Working The Trapline — War Along The Wabash… And In The Night Country

After a couple of centuries of being more-or-less ignored by everyone except frontier history and military specialists, the great victory of the coalition fo native peoples led by the Miami chief Little Turtle and the great Shawnee War Captain Blue Jacket in 1791 has, in recent years, been getting its due attention in historical publishing. The estimable Colin G. Calloway took on St. Clair’s Defeat in 2016 with The Victory with No Name: The Native American Defeat of the First American Army. Osprey released a volume on it, and last year saw the release of Field of Corpses: Arthur St. Clair and the Death of an American Army.

Now there is a new tome that looks quite promising: War Along the Wabash: The Ohio Indian Confederacy’s Destruction of the US Army, 1791, by Steven P. Locke.

An examination of the battle of the Wabash from both the Indian and American points of view.

On November 4, 1791, a coalition of warriors determined to set the Ohio River as a permanent boundary between tribal lands and white settlements faced an army led by Arthur St. Clair—the resulting horrific struggle ended in the greatest defeat of an American army at the hands of Native Americans.

The road to the battle of the Wabash began when Arthur St. Clair was appointed to lead an army into the heart of the Ohio Indian Confederacy while building a string of fortifications along the way. He would face difficulties in recruiting, training, feeding, and arming volunteer soldiers. From the moment St. Clair’s shattered force began its retreat from the Wabash the men blamed the officers, and the officers in turn blamed their men. For over two centuries most historians have blamed either the officer corps, enlisted soldiers, an entangled logistical supply line, poor communications, or equipment. The destruction of the army resulted in a stunned Congress authorizing a regular army in 1792.

This book, the result of 30 years’ research, puts the battle into the context of the last quarter of the 18th century, exploring how the central importance of land ownership to Europeans arriving in North America resulted in unrelenting demographic pressure on indigenous tribes, as well as the enormous obstacles standing in the way of the fledgling American Republic in paying off its enormous war debts.

This is the story of how a small band of determined indigenous peoples defended their homeland, destroyed an invading American army, and forced a fundamental shift in the way in which the United States waged war.

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True Detective: Night Country — a tale from the Last Frontier that works with indigenous folklore on the edges of Fennario, and is inviting comparisons to John Carpenter’s The Thing? Yeah, we’re in. Drops January 14.

From The Hollywood Reporter:

It’s December 17 in Ennis, Alaska, the final sunset of the year before months of prolonged darkness. Located 150 minutes north of the Arctic Circle, Ennis is a midsized town in which the local mining company and the Indigenous community have been clashing for years. 

At the nearby TSALAL Arctic Research Station, home to a small international team of scientists engaged in mysterious geological pursuits, something very bad has happened. The entire staff has disappeared, and when they’re found, it’s a nightmarish frozen tableau, a chilly Hieronymus Bosch conception of hell. There’s very little evidence, but several details — an eerie spiral symbol, a tongue — connect the investigation to a dead Native woman whose murder has been left as, pun intended, a cold case for six years.

From Inverse:

True Detective: Night Country is the first season to embrace the horror elements that previous seasons only sprinkled in. There are ghostly apparitions that may or may not be inventions of paranoid minds, liminal spaces that could speak to other planes of existence, and many, many things that go bump in the night. The vast, crushing darkness that surrounds the wintry Alaskan town lends to the supernatural dread, as do the Indigenous storylines that are brought to the forefront by Lopez. Reis’ Indigenous background lends her role more dramatic weight, but also allows her to play the Mulder to Foster’s Scully — anytime something strange or inexplicable happens, Danvers pooh-poohs it as Native spiritual nonsense, while Navarro is not so sure.

But apart from the obvious inspiration from John Carpenter’s The Thing, Night Country’s full-fledged horror approach is astonishingly effective. Lopez, who directs all six episodes of the season, displays a keen talent for employing the visual language of horror, amping up the dread and paranoia with every jump scare and every chilling long shot. Tying the supernatural elements in with its Indigenous storyline proves to be both narratively smart and emotionally profound — Night Country coming off the year of Scorcese’s Flower Moon and Reservation Dogs’ final season feels like a staggering evolution of Indigenous stories in Hollywood. And the season’s incredibly topical storyline of a mining company’s pollution impacting the Indigenous community is especially gutting, giving the season an electric real-world urgency.