The Big Gig at the Yellowstone Dutton Ranch. My favorite band — Turnpike Troubadours — made a cameo on My Cowboy Soap Opera’s penultimate episode. Good Lord Lorrie, Pay No Rent and Brought Me (background).
The band has released a four-song EP through Spotify of a four-song live session done in collaboration with the performance video channel Western AF, which promotes independent alt-country and Western artists. The film drops on December 13. Pay No Rent just soars here…
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An interesting doco on one of the most ensuring lost treasure mysteries in Frontier Partisans history — Kruger’s Gold. According to the legend, when Boer South African Republic President Paul Kruger fled into exile as British troops took Pretoria in 1900, something like $500 million in gold in today’s value went missing. As in unaccounted for when the British tried to reconcile the books with what they found in the SAR treasury vault. Maybe it was an accounting snafu or a hoax, but legend ever since has it that Kruger either hid the gold in South Africa or spirited it away to Europe, or a little of both.
This is a fun watch — but note that any yarn that involves Fritz Joubert Duquesne should be taken with a whole shaker of salt…
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On the opposite side of the continent 300 years earlier, a British seaman named Andrew Battell was undergoing an epic adventure. Picked up Lord of Darkness, a novel based on Battell’s tale — and I can already tell that I am going to love it. It is written in the first-person, in a facsimile of Elizabethan/Jacobean English, which creates that “reckless verisimilitude” that we crave in historical fiction. It is a curious thing that most of my favorite Frontier Partisan yarns — Fire Along the Sky by Robert Moss, Outlaw, by Warren Kiefer, and Tom Mix & Pancho Villa by Clifford Irving come to mind, and I recently mentioned I, Tom Horn, by Will Henry — are written in that first-person, picaresque style. I love the conceit of reading a “memoir” of a frontier adventurer.
And, yes, David Wrolson, Bettell’s adventures among the “Portugals” were in what we know as Angola…
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David Wrolson says
Yay!! Angola!!!
One of the hardest geographical facts for me to grasp in the whole world is shown on your map. It continually astounds me that Johannesburg/Pretoria are essentially at the same latitude as Lourenco Marques (Maputo).
“Safari Sam” has a ghostly treasure hunt as well. My personal favorite chapter was the one on the elephant hunter.
Matthew says
First person narrative can create verisimilitude and intimacy. This can really add to historical fiction especially if it’s well researched. The Flashman novels are a good example. It does sort of decrease suspense since you assume that the main character survives, but nothing’s perfect.
David Wrolson says
Re-Will Henry
I never could get into the Tom Horn book, but I loved his first person novel of the white man living with the Sioux who fought on their side in the Little Bighorn, at least I think he fought on their side. The book was called “No Survivors” and his “journal” was found on his dead body way up north in Canada somewhere. I read that book many times, but it has been decades now. May have to rectify that.
JimC says
Yes — No Survivors. That’s another favorite. Still holds up.