A couple of videos videos crossed my screen today that struck me powerfully, maybe in different ways, but for similar reasons. The first is a new teaser for Craig Rullman’s Len Babb Movie Project. I am most proud and honored to be contributing music to this work, and it’s my good buddy’s film, so, naturally, I respond to the content. But this one, … [Read more...] about Desert High

By Rick Schwertfeger, Captain, Frontier Partisans Southern Command Frontiers. We tend to think of vast, empty vistas. Perhaps a line of cavalry far off in the distance. Or the isolated cabin of movie scenes, a frightened woman, shotgun at the ready, standing in the doorway as strangers approach. Or Chingachgook, Natty Bumpo, and Uncas moving fast … [Read more...] about Piney Woods Frontier

After he defected from the American Patriot cause in 1778, Simon Girty became a highly successful agent and operative for the British Indian Department, and a key figure in the long struggle for the Ohio Valley frontier. A skilled operator, he joined native war parties on raids and major expeditions, and rallied the native warriors to defend … [Read more...] about Simon Girty — Operator

“For God and country — Geronimo, Geronimo, Geronimo.” — U.S. Navy SEAL communication confirming the killing of Osama bin Laden Abbotabad, Pakistan, May 2, 2011. * It was a helluva 12th birthday for daughter Ceili. Clan Cornelius had just returned from dinner out when the news broke: President Barack Obama stood at a lectern and … [Read more...] about Justice Rendered — Rule 5.56:HK416

Rory Young, Zambia-born Irish anti-poaching and wildlife preservation activist has been murdered by jihadis in Africa. From PBS: OUAGADOUGOU, Burkina Faso — Two Spanish journalists and the Irish director of a wildlife foundation were killed Monday in an ambush in eastern Burkina Faso, the Spanish government and officials in the African country … [Read more...] about RIP Rory Young

By Rick Schwertfeger, Captain, Frontier Partisans Southern Command, Austin, Texas There were 51,000 horses in Philadelphia in 1900. It takes some imagination to call back the reality that horses were essential to the fabric of 19th century American cities. For in the days before internal combustion engines were connected to the axles of … [Read more...] about Concrete Cowboy: Black Equestrians On Today’s Urban Frontier

Simon Girty is famous as a renegade who fought with the British and their Ohio Indian allies against the American Patriots during the American Revolution. But for the first two-plus years of the conflict, he was in the service of the Americans, working to keep the northern and western tribes neutral and participating in a military campaign against … [Read more...] about Simon Girty — Patriot

It may surprise some of you that James Ellroy’s American Tabloid is one of my all-time favorite novels. After all, it’s not a frontier tale... except, it kinda is. Allow me to explain. For starters, the era it covers — the late 1950s up to November 22, 1963 — was an era obsessed with the frontier. Every kid of the era had a coonskin cap and … [Read more...] about The Cold War Frontier

It’s a ways away from hitting screens, but South Africa is poised to give us what appears to be an epic retelling of the rise of Shaka, who mobilized the Zulu people into the most potent military force in southern Africa in the early 19th century. From Tagged Online: The epoch-making Shaka Ilembe is poised to set records as the most expensive … [Read more...] about Shaka Ilembe

Part I of the Frontier Partisans Podcast exploring the remarkable American life of Simon Girty is up. You can access it here. Girty was an ace Frontier Partisan — and, for most of the past couple of centuries, the most hated and reviled man in American frontier history. Simon Girty and his brothers James and George — who had all been captured … [Read more...] about Simon Girty Podcast