1 One cannot deal successfully with the present or the future without under- standing the past. True understanding comes from experiencing—Black Creek presents experiences. From the frst step onto the wooden boardwalk, time changes. The smell of cooking, the sound of the blacksmith hammer- ing on his anvil, the feel of soft feece, the taste of fresh whole wheat bread and the sight of crinolined skirts swaying along the pathways, all help to erase the modern world for awhile. The visitor no longer merely views but participates—history has become an experience involving all the senses. (11) Lorraine O’Byrne, foreword to Black Creek Pioneer Village: Toronto’s Living History Village Places like the Black Creek Pioneer Village in Ontario, Canada as described in the above epigraph exist because settlers continue to be fasci- nated with imagining ourselves on the frontier. As O’Byrne says, such sites facilitate visitors forgetting “the modern world” to “participate” in a set- tler fantasy created from a multisensory experience. And in some of these sites, visitors can dress in costume themselves to create photographic evi- dence of the fantasy, allowing it to endure. These contemporary historic sites, which I call “settler villages,” largely result from twentieth-century citizens working to preserve the past and proft from “heritage tourism.” 1 In a few cases, as with Brattonsville in South Carolina (United States), the village marks a preservation of a historic site. In other cases, however, as with the Bonanzaville Pioneer Village in Fargo, ND, the villages are twentieth-century constructions, with buildings brought from across the CHAPTER 1 The Settler Saga © The Author(s) 2018 R. Weaver-Hightower, Frontier Fictions, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-00422-4_1