By Rick Schwertfeger

A fellow said that these stories are treasures. They were unknown to me.
I sought them out, and discovered that they are!

As a reader, I have not been a short story guy. Something about picking up a book, beginning to read, and then switching topics ten to twenty times in the course of the book hasn’t appealed to me. I like reading through a whole novel or work of non-fiction. Exploring the whole from beginning to end.

But there’s been a resurgence of outdoors literature and adventure stories for readers like me. Magazines such as Sporting Classics and Overland Journal share the stories of great outdoorsmen and women of the past and present; current backpacking, hunting, and fishing tales; and overland expeditions to the near and far reaches of Earth that tickle the adventurous spirit in those of us who get outside. And there are numerous sites on the internet that share stories of combat heroics, and tales of special operations soldiers in many wars.

Then one day on the internet a reader of adventure tales enthusiastically recommended Louis L’Amour’s book of short stories Yondering. I’d never heard of it. And I’d only read one L’Amour novel, The Warrior’s Path. I enjoyed it, though it hadn’t enticed me to read more of his prodigious output of novels. And what the heck is “yondering”? Well, it is “to roam or wander off, capturing the adventurous frontier spirit of travel and roaming.” And this fellow was so enthusiastic about the book that I had to give it a try.

And guess what: The stories in Yondering are terrific — engaging, captivating, very well-written. And L’Amour knew of what he wrote about. For, in an introductory piece, he tells us that he was a merchant seaman for many years, and likewise shipboard during World War II. Many of the stories, though fiction, were stimulated by persons he ran across in his travels, and by events that he was involved in or that happened around him. There is an authenticity about the stories. And the quality of L’Amour’s writing indicates that the short story arguably was his forte. They are so good that I wanted more. Turns out that his short stories are collected by theme. I bought Volume Four: The Adventure Stories. And there are more gems there!

Reading L’Amour’s adventure stories provides a window back into what the world was like in the time of my father and uncles. L’Amour was a few years older, but they all lived through the heart of the twentieth century. And they all served in World War II, many seeing combat, or at least coming under fire. Theirs was a world of working men, auto mechanics, small boat engine repair, factory guys, a seaman in L’Amour’s case. Too young for World War I, they survived through the Great Depression, and answered the call to defeat fascism in Europe and Japanese imperialism. A number of L’Amour’s stories are of WWII combat, both on land and on the sea, even on the northern coast of Russia.

Some of the guys in L’Amour’s stories are on the seedier side, tough guys, almost or actually criminals. Quite a few of his stories take place in exotic ports around the world, Singapore, Shanghai, the East Indies. Merchant seamen who didn’t make much money; and had to lay over in far flung ports until they could catch a job on another ship. Time in port, as their monies dwindled, led to poor accommodations, hunger, and even wrong side of the law stuff. Spying, working for whichever side of a war paid them best. Guys like “Pete Lucieno, short, fat, and oily, he participated in everything crooked in the Indies.”

There are more contemplative stories, too. The narrator has tea in the apartment of a tweedy, elderly fellow surrounded by hundreds of volumes of classics on his bookshelves. After an interesting conversation, the narrator discovers a truth – the fellow can’t read! In another story the narrator — a seaman in a café awaiting a ship opening –—sees a young lady enter the café, fleeing rain. Her shoes are soaked. She allows him to buy her coffee. They talk. She’d just lost her job, and the rent was due that she couldn’t pay.  She has nowhere to go. Given the hard rain falling, he invites her to his rental apartment. She agrees. She is very pretty. But being a gentleman, he grants her his bedroom for the night and sleeps on the couch — even though he thinks to himself, “I’m going to regret this choice in the morning.”

Many of the stories are so entertaining because their “heroes” manage to use guile and fighting skills to escape from ominous, likely fatal traps on the seas, on airbases, even in the air. You get into some of these stories and you just know the prime guy is going to get into some kind of situation of double-dealing or deceit, where he’s in mortal danger. The creative escapes are exciting, captivating, and just great!

The description by the guy on the internet proves to be true: Louis L’Amour’s adventure short stories are “the closest thing there is to reading Spencer Dutton’s diary!”

