We have the lovely, leggy Grace Potter singing “Devil’s Train”; Dave Alvin (the Coolest Man in the Universe) singing “Lonesome Whistle”; “The American Dream by The White Buffalo (appearing this September at the Sisters Folk Festival); and a very strange (in a good way) rendition of “Sweet Betsy From Pike” by Iggy Pop. Oh, and a slurring Shane Macgowan gives us “Poor Paddy on the Railway.”

Thanks to Ralphus over at Flintlock & Tomahawk for the tip.

Lawrence’s SMLE on display at the Imperial War Museum.

The frisson experienced seeing an actual artifact used by a legendary frontier partisan is hard to describe. I still remember the weird sensation looking at the Lee-Enfield rifle carried by T.E. Lawrence in the Arab Revolt. It rendered everything hyper-real and at the same time unreal…

Like I said, hard to explain.

The rifle is on display at the Imperial War Museum, one of the finest museums I have ever set foot in (in 1996) and I hope to go back someday.

The rifle has a strange history. The Lee-Enfield was a workhorse combat rifle in the Great War — and the greater one to follow. Not  elegant; all business, and very good at the business indeed. The bolt location and smooth action made it legendarily fast-firing, and it was accurate, and above all soldier-proof durable.

The rifle that ended up in Lawrence’s hands was originally issued to the Essex Regiment, which hit the beaches at Gallipoli and suffered intensely. The rifle was left behind when the British forces evacuated the peninsula, and picked up as spoils of war by the Turks.

The rifle was inscribed in Arabic script with the legend: “Part of our booty in the battles for the Dardanelles.” The inscription made it suitable as a gift to Prince Feisal, son of Sharif Hussein, the Emir of Mecca. The gift was really a pointed message to the restive Arab leader: We’re still on top; don’t get any… inappropriate… ideas.

When Feisal kicked off the Arab Revolt, he presented the rifle in turn to the young British officer who would prove to be a valuable advisor and explosives expert.

Lawrence wielded the rifle throughout the revolt, all the way to the triumphal entry into Damascus. He carved his name into the stock, along with five notches. He stopped carving notches as the campaign wore on and he sickened of the killing.

After the war, Lawrence gave the rifle to King George, and it ended up in the IWM, where people like me can gaze upon it as a piece of legendry come to life.

Burnham’s Lee-Metford rifle and Remington revolver. The gunleather is reportedly original.

Frederick Russell Burnham was a noted scout, explorer and prospector at the turn of the 20^th Century. He was a youth in Arizona Territory during the last of the Apache Wars and was embroiled in the dark business of the Tonto Basin Feud. He prospected in Alaska during the great gold rush. Most famously, he was part of the Pioneer Column that took the land across the Limpopo River in southern Africa to create Rhodesia, and a scout for the British Army in the Boer War.

His books “Scouting on Two Continents” and “Taking Chances” are foundational texts for any student of frontier history, special operations or African military history.

Burnham, left, with his half-stocked Lee-Metford, during the Matable Wars in Rhodesia, Southern Africa, 1896.

Burnham’s primary arms in Africa were a sporterized Lee-Metford rifle and an 1875 Remington revolver with hippo ivory grips. The bolt-action, magazine fed Lee-Metford was the immediate predecessor of the legendary Lee-Enfield that would serve the British Army through both World Wars. It was a durable, accurate rifle. Its .30 caliber cartridge would have been light for big African game, but certainly adequate for pot hunting.

The Remington was an excellent revolver; sturdier than the contemporary Colt. That durability is reflected in the fact that Burnham apparently carried his through decades of adventure.

Huffman arrived in Montana in 1879, at the age of 25. That early arrival put him in position to capture the drama of life of the Montana prairies as it was happening, before fast-moving changes made the “Old West” an item of nostalgia. Huffman’s photographs thus make up one of the most authentic depictions of life as it was lived in the West that we have.

“He got there right after the Custer battle … he got there 20 years before Curtis did,” says my friend Larry Len Peterson, a Sisters resident who just released the third edition of his collection of Huffman’s work. “Out in the field, they were authentic images. He didn’t pose people, generally.”

