Working The Trapline — Proof Of Life + Redcoats, Samurai & The Wild Frontier

West Papuan rebels seeking independence from Indonesia released a proof-of-life video of a New Zealand pilot taken prisoner a year ago. An operation to rescue him ended with a West Papua Liberation Army ambush that killed four elite Indonesian army troops in the mountains of the Papua Highlands province.

Leading Britain’s Conversation reports:

Philip Mark Mehrtens, a 38-year-old former Jetstar pilot, appears gaunt in the new hostage video where he tells his family: “I’m OK, they are treating me well… I’m trying to stay positive and I hope that you and Jacob are healthy and doing OK and getting support.

“I love you both lots and miss you both lots and hope to be able to talk with you soon.”

He said that the regional commander told him he would try to organise a phone call with his family in the coming days.

Mr Mehrtens was kidnapped last year when he flew a light aircraft or the Indonesian airline Susi Air to Paro in the Papua highlands, carrying five Papuan passengers.

The region is still very wild. Papua encompasses the western half of New Guinea and has been under Indonesian rule since 1969. There are still, reportedly, uncontacted people in Papua.

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I have tremendous respect for Samuel K. Dolan. As a writer of non-fiction, he has vividly depicted the epic Frontier Partisan history of the U.S.-Mexican Borderlands in Cowboys and Gangsters: Stories of an Untamed Southwest; Hell Paso: Life and Death in the Old West’s Most Dangerous Town; and The Line Riders: The Border Patrol, Prohibition, and the Liquor War on the Rio Grande. As an executive producer with Warm Springs Productions, he leads the team that has created four seasons of INSP Network’s Into the Wild Frontier.

In advance of the March 24 premier of Season 4, Dolan was a guest on the Cochise County Travels podcast. Give it a listen here or on Spotify or Apple.

I have worked with Dolan’s people and they are really fine folks, professional and down to earth, and the writers and directors of the pieces I’ve contributed to really dig in and endeavor to tell these epic stories as faithfully and as vividly as possible.

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Another stalwart Frontier Partisan storyteller, Christian Parkinson, just keeps delivering on his tales of significant but obscure African frontier conflicts. Some colonial British soldiers considered the Basuto the finest warriors in southern Africa, the Zulus not excepted.

I was not familiar with this conflict other than its name. Fascinating stuff. Turns out that attempting to disarm a fighting people is a good way to touch off a rebellion.

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I am quite excited about the FX Shogun limited series, which premiers on February 2. To a fervid level. As I mentioned before, part of it is the opportunity to revisit a story that absolutely blew my world wide open when I was 15 years old. But mostly it just looks magnificent — and I’m hearing very good things about the quality of the storytelling.

John Blackthorne, a Western mariner on a Dutch East India Co. vessel, is shipwrecked in Japan in the year 1600, the classic stranger in a strange land. The world he enters is one of perpetual civil war, as alien and dangerous a frontier as a man could find. A world, as he describes it, of doomed lovers and cursed kings.

I really dig the aesthetic here — dark and full of menace and portent.

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Lady Marilyn is usually the one who enjoys food videos — but this one has Daniel Boone.

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Ain’t this a beautiful thing?

From Maine Public Radio:

BRUNSWICK, Maine – One of the oldest-known examples of a Native American birch-bark canoe is on display at a museum operated by a historical society in Maine.

The Pejepscot Historical Society says the canoe dates to the mid-1700s. It’s an example of the type of canoe that was critically important to the history and culture of the Wabanaki, the first people of parts of northern New England and Atlantic Canada.

The historical society put the canoe on display Thursday. The society came into the possession of it in 1889. It had spent three decades in a barn before being placed in the museum.

The Penobscot Nation’s tribal historian James E. Francis Sr. says this type of canoe was “extremely important for your family’s survival” in his tribe. The Penobscot still build them today.