Frontier Partisans

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

Today, April 16, 2021, marks the 275th anniversary of the Battle of Culloden Moor, where the last great Jacobite uprising was crushed in a mighty slaughter of the warriors of the Highland Clans. Their defeat there at the hands of the Duke of Cumberland marked the end of the movement to restore the Stuart dynasty to the British throne, a movement … [Read more...] about Ghosts Of Culloden

One of the wildest tales in Frontier Partisan history is getting what appears to be a rather lush screen treatment: Edge of the World, featuring the remarkable Jonathan Rhys Myers as pirate-smashing, empire-defying James Brooke. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J2AK04A3HJw The adventures of Sir James Brooke, who defied the British Empire to rule … [Read more...] about Working The Trapline On The Edge Of The World

I gave it my best shot. Truly. All four hours of Raoul Peck’s sprawling HBO documentary Exterminate All The Brutes. It is, as I expected, a full-throated indictment of Western Civilization. If you are inclined to believe that the “settler-colonialism” of the West is fundamentally genocidal and evil — and that that is pretty much all Western … [Read more...] about Indicting Western Civilization