Noted Western historian J. Evetts Haley said that, “For sheer versatility of significant and historic subject matter close to the range of the grass, (Huffman’s collection) surpasses them all.”

The new hardback “L. A. Huffman: Photographer of the American West” is now available.

Peterson has published a number of high-quality coffeetable books focused on artists like Charles M. Russell and sporting artist Philip R. Goodwin. The Huffman book has proven to be extraordinarily popular, selling $500,000 worth of copies in its previous two editions.

“I think it’s probably the most successful book on photography of the West of all time,” Peterson said. “These photographs capture the West better than anything in word or paint.”

In an unusual arrangement, the third-edition hardback will be available only through small, independent booksellers like Paulina Springs until next fall. According to Peterson, that decision was a conscious choice to support local economies in the West.

The photographs featured in the book come largely from the collection of Gene and Bev Allen. This edition features new material, including both parts of stereoscopic images, which were very popular in the late 19^th century.

For more information on Huffman’s work, visit www.lahuffman.com. For more information on Peterson’s work, visit www.mountain-press.com.

Tannhauser carries a wheellock rifle, an appropriate long arm for a man I regard as a proto-frontiersman of sorts. It may seem a stretch to put a rifle in the hands of a 16^th Century warrior, but it’s not. It wouldn’t have  been common armament, but such critters definitely existed.

Rifling dates back to the 15^th Century, and the wheellock was invented around 1500, probably in Germany. The lock was complicated and expensive to produce, and it was hardly soldier-proof, requiring diligent cleaning and maintenance to function reliably. While wheellock cavalry pistols caught on, long arms were mostly for hunting — though obviously a hunting rifle could serve in combat.

There is a wonderful example of a wheellock rifle attached to one of the earliest settlements in America. It is a rifled carbine believed to have been owned by John Alden of the Plymouth Colony. Known as The Mayflower Gun, it is in the NRA’s National Firearms Museum.

It started life as a .50 caliber rifle. The rifling was worn almost completely away and the bore has hollowed out to .66 caliber, but apparently the carbine-length rifle is still functional. It’s club-butted, a style that would remain popular, particularly in fowling pieces, through the 18^th Century in New England.

The NRA blog notes:

“According to markings on the barrel and lockplate, the gun was made or repaired by the Beretta family of armorers.”

How cool is that?

A more extensive article can be found here.

 “Of all the Boer generals, 37-year-old (Louis) Botha was the prodigy.”

— Thomas Pakenham, “The Boer War”

Louis Botha was the commander of the Transvaal Army in the Anglo-Boer War, a daring, resourceful and determined warrior. And, like his compatriot Jan Smuts, he proved equally impressive as a post-war statesman, leading South Africa into a close relationship with their former foe, Great Britain, earning the wrath of diehard hardliners.

With a slouch hat pinned up on the right side, a dashing Vandyke beard and a piercing eye sighting down the barrel of a Mauser, Botha looked the part of the rakish raider in the field. Yet, as South African History online notes, “A great man of action, he was renowned for his simplicity, humanity, quick wit and good nature.”

Early in the war, Botha conducted a raid on a rail line that would have done Jesse James proud. His men scattered rocks on the track on a blind curve. When their prey, a British troop train armed with a 7-pounder ship’s gun, hove into sight, the Boers opened up on it with a field gun. As expected, the engineer put on steam, highballing around the curve, and into a pile of rocks. The engine stayed on the line, but the three armored troop trucks derailed.

“From nearly a mile away, Botha’s men poured shells and bullets into the stranded steel whale, soon silencing the 7-pounder.  The upturned trucks gave little cover to the British. Some of the soldiers scattered across the veld, to be hunted down and captured.”

— Pakenham

Among the captives was a young Winston Churchill. His escape from a Boer prison camp and his account of it would make the young fellow’s reputation.

Botha and other ace Boer generals like Smuts, Christian De Wet and Koos De la Rey gave Britain, in Kipling’s phrase “no end of a lesson.” But the small Free State and Transvaal republics were eventually ground down, and the British eventually figured out an effective counterinsurgency strategy when the war degenerated into a guerilla conflict.

Botha was on the negotiating team for the Boers in peace talks that not only ended the war, but in large part allowed the Boers to win the peace.

