Muzzleloader Magazine Articles

We are very proud that Gerry Barker has been published recently in Muzzleloader Magazine:

- July/August 2008, page 68, "Build Your Own Adventure"
- September/October 2008, page 60, "At the Speed of an Ox"
- March/April 2009, page 63, "Indentured Servitude"

Picture of the Oxen at the Hartford City Civil War Event 2007

We thank photographer Linda McMillan for allowing us to post this picture taken at the Hartford City Civil War event in October 2007. The Four Kings are great around cannon. This event several years ago was their first time around large cannon. They had been around other artillery, but nothing this large. The first firing on the line took them a bit by surprise, but with Gerry by the lead team of George and William, and me by James & Charles to reassure them, by the 3rd firing they had settled and have never again really reacted to artillery.

Their calm, quiet acceptance has helped other teams, both horses and oxen, to accept artillery with aplomb.

Description of Frontier Resources and how it got started

Frontier Resources is a traveling museum that was developed to provide a supplement to other museums, schools, historical societies and events for presenting programs on the history of the Midwest. We have tools, animals and people not normally available to most sites and more importantly the skills to use them and teach students how to use them. Our principal focus is "Hands on History".

We believe that involving young people in the activities of our past is one of the best ways to gain and keep their interest in History. We also believe that History is an important preparation for the future. At present, the organization, like any other museum has full time employees, a part time staff and volunteers. We also have access to wagons, plows, spinning wheels, and butter churns as well as most of the other tools of frontier living.

Frontier Resources was formed in 1994 by Gerry Barker. He recruited three other people who were equally interested in using Living History as a teaching method. Over the years we have presented the history of the Midwestern frontier to hundreds of thousands of school children through a series of hands-on programs as well as taking part in numerous living history projects such as building homesteads, stations and fur posts. We have taken part in military campaigns, herded cattle, built roads and gone on pack trains and wagon trains. In all of these activities the purpose has been research or teaching.

Jumps research

Over the years various members of Frontier Resources have been researching 18th Century Middleground Frontier clothing and gear. Some of that research has been posted on my private blog: http://timely-thoughts.blogspot.com/2006/06/jumps-research-recreating-cries-of.html