The Darkness

To immerse yourself in Frontier Partisans history is to walk a path into darkness. From a very young age I was drawn as though magnetized to the heroic myth of the frontier hunter exploring and settling wild lands. By the time I was in my teens, I was steeped deeply enough in the history to recognize that my Frontier Partisan heroes were harbingers — and often perpetrators — of ecological destruction and ethnic cleansing.

I suppose I might have recoiled, but I didn’t. I went deeper.

At some point, there was a conscious decision that I would embrace the history in all of its genuine heroism and its inglorious brutality. There is plenty of both, and it’s not just an American phenomenon. Frontier societies from Siberia to South Africa, from Canada to New Zealand and Australia, manifested strikingly similar stories. Hell, go back further into the mists of time, to the frontiers of Rome, or to the Danes’ invasions of Saxon England, and you will find patterns of colonization and resistance, heroism and skullduggery, prodigious exploitation of the natural world… Continuity & Persistence.

FP reader Monk just scouted up a new book that maps an intimate and personal course through Australia’s Frontier Wars — a history that the Land Down Under is still reckoning with.

David Marr was shocked to discover forebears who served with the brutal Native Police in the bloodiest years on the frontier. Killing for Country is the result – a soul-searching Australian history.

This is a richly detailed saga of politics and power in the colonial world – of land seized, fortunes made and lost, and the violence let loose as squatters and their allies fought for possession of the country – a war still unresolved in today’s Australia.

I’m not deeply versed in Australia’s Frontier Wars, but what I know reminds me of the mid-19th Century Indian hunting endemic to California and southern Oregon. Settlers responded to killings or livestock thefts by aboriginal people with punitive expeditions that resulted in disproportionate and often indiscriminate killings that in many cases amounted to massacres. Ben Wright would have been right at home in the Australian bush.

It bears keeping in mind that the native peoples, too, were indiscriminate in seeking payback. Logan’s revenge for the egregious and gruesome slaughter of his family on Yellow Creek near the Ohio River in 1774 was to fall on settlers in the Pennsylvania and Virginia backcountry that had no hand in the crime. They were there, and they represented the tribe of Logan’s enemies, so he glutted his vengeance on them — innocents though they were —  in a welter of blood.

This kind of history is fraught, and it really becomes a minefield when it is tied to modern political ideologies. Those who insist on a triumphalist view of Western history can be provoked to rage by any evocation of the darker aspects of our story. I suspect that it threatens some people’s sense of identity, and their belief in the fundamental “goodness” of our civilization. Some take the darkness as evidence that our whole civilization is, in fact, rotten at the core, and was from its inception. Thus, of course, it needs to be overturned and replaced.

I saw a lot of the latter as an undergraduate at UC Santa Cruz, which was an early adopter of many of the “progressive” shibboleths that pervade higher education today. My Native American History classes constantly threatened to dissolve into therapeutic rant sessions where fundamentally angry personalities riddled with ressentiment could ascribe their multitude of dissatisfactions to white supremacy and the patriarchy. Since I represented both to some of those folks — due to being large, white, male and adorned in a hat and boots — I was privileged to act as a lightning rod. It was more fun than it might sound.

I don’t trust those people. They are ideological kin of the people who promulgated Year Zero concepts of  social revolution that were responsible for atrocities on a scale that even the most hardened Indian killer might blanch at.

I’ve also raised the ire of some folks who think history should be “patriotic.” One reader was enraged that I ran a column on the 125th anniversary of the Wounded Knee massacre — in the “Christmas edition” of The Nugget, no less. He slagged me off with great heat and vitriol all over Facebook, but we ended up having a decent conversation when I invited him over for coffee. Make of that what you will.

The Darkness demands something more of us than history as propaganda. Mostly it demands that we grow comfortable with discomfort, because there are no uncomplicated black-hat/white-hat scenarios in real life. Good people sometimes do horrible things out of fear and rage, and through justifying ideologies that cloak self-interest. Bad people take advantage of unsettled conditions to give rein to sadistic impulses. People get caught up in moments of intense emotion. And people of all stripes sometimes do unfathomably brave and noble things, at profound cost.

The Frontier Partisans project is about seeking to understand what happened and why across the wide geography and timeline of frontier history, right up to today. It requires empathy and a certain degree of humility. It’s not free of judgment — but all judgment has to be nuanced and contingent. It’s always going to be an imperfect work in progress.

And the trail is always going to lie, at least in part, in the shadow of The Darkness.