P.S.: For those interested in purchasing L’Amour’s adventure stories: Ten of the stories in Yondering are included in The Collected Short Stories of Louis L’Amour: Volume Four: The Adventure Stories. Three are omitted, plus a short concluding poem. But most importantly, in Yondering, L’Amour provides short introductions before some of the stories with significant personal history or context to them. I found those really valuable. They are not included in the Collected Stories edition. I’d go for both if you can swing it, in order to get those introductions; and because the version of Yondering that I got is a beautiful “leather”-bound one.

© Rick Schwertfeger, Austin, Texas     r.schwertfeger1023@gmail.com     October 25, 2026

Looks like this will be set amid the tumult of the 17th Century War of Three Kingdoms, and the story carries an appropriate whiff of the uncanny.

Isle of Mull, 1642.

When a raid on the rival Campbell clan ends in slaughter on Ganavan Bay, warrior Kal MacLean wakes naked among his dead brothers with a sword wound through his chest. His saviour is the last person he should trust: a Campbell widow named Mary, who pulls him from the tide not by chance, but because her tapestry has already shown her he was coming.

Nursed back to health in the heartland of his sworn enemies, Kal discovers that the conspiracy behind his betrayal reaches far beyond one man’s treachery, threading from the blood-soaked glens of Argyll to the throne of Scotland itself. Hunted by both clans, shadowed by a creature of ancient legend that walks between the living and the dead, and falling for a woman who can see his future when he cannot, Kal MacLean is about to discover that loyalty is the oldest lie in Scotland.

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Speaking of the uncanny…. Clan Cornelius celebrated the spooky season with our annual Carving of the Pumpkins. The Bad Moon Rising looks like a digital effect, but I can assure you, that’s just the way the sky looked on this chill October eve.

’Twas a most Celtic night, and our music matched the mood, featuring Emily Scott Robinson’s Macbeth song cycle.

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We’ll add in the lovely Emily Burak playing the theme from Skyfall in the Great Glen. Because… Scotland…

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Done signed up for this course:

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There are many great artists of the American West. Charles M. Russell remains the greatest of ’em all. I will never forget the moment I first saw a Russell original painting, after a youth where I saw them only in books — and wanted to fall into them. There were several Russells in a special exhibit on the walls of the Gene Autry Museum of the American West in Los Angeles, and I leaned so close that my legs pushed on the velvet rope in front of them, and set off the security system. Beep, beep, beep… The museum docent smiled and gently reminded me to keep a little distance. She got it.

I had frisson chills.

I can’t say it any better than Ian Tyson did:

God hung the stars over Judith Basin
God put the magic in young Charlie’s hands
And all was seen and all remembered
Every shining mountain, every longhorn brand
He could paint the light on horsehide shining
The great passing herds of the buffalo
And a cow camp cold on a rainy morning
And the twisting wrist of the houlihan throw

Montana PBS just posted this fine doco on the Cowboy Artist. I still get frisson chills…

The Nugget Newspaper is partnering up with Collette, an award-winning guided tour operator, for an October 2027 trek out into “America’s Cowboy Country.” I’m not the tour guide; they’ve got a pro for that. I will be what I guess you’d call a featured guest — a highly enthusiastic participant in a tour through Yellowstone, Grand Teton National Park, Jackson Hole and Cody, Wyoming. We’ll hit the gold rush town of Deadwood, in the Black Hills of South Dakota. I will do my best to refrain from lapsing into the virtually poetic profanity of the brilliant HBO show set there… but don’t think for a minute that I couldn’t deliver on it.

The tour is billed as “America’s Cowboy Country,” but for me this is Mountain Man country — the very land that John Colter traversed alone in the dead of winter 1807-08 on an expedition to recruit native trading partners for entrepreneur Manuel Lisa’s fledgling fur trading operation on the Missouri River. It’s also the land of the Absaroka, the Lakota, Northern Cheyenne, the Arapaho, the Shoshone. On tour, we’ll delve into many of the incredible stories of the first half of the 19th Century, when that country was the epicenter of the fur trade and of intense competition among the native peoples, and more wild than the Wild West of our imaginings. And there’ll be other tales from later days, when it did, indeed, become “cowboy country.”
This is going to be a hoot. And those who participate will not only get to visit some of the most spectacular country our nation has to offer in the company of top-tier historically minded nerds, they’ll also be directly supporting The Nugget Newspaper — support that is vital and deeply appreciated.

