Perhaps I was moving too fast along the trail and failed to cut the sign. Maybe it was over-tracked by other critters. Somehow I missed the 2018 publication of Unsettling the West Violence and State Building in the Ohio Valley. Well, I’m hot on its trail now. Given the near fifty-plew price tag, I ordered it up through interlibrary loan. … [Read more...] about Unsettling The West

The weather turned cold and wet over the weekend, with the snow level dropping down to about 4,000 feet. The wind whipped the rain into stinging needles, occasionally breaking up the cloud cover to allow a glorious rainbow to arch over golden meadows. In other words, it was an ideal weekend for surrounding yourself with books. The inaugural … [Read more...] about A Feast Of Books

This looks like fun. At least Emily Blunt in early 20th century adventuress kit is quite charming... Getting a Mummy vibe? Me, too. That’s no bad thing. Ceili and I have watched that movie about a thousand times. “I’m a... librarian...” Always up for a pulp adventure, so we are. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ydnzilTiBcY From The … [Read more...] about Welcome To The Jungle

I mean, hell: In the song “Copperhead Road,” Steve Earle tells the story of three generations of the Pettimore family in less than five minutes. A writer doing the same thing would need hundreds of pages. That’s sorcery. — Alex Bledsoe * Sisters Folk Festival 2019 is in the books — and a fine one it was. As I anticipated, the highlight of the … [Read more...] about Shiver And Hum

I don’t read a whole lot of frontier fiction. As deeply immersed as I am in this stuff, it’s all too easy to get thrown out of the story by anachronism, historical errors and the like. A good Mountain Man novel is surprisingly hard to come by. The Big Sky and Fair Land, Fair Land by A.B. Guthrie; Mountain Man by Vardis Fisher; Lord Grizzly, by … [Read more...] about A Fine Fandango

It is an axiom of frontier backcountry travel that it is wise to pause now and then to study your backtrail. Hostiles may be trailing you. And you might have to traverse in reverse, and the terrain always looks different going that way. I didn’t set out to take a scout down the backtrail last week; it just happened. Blame a $1 sale at my … [Read more...] about Scouting The Backtrail

In the heart of downtown Bend is a wonderful “pop culture” store called Pegasus Books. Owner Duncan McGeary is an author and a friend who has managed to make a living and a career out of his youthful enthusiasms. Pegasus Books is something of an anomaly and an anachronism in the hipster heart of 21st Century Central Oregon. He was there long … [Read more...] about The Savage, Sexy West Of Sanjulian

Summer of 2019 was already shaping up pretty damn good in the world of Frontier Partisans literature and cinema, what with a Deadwood movie, the return of Yellowstone and a mountain of research books to read. But this piece of news blows the whole thing up: Craig McDonald’s tale of Hector Lassiter and the Punitive Expedition is hitting the streets … [Read more...] about Once A World

Kevin Smith over at The National Review took a swipe at an iconic American movie on Monday: The greatest Western of all time . . . isn’t. Though The Searchers is regularly hailed as the finest exemplar of its genre and one of the best movies of any kind (seventh-best of all time, according to the decennial Sight & Sound poll), John Ford’s 1956 … [Read more...] about Searching For ‘The Searchers’