Season 4 of Outlander featured an eye-catching detail. One of the Cherokee warriors encountered by the Frasers in the North Carolina backcountry is depicted carrying a blue-painted trade musket. This is a nice, authentic touch — some of the cheap, lightweight muskets manufactured for the Carolina deerskin trade were, in fact, painted blue. … [Read more...] about Blue Gun Blues
The Murder Of John Bozeman
John Bozeman met a violent end right in the middle of the epic fracas created by the trail he blazed running from Fort Laramie northwest to the Montana goldfields. A little over a year after the December 21, 1866, destruction of Col. William Fetterman’s command — even as the Lakota, Cheyenne and Arapaho continued their harrying of the Army posts … [Read more...] about The Murder Of John Bozeman
Working The Trapline — September 2019
This one is a music-heavy trapline. It’s Sisters Folk Festival month, after all. The band that brings the most “frontier” to the festival is Le Vent du Nord. Ceili wrote a profile of the band for The Nugget, which you can read here: The traditional Quebecois band, Le Vent du Nord is an award-winning group considered leaders in the … [Read more...] about Working The Trapline — September 2019
The Slaughter Of The Jesus Indians
“You recall the time when the Jesus Indians of the Delawares lived near the Americans, and had confidence in their promises of friendship, and thought they were secure, yet the Americans murdered all the men, women, and children, even as they prayed to Jesus?” — Tecumseh to Gen. William Henry Harrison The American Legends Podcast is a … [Read more...] about The Slaughter Of The Jesus Indians
Gentleman Joe McKay
Stumbled across a few shots of a flamboyant Frontier Partisan who played a key role in the fight that sparked the Northwest Rebellion in Saskatchewan, Canada, in 1885: Gentleman Joe McKay. I wrote of this frontier conflict in a chapter on the great Metis war leader Gabriel Dumont in Warriors of the Wildlands. The Metis of the Canadian … [Read more...] about Gentleman Joe McKay
Must Be A Certain Kind Of Fool — An Appreciation Of ‘Desperado’
It is de rigueur in the hipper circles of Americana music to shit on The Eagles at every opportunity. After all, the icon of all that is hip and holy — Gram Parsons — once described The Eagles as “a plastic dry-fuck.” Well, I love Gram Parsons’ music and we are forever in his debt for his introducing Emmylou Harris to the world — but he was a nasty … [Read more...] about Must Be A Certain Kind Of Fool — An Appreciation Of ‘Desperado’
The Gabaldon Effect
There’s this thing called The Outlander Effect. It refers to the massive impact the Outlander series of books by Diana Gabaldon and the STARZ series based on the novels on the economy and culture of Scotland. Over the past quarter century, the books and show — largely set in the Highlands at the time of the Jacobite Rising of 1745, then moving to … [Read more...] about The Gabaldon Effect
A Fine Fandango
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
Scouting The Backtrail
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
The Bozeman Trail War — Part VII — Endgame
The garrison at Fort Phil Kearny was numbed with shock, grief-striken and terrified. When Col. Henry Carrington led a detail out to recover the 81 bodies from the December 21, 1886, destruction of Captain William Fetterman’s command, he ordered that the women and children be gathered in the powder magazine of the fort. If the Lakota stormed the … [Read more...] about The Bozeman Trail War — Part VII — Endgame
