes to don the leather pants and beaver-skin hats worn by fur traders of the Old West, while others come to the gatherings as an escape from their contemporary lives.

The term rendezvous was coined by the original fur traders, who got together to trade and buy gunpowder, bullets and beaver traps, said Herman Kopf, 81, the gun club caretaker.

Kopf said his daughter and son-in-law are Rendezvous people. They met, married and had their first child christened at the annual Sespe functions.

Doyal has been coming to the Sespe Rendezvous for five years.

“This is how I keep myself together,” Doyal said, showing off the medicine bag and American Indian trade beads that hung from his neck.

Doyal said he earned his nickname for

the agility and speed with which he puts up tepees, a skill Blaine and Cindy Rosenlund of Riverside had not yet acquired.

“They don’t call me Lodgepole for nothing,” Doyal called playfully to the Rosenlunds as they struggled to wrap a huge sheet of canvas around tall, thin lodgepole pine trees--for the second time that day.

Cindy Rosenlund, who said she has some American Indian heritage, quit her job in April to make crafts at home and sell them at festivals like this one.

“The more you get interested in this, the more you want to find out about your family,” she said. “I would have had ancestors who were doing the exact same thing.”