In the 90s, I was the Head Guide at Fort William Henry for 6 years. Our “curator” was a retired high school art teacher who had been hired for his ability to design and build displays- I spent years doing all the research for him. I was able to fix some of the misinformation in the museum and on the tour, but there were only two things I was able to fix as far as the material culture went. One was to get them to stop issuing waistcoats with zippers up the front and gaiters that zipped up the outside of the leg. Even then, it only happened because I pointed out that missing button made a waistcoat look well-worn, but a zipper that threw a tooth required a replacement and that cost money. We had a half Comanche fella who would take tours in his Indian Wars western outfit until Last of the Mohicans came out, then he got decent Eastern Woodland clothing made- the Fort didn’t provide any clothing for anyone who wasn’t 44th Regiment British. Wore my own stuff for years because it was better. The second was convincing them to allow my anthropology professor, Dr. Maria Liston, to do an archaeological field school. As part of it, we got them to rebury the human remains they’d been displaying since the 1950s. I will always be grateful to the old place for launching my decades-long career in museums, but I will also never forget that it isn’t actually much of a museum itself.
Which is all to say, don’t take any of the material culture you see there as actually representative of the New York frontier in the 1750s. 😬
Jay