Botha would go on to become the first prime minister of the Union of South Africa, and a close ally of his former enemy. Too close for many Boers. When World War I broke out, he took his newly-minted nation into the war on the side of the British. Many Boers were strong Germanophiles, and Botha’s actions proviked the short, savage Boer Revolt.

With that suppressed, Botha and Smuts pursued their imperial ambitions for South Africa, chasing the Germans out of their South West Africa colony.

South African troops fought valiantly in Europe and in the East Africa Campaign.

Botha participated in the Versailles Treaty (which he thought too harsh on Germany) and led a military mission to Poland during that country’s war with the new Soviet Union.

Having gone from stocky to downright fat, Botha, 56, was in declining health and he contracted influenza and pneumonia in 1919. A massive heart attack finished off one of the great badasses of Frontier Partisans history.

This from Al-Jazeera English (because you won’t see it on CNN):

Living standards for indigenous people on par with “third world” countries, buttressed by a large population of unemployed young men in a “warrior cohort”, and easy-to-target economic infrastructure, all mean Canada has conditions for a potential indigenous “insurgency”.

That’s according to a new report penned by a former Canadian military officer for the MacDonald Laurier Institute, a think-tank supported by corporate executives.

“For many Aboriginal people in Canada, but especially for First Nations women and children, life on-reserve is dreary, dark and dangerous,” wrote Douglas Bland in the report, Canada and the first Nations: Cooperation or Conflict? ”Social fractionalisation significantly increases the risk of social conflict. The phenomenon provides motives for an insurgency,” read the report, issued in May.

Bland refused interview requests from Al Jazeera, but conclusions from the Queen’s University professor emeritus and 30-year military veteran have worried the Canadian establishment, especially in light of indigenous-led protests associated with the Idle No More movement, and Canada’s increasing dependence on natural resource extraction.

Such think-tank rumination has to be taken with a grain of salt. “Insurgency” is a loaded term and “motives for an insurgency” are a long way from actual militant action. Still, this is something worth keeping an eye on, even though you won’t hear about it in a U.S. media obsessed with the sensational trial of the month and handicapping the daily D.C. bullshit cycle.

The story of John Riley and the San Patricios (The Saint Patrick Battalion) is one of the most poignant in the annals of the Frontier Partisans.

Irish immigrants who joined the U.S. Army during the Mexican War faced discrimination and brutal treatment at the hands of a Protestant officer corps that nursed an ancestral distrust for Catholics and looked down on these Famine Paddies the same way they disdained Mexicans, blacks and Indians.

John Riley was the ringleader of a group of defectors — mostly Irish, but also German Catholics and other disaffected elements, including black slaves — who identified more with the Mexican enemy than they did with the army in which they served. They formed an Irish battalion in the Mexican Army known as the Saint Patrick’s Battalion and fought hard for their co-religionist cause. It did not end well.

This fine ballad, written by Tim O’Brien and Guy Clark tells the whole story. Listen here:

John Riley came form Galway town in the years of the Irish hunger

And he sailed away to America when the country was much younger

The place was strange and work was scarce and all he knew was farming

So he followed his other Irish friends to a job in the US Army

 

Adventure calls and some men run, and this is their sad story

Some get drunk on demon rum and some get drunk on glory

 

They marched down Texas way to the banks of the Rio Grande

They built a fort on the banks above to taunt old Santa Anna

They were treated bad, paid worse, and then the fighting started

The more they fought the less they thought of the damned old US Army

 

Adventure calls and some men run, and this is their sad story

Some get drunk on demon rum and some get drunk on glory

 

When the church bells rang on Sunday morn it set his soul a shiver

He saw the Senoritas washing their hair on the far side of the river

John Riley and two hundred more Irish mercenaries

Cast their lot, right or not, south of the Rio Grande

 

Adventure calls and some men run, and this is their sad story

Some get drunk on demon rum and some get drunk on glory

 

They fought bravely under the flag of the San Patricios

Till the Yankees soldiers beat them down at the battle of Churubusco

Then fifteen men were whipped like mules

And on the cheeks were hot iron branded

Made to dig the graves of fifty more, who a hanging fate had handed

 

