By ANN ALLEN
Indiana Correspondent

ROCHESTER, Ind. — When Lindsey Shultz and her family started raising goats for 4-H projects, they couldn’t find a market for their milk.

“We were dumping it down the drain,” she said, “and we hated to see it go to waste.”

That’s when the family from Kountry Kid Farms of Lakeville, Ind., decided to turn milk into soap. Since it was a frontier-type product – made like old-fashioned lye soap but with milk instead of water and vegetable oil instead of lard – they opted to dress as frontier people and sell their product at area rendezvous reenactments.

That was six or seven years ago, and now they’re hooked on the lifestyle and sales technique. They attend the Redbud Trail Rendezvous at the Fulton Co. Historical Society every year, where Lindsey explains the merits of goat milk soap, such as it is creamier and less abrasive.

“It won’t eat your skin,” she said April 27, as she huddled by a wood-burning stove to escape the icy chill of the day – which did nothing to spoil anyone’s enthusiasm for coming out to experience frontier living.

She and her mother, Debbie, and one or more of her seven siblings will return to Rochester in September for the Trail of Courage Living History Festival, after having been to Holland and Grand Haven, Mich. They also plan to attend a rendezvous at Lafayette, Ind. Accompanying them will be a handful of the family’s 60 goats, some of which will be milked during open-air demonstrations.

What the family likes as much as their marketing program is the camaraderie they experience with other rendezvousers. “Everyone is like family,” Shultz said.

Her opinion was shared by John Bringham of Lakeville, who wasn’t there to sell anything; he just likes living frontier-style. “I only do it four times a year and only on weekends,” he said as he stood in his tepee, explaining its snug cloth and pole construction.

“This is a mountain man’s lodge,” he said, noting the tepee’s slightly egg-shaped base and elongated form that make it impervious to high winds and rain. Like Shultz, he feels a sense of family with fellow participants. “Everyone looks after everyone else.

“It costs a lot of money to look this cheap,” he added, with a grin.
For Bill Willard, the Fulton County historian, and his wife, Shirley, frontier living is second nature. “We’ve been to every Trail of Courage since it started,” he said, “and I guess we’ve been to all the Redbud Trails too.”

Now “retired” from cooking buffalo burgers, he demonstrated finger weaving in the Indian Awareness Center. Shirley, recuperating from a bout of pneumonia last week, called the Frontier Frolic.
Karen Hainlen of Apple Cart Creations of Greentown, Ind., enjoyed the comforts of home while giving spinning demonstration in a two-room tent that revealed an antique bedstead and other conveniences.

These people were only a few of the reenactors who demonstrated and sold everything from leather work, blacksmithing, flintknapping, needle felting and beadwork – anything pre-1840, the year fur trading died. There were puppets, wildlife rehabilitators’ talks, muzzle-loading shooting contests and storytelling.
Many participants lived in tepees, which were typical of the ones used in the West; others had wigwams, more typical of Hoosier Indians.

Most, like Lindsey Shultz, will return in the fall for the Trail of Courage. For many, it will be another family reunion, an opportunity to compare notes before retreating to modern homes for the winter.