You can get the whole itinerary here.

It would be a real hoot if some of you Frontier Partisans joined in on this deal. A rendezvous, by Crom! Check it out and let me know if you’d like more information (that brochure is pretty complete).

Couldn’t be prouder of him.

Conditions were about perfect and Suttle Lake was just beautiful. It was cold early and late, but mild through the day with no wind. A bald eagle kept the event under surveillance.

He ran 8 a.m to 8 p.m.

Ceili was there for support for the duration, of course. Jarod’s mom Beth Gatley came out after winning her age group in a half-marathon elsewhere in Sisters, and Marilyn and I got there at Jarod’s 10th lap. (I cannot claim to have done a lick of running on Saturday, but I did get in a good FP Biathlon — with a little extra inspiration, knowing what was going on just up the trail).

 Photo by Cody Rheault.

Jarod did a similar challenge, running 50k up and down Mt. Pisgah in Eugene, Oregon, and did a 50k race in Sisters in May. All different beasts with different challenges, but this day at Suttle Lake is the farthest and longest he’s ever run.

The feat definitely scores high in the delightful Instagram trend of “Mohican Maxxing” — and it offers a call-back to some real-deal Frontier Partisan running exploits. I like to think that Adam Helmer, John Colter and Geronimo are looking on from Frontier Partisan Valhalla and raising a horn…

Nothin’ left to do but smile, smile, smile… Photo courtesy Alpine Running.

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In recent months, I have become quite fascinated with the Renaissance transition to firearms. I have mentioned before that my historical passions really ignite with the beginning of the Age of Exploration, when Europe exploded outward in a world historical eruption of technological, cultural and imperial expansion that shaped the world we have inherited (which is shifting under our feet as we speak).

Firearms had a lot to do with how all that played out. It’s not an accident that guns lead the title of Jared Diamond’s Guns, Germs and Steel, which offers a thesis on why and how European empires were so successful in conquest of much of the globe. The Italian Wars of the late 15th and early 16th centuries were a major driver of the development of firearms technology — and their swift capture of culture.

Just in the past couple of weeks I have been presented with a couple of articles that are worth exploring. Aeon published an essay by historian Catherine Fletcher, whose latest book is The Firearm Revolution: From Renaissance Italy to the European Empires.

Fletcher notes that, while there were plaintive arguments that firearms were unchivalrous and the work of the Devil, elites adopted them readily enough — and they quickly penetrated more ordinary lives.

In the context of long-running on-off war, it made sense for rulers across Italy to mobilise citizens and equip them with up-to-date weapons. Alongside requirements for militia drill went contests to incentivise the acquisition of shooting skills. Farmers found guns useful for pest control; hunters used them too. Thus, in the 1520s and beyond, more and more Italian states formalised or expanded their militia. Giovanni Moro, a Venetian official who had previously handled military supplies, proposed in 1525 the formation of a citizen militia of 12,000 men, of whom two-thirds would use firearms; these men would receive powder and lead for practice, and a contest would be held three times a year to encourage them.

This transition period between the medieval world and the early modern epoch is incredibly rich — in art, in music, and in the darker pursuits of power, wealth and prestige.

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Graham Turner is an ace historical artist. He specializes in English medieval history, and his book on the Wars of The Roses is absolutely magnificent. I refrained from purchasing it because I just can’t justify dropping that many plews on a work that is well outside my historical purview. I will, however, be picking up his Osprey book on Kings Mountain. It published in April, and somehow I missed it.

His heart’s territory may be in the 15th Century, but he does just fine by the 18th…

The first image is ‘The Siege of Mackay’s Trading Post,’ depicting an episode in which Loyalist militia, supported by Cherokee and Creek warriors, fought off attacking patriot militia in a four-day fight in Augusta, Georgia.

The second image is the mustering of the Overmountain Men as they set out to hand Major Patrick Ferguson’s ass to him.

The third image is from the battle itself.

