Kira Rambles

If you were a ghost on a battlefield, would battle reenactments piss you off?

As a staff member at Fort Ticonderoga, I participated in my first battle reenactment in September. We reenacted Brown’s raid, when American forces returned to the fort and tried to take it back from the British and their German allies in September of 1777 after the Northern Continental Army evacuated Ticonderoga in the face of John Burgoyne’s British campaign in July. 

The fort has a recreated redoubt, a six-feet high, square earth and wood fortification by the parking lot, across the exit road from our infant neighborhood of soldiers’ huts, a collection of pine timber-frame cabins the continental army built at Ticonderoga when the Americans briefly took the fort from the British 1775-1777. They had hundreds. We currently have three. 

During the reenactment, I joined reenactors portraying a company of Vermont Rangers that ambushed British soldiers on top of the mountain above the fort and fired cannon from the mountain at the fort for the first, and only, time ever. Despite that strong start, American forces were unable to retake the fort, so we reenacted two battles, the colonists advancing on the fort and taking the recreated redoubt–and their retreat. 

During the retreat, my company found ourselves taking cover in the replica soldiers’ huts, which happen to be on top of a mass grave of soldiers who died in the Battle of Carillon at Ticonderoga in 1758. The battle was the bloodiest on North American soil before the American Civil War, and I wondered, what would those soldiers think about our reenactment? 

Granted, Brown’s raid was long after the Battle of Carillon and the French and Indian War, but the fort does reenact the British siege and French evacuation of the fort in 1759, which is a lot more immediate to the soldiers that died there in 1758. Also, to some extent, reenactments at the fort look similar; while the uniforms and the exact musket drill change, they all involve temporarily blocking off the exit road and shooting blanks at each other until someone runs away. 

Does running around and firing a lot of black powder honor them, or are they judging us for romanticizing conflict that killed them? 

It’s hard to say, but, at the very least, it feels essential for reenactments to involve an Indigenous land acknowledgement and a nod to the soldiers who really died here. And, to the ghosts at Ticonderoga, this essayette is a rhetorical question. Please don’t answer.