I caressed the fake coonskin cap and decided, as my fingers slid across the silky artificial fur, that I must have it.

Not that I intended to don the thing myself.

But I figured it was ideal headwear for my son, Max, who’s 11 and is far more adventurous, in his sartorial choices, than his old man.

Max, as I suspected, latched onto the idea — and the coonskin cap — with alacrity.

The hat, with its distinctive tail, hangs from a prime peg on the garment rack in our kitchen when it’s not on Max’s head, transforming him into a diminutive Davy Crockett.

Although I was happy to see Max’s smile when he saw the cap, the event that made it possible was bittersweet.

The date was Dec. 17, the place the Calvary Baptist Church in Baker City. That’s where Trail Tenders Inc., the nonprofit volunteer group that has been integral to the success of the Oregon Trail Interpretive Center for three decades, sold merchandise that would normally have loaded the shelves at the center’s Oregon Trail Shop.

Trail Tenders, which was actually started in 1989, three years before the Bureau of Land Management opened the center on Flagstaff Hill, five miles east of Baker City, is dissolving.

This marks a disappointing conclusion to an otherwise great story — one that defines Baker County residents’ commitment to the area’s history, and in particular its role in the wider chronicle of the Oregon Trail.

Mike Popa, a board member for Trail Tenders, had told me the previous week that the extended closure of the center — first due to the pandemic, and currently while the building undergoes a major renovation to make it more energy efficient — and the ongoing difficulty of recruiting new members combined to doom the organization.

The center, which opened in May 1992 and has welcomed more than 2.3 million visitors in the ensuing decades, has been closed since November 2020. It’s slated to reopen some time in 2023.

For me — and, I suspect, for a lot of people who are fond of the center — the Trail Tenders and their efforts defined the place as much as the exhibits and the living history performers and the grand vista of Baker Valley and the Elkhorns from the panoramic windows.

Besides managing the gift shop, Trail Tenders volunteers helped organize all manner of events — wagon encampments and demonstrations of blacksmithing and other pioneer skills, among much else — that have made the center so much more than a place to walk through, glancing at the descriptive signs and perhaps signing the guest book.

(Which is not to diminish the importance of that gift shop. A visitor center, it seems to me, would be bereft without a place to procure a T-shirt or a coffee mug or some other accoutrements that, however kitschy, help us remember the visit years and decades later.)

On Dec. 17, as I walked past tables laden with items, many bearing some connection to the great migration that brought so many thousands over Flagstaff Hill and into Baker Valley, I was both excited and melancholy.

The coonskin cap was a highlight.

I also claimed a book that’s something of a compendium of Oregon people and places, as well as a T-shirt, and both at what seemed to me a too-generous discount.

Yet I was chagrined to realize that these hundreds of mementoes, rather than ending up in a bag carried out the center’s doors and past the basalt rimrock beside the entrance, by visitors still marveling at what they had seen, were instead stacked as though at a yard sale, picked over by bargain-seekers.

This is a less ignominious end, to be sure, than being tossed in the trash.

And I suppose some local residents came away with trinkets they might never have thought to buy from a place that is so close, any more than people who live near, say, Yellowstone National Park are apt to frequently patronize the Old Faithful Lodge gift shop.

But it still seemed to me a slightly dour affair, no matter how attractive the price on the shot glasses, which for me epitomize the concept of a gift shop.

I am optimistic, though, that the dissolution of Trail Tenders Inc. is merely a pause and not a true ending.

I believe Baker’s affinity for the Oregon Trail is considerable, and that this, combined with the generosity of our residents in contributing to bettering the community, will ensure that the spirit of the Trail Tenders, if not the name itself, will persist and, when the center itself finally reopens, once again thrive.