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ScreenRant devoted its cover story to the coming premier of Season 2 of The Terminal List. Jack Carr’s battered, broken, yet defiant former Navy SEAL James Reece returns to the screen in a highly anticipated continuation of what has become a major action franchise. It has dropped on Amazon Prime  as of October 21. Clan Cornelius will pick up that target in the next couple of days.

The article captures a major reason that the show has garnered a loyal and passionate following. There’s serious effort put into getting it right:

The Terminal List feels like more than an exercise in entertainment: it is a meticulously crafted machine, relentlessly prepared, and focused on honoring not only Carr’s novels, but the military personnel who have responded so positively to it.

This season, based on the novel True Believer, will please Frontier Partisans, being that Raife Hastings is brought into the main James Reece story. The Hastings family are Old Rhodesians — and that matters. Raife is played by Tom Hopper, who I first encountered as Billy Bones in Black Sails. He is a presence. In the books, he tends to the old school, vs. Reece’s inclination to the latest-and-greatest. You can guess which approach I find more simpatico…

And we get us some Africa…

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Speaking of Africa…

When I was first discovering Africa as a field of Frontier Partisan exploration, I found the work of Robert Ruark. Something of Value, his epic novel of the Mau Mau Emergency was important in building my understanding of the Continuity & Persistence of imperial bush wars across the globe — not to mention being a cracking yarn. It was Ruark who introduced me to the great hunter Harry Selby, one of the most admirable men to have ever taken the field.

A man of his mid-century era in many ways, he embodied both the virtues and the vices of the Hemingway model of the man of action/man of letters — including a dangerous thirst. He was a fine writer at his best, though his work could turn unpleasantly acidic. Alcoholism killed him early, but he left a legacy of writing on African hunting that shaped the genre and holds up to this day. This piece explores that legacy through the man’s tools.

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The Conan the Barbarian podcast’s most recent episode has Robert E. Howard scholar Jeff Shanks and writer John C. Hocking venturing Beyond the Black River in a fine analysis of REH’s frontier Conan tale — which is a favorite of many Howardians, including your FP correspondent.

They delve into the geography of the Pictish Wilderness, which I enjoyed, and explored Conan’s (Howard’s) skepticism of the Aquilonian colonial project. They rightly note that such attitudes toward settler-colonialism are unexpected from an American pulp writer in the 1930s, especially one as steeped in frontier lore as Bob Howard. One of the reasons that REH’s work has endured is that Howard had a complex worldview and understanding of human nature. He was no triumphalist and was, in fact, skeptical of the ultimate benefits of civilization. REH was intuitively in tune with the Frontiersman’s Paradox, and it gave his yarn-spinning more depth and texture than the average pulpster could muster.

Anderson had one of the most distinctive voices in the genre, a voice that Trigger at Saving Country Music described as:

…like caramel being run through a volume pedal. 

I believe that my first exposure to John Anderson was his rendition of Billy Joe Shaver’s I’m Just An Old Lump of Coal. From a Frontier Partisans standpoint, though, his most powerful work was and will always be his own Seminole Wind, an elegy to his home state of Florida that evokes the ghost of the Seminole rebel Osceola.

A masterpiece on every level.

Ever since the days of old
Men would search for wealth untold
They’d dig for silver and for gold
And leave the empty holes

And way down south in the Everglades
Where the black water rolls and the saw grass waves
The eagles fly and the otters play in the land of the Seminole

So blow, blow Seminole wind
Blow like you’re never gonna blow again
I’m calling to you like a long-lost friend
But I know who you are
And blow, blow from the Okeechobee
All the way up to Micanopy
Blow across the home of the Seminole
The alligators and the gar

And progress came and took its toll
And in the name of flood control
They made their plans and they drained the land
Now the glades are going dry

And the last time I walked in the swamp
I sat upon a Cypress stump
I listened close, and I heard the ghost of Osceola cry

So blow, blow Seminole wind
Blow like you’re never gonna blow again
I’m calling to you like a long-lost friend
But I know who you are
And blow, blow from the Okeechobee
All the way up to Micanopy
Blow across the home of the Seminole
The alligators and the gar

May that Seminole Wind blow him home…