Working The Trapline — MeatEater Christmas Ball; Classic Firearms; A Mohawk Warrior

MeatEater kicked off their Christmas tour on December 20 with a show in Fayetteville, Arkansas. The crew is spreading holiday cheer and sharing hunting stories in a mini-tour across a half-dozen Southern cities. In the Fayetteville show, Clay Newcomb sang The Bird Hunters with Evan Felker of Turnpike Troubadours, which had to be a thrill for him. I saw an Instagram post of the performance with a comment that cracked me up:

“And Clay, I want you to know how many knives got hidden in the landscaping outside of Ozark Music Hall last night.”

That amuses me, because Clan Cornelius has a a pre-concert ritual in which Lady Marilyn asks me and now Jarod Gatley, too, (sometimes more than once) if we have divested ourselves of all knives…

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Our friends at Rock Island Auction Co. included Frontier Partisans in a year-end blog post extolling the virtues of classic firearms. Joe Engesser asked me to sing the praises of my CZ600 Lux in .223 Remington. Happy to do so, of course. Ended up in some illustrious company, and am most honored to have been included. Jarod Gatley made me look good.

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Reader Stephen Fox recently highlighted a Frontier Partisan who needs his own post. Talkin’ about John Norton, aka  Teyoninhokarawen, a man of Scottish-Cherokee heritage who came to lead small but effective Mohawk forces on behalf of the British during the War of 1812.

As you know, I can resist anything but the temptation to scurry off down a sidetrail. This one is absolutely merited — and it points to a conflict that for some reason has always been sketchily filled-in on my map of the territory of the Frontier Partisans.

Turns out that Norton wrote a memoir of his wartime experiences, which has been published with heavy annotation by the University of Toronto Press. I am fascinated by the “Men of the Middle Ground,” who walked between and among the Euro-American and Native cultures across the continent and several centuries. I knew of Norton, but had not delved deeply into his career. Like I say, the War of 1812 has not been prominent in my work. Look for a post — and a podcast — on Norton in the coming weeks.

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Yes, I will be firing the Frontier Partisans Podcast back up after a long hiatus. My ambitious plans for a new project got derailed in 2025, mostly by the demands of the day-job, but I think I have things on track for more in-depth work in 2026. I am returning to The Ranger Project — but with significant additions and modifications based on my exploration of irregular warfare in the American Civil War. That work was fruitful and exciting — but I realized that my notion of hyper-focusing on that era and setting aside or diminishing my long-term and ongoing interest in the broader sweep of Frontier Partisans history was just not going to work. My temperament doesn’t really allow for that kind of specialization — and, more importantly, the broader approach plays to what is actually (at least I think it is) one of the primary strengths of Frontier Partisans: the highlighting of Continuity & Persistence.

The research itself started yelling at me about this pretty early on. Almost all of the irregular outfits in the South in the ACW self-consciously invoked frontier warfare of an earlier era, and the exploits of Francis Marion, the Swamp Fox, in the American Revolution. If those irregulars were going to insist on Continuity & Persistence themselves, who am I to argue?