Frontier Partisan Bookshelf

Frontier Partisan Cinema — Black Sails Unfurled Next Year

May 9, 2013
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  The Spanish Main was once the vastest, richest and most strategically significant American frontier. The buccaneers who sailed with the likes of Captain Sir Henry Morgan were every bit as much a force of Frontier Partisans as any ranger band. They were guerrilla warriors of the sea, sometimes sailing as privateers under the auspices [...]

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Frontier Partisans Cinema — Alone, Yet Not Alone

May 9, 2013
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Ralphus at Flintlock & Tomahawk has put up another bit of interesting news. Seems there is a new movie coming out sometime this year set during the French & Indian War. “Alone Yet Not Alone” is based on a popular novel of the same title. The author has novelized a family story of her German [...]

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The Last Gunfight

May 8, 2013
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The gunfight at the O.K. Corral seems to exert an eternal fascination. Barrels of ink and miles of celluloid have been committed to the legend and history of the events surrounding the October 26, 1881, showdown in Tombstone and its grim and bloody aftermath. Do we need another Tombstone book? Journalist Jeff Guinn apparently thinks [...]

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The Other One

March 31, 2013
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I have often said it was Robert E. Howard who inspired me to write. That’s true enough — but there was another one. His name was Henry Wilson Allen, but I didn’t know that back when I was devouring his books. I knew him only by his pen names: Will Henry and Clay Fisher. Will [...]

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The Legend of Jesse James

March 20, 2013
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Dug through a pile of old CDs and found a gem: The 1999 twofer CD reissue of “White Mansions” and “The Legend of Jesse James.” This pair of concept albums was the late-1970s work of an Englishman named Paul Kennerley. Captivated by the voice of Waylon Jennings, Kennerley grew obsessed with images of the American [...]

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A Short History of Combat Tracking

March 18, 2013

There’s an excellent article entitled “A Short History of Combat Tracking” over at sofrep.com. Discussion of the early frontier, the Apache scouts and Frederick Russell Burnham. Author John Hurth is retired Special Forces and wrote “Combat Tracking Guide.” Tracking is a great way to connect to the outdoors, whether you’re doing it for another purpose [...]

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Black Site

March 11, 2013
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My undergraduate honors thesis back in 1987 followed the cultural and historical line linking the archetypal Kentucky frontiersman Simon Kenton with special operations forces of the 20th Century, most specifically Delta Force. (Yes, I’ve been obsessed with this stuff my whole life. My folks have pictures of me in a coonskin cap when I was [...]

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The War That Made America

March 4, 2013
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The excellent PBS series “The War That Made America” is once again accessible on Youtube here. Replete with vivid reenactments, “The War That Made America” is the best available film depiction of the frontier conflict that shaped the destinies of both Canada and the incipient United States. It’s a four-hour visual feast. In addition, here’s [...]

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Born on a Mountain Top

March 2, 2013

Piece on NPR here. There’s yet another Crockett book out, examining the legend. “For anyone who loves U.S. history, Crockett is a wonderful point of entry, because he intersects with so much of it. You’ll find him in the middle of the bitter struggle between settlers and Indians, for example, taking different sides at different [...]

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Controversial Western Historian Dies

February 18, 2013
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Glenn Boyer died on February 14 at 89. He was a towering figure among those who mined the vein of Wyatt Earp history. For years, he was considered a groundbreaking researcher. Then cracks emerged in his work, a purported memoir of Wyatt’s wife Josephine and “Wyatt Earp’s Tombstone Vendetta.” By the turn of the 21st [...]

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