I love and respect good graphic designers. A huge part of the appeal of The Nugget Newspaper is down to the stellar design work Jess Draper contributes week in and week out. The good looks of Frontier Partisans and my book Warriors of the Wildlands has nothing to do with me and everything to do with the aesthetic talents of Lynn Woodward.
So there is no negative bias in my judgement that the designer of the book Lovewell’s Fight must receive 40 lashes, well laid, for Egregious Sins of Anachronism Against Frontier Material Culture. Lovewell’s Fight examines an episode from New England history dating back to 1725, when a party of scalp-hunting New England Rangers ran afoul of Abenaki warriors. The ensuing day-long firefight would be celebrated in legend and ballad for a couple of centuries.
So… what’s wrong with this picture?
Damn yer eyes! We should be well past the days when artists put Great Plains culture war-bonnets on Mohicans and housed Shawnee in teepees. For decades, historians and reenactors have struggled to make the general public understand that “the frontier” does not equal “the West.” Somebody didn’t get the memo.
It should be this:
Not this:
Matthew says
That’s an egregious error, but what do you think about works of fiction that are INTENTIONALLY anachronistic? Like the old shows Hercules and Xena which seemed to happen an alternate ancient Greece that made no sense chronologically?
JimC says
I try not to be pedantic about fictional entertainment if it holds together on its own terms.
Matthew says
It really depends for me. Now I’m not as likely as you to see minor errors, but when something is to egregious than it can bother me.
Of course, certain choose to be anachronistic. As I mentioned: Hercules and Xena. There is also an anime called Appare-ranman that is set in 19th Century America. It’s about two Japanese who get stranded in America and have to compete in a car race across the continent to get money to go home. Because of the cars you would think it is around the turn of the century. However, a lot of America is like the early Wild West period and one of the Japanese characters is a samurai which would have been anachronistic even in Japan at the time. It plays loose with geography too. So it happens in a kind of mythic America. It is a lot of over-the-top fun, though.
JimC says
I had to give up on Ron Hansen’s The Kid (as in Billy the…) when he referred a character stealing a Ruger Old Army revolver. Ruger started in 1949. The Old Army is a blackpowder replica revolver introduced in 1972. Couldn’t get past it.
Quixotic Mainer says
To be fair, if those gents had known the ’73 was going to be a thing they would have badly wished for some! The reprint will probably have the rangers toting those evil AR14’s. But that is a historical slip of eye rolling proportions.
JimC says
The author is not the most engaging writer, but sure am glad i dived into this story.
Quixotic Mainer says
I have a hankering to see the battlefield now. It kinda sounds like everyone split up and it was a tree all, “first man to move is the first man to die”, kind of situation that went on all day. It would have been very different in the scrubby brush we have now rather than the old growth forest.
JimC says
Just from a tactical perspective it’s an exceptional event in frontier history. The two-hour firefight that was Estill’s Defeat in Kentucky (https://frontierpartisans.com/18948/firefight-at-little-mountain-estills-defeat/) was unusual. The Lovewell Fight went on for TEN hours. The scalphunting focus of the mission is also interesting. Usually something associated with the mid-19th century border.
Matthew says
So they were just out there to collect indians scalps?
JimC says
It’s a little more complicated than that, but in a nutshell, yes.
Quixotic Mainer says
10 hours is a long time to stay keyed up and in action, just the adrenaline dump in between flare ups would be draining. I’m guessing the tribes stayed on them because of their proximity to the village as much as that they had a numerical advantage. The Abenaki couldn’t load everything onto travois and split.
Dave T says
I’m a gun guy and seeing a ’73 Winchester target rifle (extra long barrel and PG stock) having anything to do with an event in the early 1700s is just wrong. And don’t ask me about John Wayne using an 1892 Winchester from the 1830s (Comancheros) into the early 1900s (Big Jake).
Dave
Lynn Woodward says
And how about the “arrow” — from a computer font invented somewhere in the 1990s. Irksome! All of it! And thank you for the shout-out, Jim! An honor to be trusted with free reign on your designs.
wayne says
How do we get a job editing/correcting this kind of crap?