Adventure calls and some men run, and this is their sad story

Some get drunk on demon rum and some get drunk on glory

 

John Riley stands and drinks alone at a bar in Vera Cruz

He wonders if it matters much if you win or if you lose

I’m a man who can’t go home , a wanderer, says he

A victim of some wanderlust and divided loyalty

 

Adventure calls and some men run, and this is their sad story

Some get drunk on demon rum and some get drunk on glory

The Spanish Main was once the vastest, richest and most strategically significant American frontier. The buccaneers who sailed with the likes of Captain Sir Henry Morgan were every bit as much a force of Frontier Partisans as any ranger band.

They were guerrilla warriors of the sea, sometimes sailing as privateers under the auspices of Queen and Country and sometimes on their own hook as outright pirates. And, though it is not often portrayed, many were noted as fine shots with their long muskets.

Now their deeds are coming to the screen in a forthcoming STARZ series, “Black Sails.” The trailer has me pretty enthused. It’s STARZ, so it will come replete with plenty of gory action and umm… booty. Pulpy goodness.

Wenches!

Sez the entertainment Web site Collider:

“…the drama series takes place 20 years before the events of Robert Louis Stevenson’s classic novel ‘Treasure Island’ and centers on Captain Flint (the deceased pirate who literally put the treasure in ‘Treasure Island’) and a young Long John Silver as they fight for the defense of notorious criminal haven New Providence Island.  Based on this early trailer, it’s very clear that the show is influenced by the monster success of HBO’s ‘Game of Thrones.’”

Now yer talkin’ my language, me buckos. I have often lamented to my wife that I just can’t climb onto the “Game of Thrones” bandwagon. I want to like it, but I can’t. Not the show’s fault. I just can’t relate to the medieval setting.  She’s probably tired of hearing me say that if there was something with that Game of Thrones atmosphere and aesthetic set in “my” world, I’d be all over it. Well, lassie, perhaps we’ve found the treasure: The early 18^th Century Spanish Main… that’s in my wheelhouse.  Not quite in the X-ring, but close enough to the sweet spot.

Gentleman Bastards!

So feast yer eyes on the trailer linked above. Galleons! Gold! Wenches! Gentleman Bastards! Yo, ho, ho, etc.

And for yer listening pleasure, the finest pirate ballad ever penned: “Lover’s Wreck” by Gaelic Storm.

A hundred days at sea, A wretch away from misery
Rummies and rats and tarry jacks my only family 
The island of salvation is still a scream a way
As the lungs of the night blow out the light my heart kneels down to pray

Lord why did you take her She meant so much to me
Now I’m a wretched soul on a privateer drowning out at sea
I’m killing and I’m drinking my blue heart to black
But I swear, oh Lord, I’ll never sin again if you bring her back

Gypsy was a siren, Dripping with desire
Her moonless hair and skin so fair as warm as frozen fire
She had the loyalty of a cat, behind those pale green eyes
And through her cherry lips the devil slipped, a thousand lies
A clan of rogues and vagabonds occupied her head
That thieving band took her pale white hand and stole her from my bed
And like a ghost ship in the night she drifted out once more
To land upon the sand of another lover’s shore

Lord why did you take her she meant so much to me
Now I’m a wretched soul on a privateer drowning out at sea
I’m killing and I’m drinking my blue heart to black
But I swear, oh Lord, I’ll never sin again If you bring her back

In my sleeping mind she sings a sad and lonely lullaby
When I wake there’s just the ache that’ll haunt me till I die
When those winds of vanity no longer blow her west
I pray they’ll guide her home (across the foam) and put my heart to rest
Press gang filled this Man-o-War To make the black mouthed cannon roar
Now all my trade is ball and blade, and blood forever more
And the sting of salt and spray, the ocean’s howl and squall
A stumbling wreck, I roam the deck, at the devil’s beck and call.. at the devil’s beck and call

Lusty wenches!

Oh, Lord, why did you take her She meant so much to me
Now I’m a wretched soul on a privateer Drowning out at sea
I’m killing and I’m drinking my blue heart to black
But I swear, oh Lord, I’ll never sin again if you bring her back

Galleons!