Randy Chappel in his workshop.

Retro Smithy
Randy Chappel, a historic artisan and interpreter at the Ukrainian Cultural Heritage Village near Edmonton, is a history buff with a thing for things.

He is so fascinated with artifacts that he recreates them in a blacksmith shop. With a love of fur-trade history, Chappel makes trade kettles, fire strikers, awls, trade axes and knives, powder horns, cassettes, and canoe boxes, copying originals to make his new ones look authentic. "The canoe boxes were made with rounded or clipped corners to prevent puncturing the canoe if dropped, so of course mine have clipped corners too."

It all started when Chappel took an interest in reenacting the fur-trade brigades in Western Canada in the late 1700s and early 1800s. "As I got more serious about it, I started thinking about the type of gun I had, the clothes I wore, the tools I used, the campsite. Soon I had a period gun, period clothes, period camp gear." And as he visited various museums and historic sites and saw original artifacts on display, he considered how great it would be to have such things in his own collection. "I thought to myself, 'Well, I could just make them.'" So he did.

The first artifact Chappel reproduced was a Northwest trade gun. He borrowed a real one from a friend and ordered the necessary parts from various catalogues and magazines in the United States. From there he moved on to other fur-trade artifacts, and most recently to pieces from the medical history of that period. On a visit to Fort William, Ontario, in 1998, Chappel became enamored with the region's past, which Lord Selkirk recorded in the early part of the nineteenth century. Lord Selkirk took an inventory of the fort, including the office of Dr. John McLoughlin, which present-day locals recreated based on his records. "The doctor's office was so neat to see, but I wanted to know more about the tools and procedures."

Chappel's homemade medical instruments, copied from historical originals. These tools were used for amputations: the large saw for a leg, the medium one for an arm, and the small one for a finger.

Chappel started to research the gory lore of Canada's remedial past and soon began to reproduce an assortment of medical apparatus. Part of his investigation involves studying museum collections of primary relics, taking sketches and measurements for duplication.

Back in the shop, Chappel makes rough steel shapes of the tools, then adds careful details by cutting, filing, sanding, and polishing. Sometimes he adds a fake patina to give an instrument a used look. Things like trepans (used for drilling holes in a patient's skull to treat a concussion) and bloodletting tools (used to cut the patient's skin to treat fever and other ailments) are now part of Chappel's creative repertoire.

Much of Chappel's work is on display at various historic sites in Western Canada, including the Ukrainian Cultural Heritage Village. Chappel also gives lectures on medical history at locations across North America, showing off his lookalike artifacts to wide-eyed history enthusiasts.

If imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, Chappel's affinity for the past is obvious. As a child, he thought the history tales his schoolteacher father recounted were dull, but today says, "I think I was born two hundred years too late."

This article appeared in the December/January 2005 issue of the Beaver.