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!

“Alone Yet Not Alone” is based on a popular novel of the same title. The author has novelized a family story of her German immigrant ancestors, raided by the Delaware during the conflict.

The novel is marketed as “Christian fiction,” and matters of faith are clearly a dominant theme. In our secular age, it is hard to recognize the importance of religious faith on the early frontier. The German settlers were particularly devout. The captivity narrative as a story of faith and redemption: Presenting the story through that lens is true to the source material in a way that is is unexpected in 2013.

The trailer for the movie looks striking — costuming is top-notch, period-appropriate. Afraid the acting looks a little sketchy, and I am wary of any storytelling that wears its message too heavily. There is one scene in the trailer that is freighted with contemporary politics to a degree that it made me snort derisively.  Not a good thing.

And I have a hunch that the portrayal of the Indians will raise a few hackles, although I would argue that it appears, again, faithful to the source material. It may be uncomfortable for folks in 2013, but the settlers of the early frontier had reason to see the Indians as frightful savages. We have the luxury of distance, which helps us recognize that the Indians had reason to see whites as a scourge, but that’s not the story this movie is telling.

From the trailer and the promotional materials, it appears that no one will accuse the makers of “Alone, Yet Not Alone” of being PC in their depiction of the Indians, apparently Delaware.

In any case, a film in this setting done seriously is a good thing. I doubt it will get wide theatrical release, but I’ll be keeping an eye out for it on Netflix or DVD.

Here’s the official synopsis:

 The year is 1755, and the English colonies are being ravaged by the atrocities of war.
Opposing European powers have clashed over the fertile Ohio valley, and entire families are devastated by the ensuing violence. Hostile native tribes are raiding the vulnerable frontier farms, and two young sisters are among those taken captive.

While hoping for rescue and return to their home, they are comforted with the words of a family hymn: Alone Yet Not Alone. But when the sisters are suddenly and cruelly separated, their tender faith is brought to a stretching point.

Forcibly immersed into a primitive foreign culture, the older sister, Barbara, clings to her beliefs. Yet now a deeper fate threatens, and she makes a difficult decision: to risk her life in an attempt to escape.

Pursued by a relentless and cunning warrior, Barbara and her three fellow captives must cross over two hundred miles of raw wilderness in their effort to reach friendly territory.

Will their courage and trust in God be enough to see them through? And if they do succeed, will they find their family? Will Barbara ever see her sister again?
Alone Yet Not Alone depicts the riveting true story of a family at a critical juncture in our nation’s history.

 

 

Do we need another Tombstone book? Journalist Jeff Guinn apparently thinks so — and it turns out his “The Last Gunfight: The Real Story of the Shootout at the O.K. Corral-And How It Changed the American West” is well worth the time I spent listening to the unabridged audio.

If you want to get straight to the shooting, this book ain’t for you. Guinn takes the reader on a leisurely exploration of the phenomenon of a late-Victorian mining boomtown. For me, that’s the value of the book —it paints a vivid picture of the boom-bust economics and high-stakes personal politics that drove the action on the frontier.

Tombstone, Arizona — This ain’t no place for no hero…

Guinn is evenhanded and dispassionate in his approach to the old story. Wyatt Earp comes off as a very tough man who could never quite put things together in a way that would give him the money and status he craved. Not a hero, not a villain — just a hard man on the make who couldn’t quite make it.

Some of the negative reviews on Amazon.com would have you think the book is an “anti-Earp” screed, which is ridiculous and reveals more about the psychological needs of the reviewers than it does about the book.

Guinn does a good job of laying out the dynamics that built like a thunderstorm over the southeast Arizona desert. If the Earps are not portrayed as heroes per se, certainly Guinn isn’t taking up for the “cowboy” faction. They may not be the red-sash gangsters of the movie “Tombstone,” but they are clearly rustlers and outlaws. Guinn makes their world-view understandable but he doesn’t whitewash them. Nor does he — thank god — turn them into victims of class warfare or call them “pastoralists” as Paula Mitchel Marks did in “And Die in the West.”

The gunfight, which actually took place in a lot on Fremont Street, was an unfortunate affair built as such affrays so often are, out of pride, misperception of motives, miscommunication and the venality of some of the players — specifically the lush and coward Ike Clanton and the slimy politician Sheriff Johnny Behan.

Nobody came out the winner from the Tombstone showdown. Obviously not the “cowboys” who met their maker in the brief exchange, but nor did the Earps ultimately fare well.

I think the importance of events in Tombstone is oversold — and not just by Guinn. It’s certainly an interesting, complex and exciting tale, but I personally think the Lincoln County War in New Mexico has more to say about commerce, conflict and politics in the West than this sorry affair. But that’s by the way; the books a good ’un; I’m glad I spent a few hours on it.

The Vatican has apparently revealed what is believed to be the first European painting of the Indians — dating to just two years after the first voyage of Christopher Columbus.

From The Telegraph (UK):

The group of tiny figures was discovered during the restoration of a magnificent fresco, owned by the Vatican, which depicts Christ’s Resurrection.

The painting, by the Renaissance master Pinturicchio, was finished in 1494, just two years after Christopher Columbus first set foot in the New World.

It has adorned the walls of the Borgia Apartments in the Vatican for 500 years but was only recently subjected to restoration work.

The naked men, who appear to be dancing, were spotted by a restorer, Maria Pustka, as she removed centuries of grime.

Thanks to Ralphus over at “Flintlock & Tomahawk” for the heads-up.

From Fox News: Doug Owsley, division head for Physical Anthropology at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History, displays the skull and facial reconstruction of “Jane of Jamestown” during a news conference at the museum in Washington.

From the Los Angeles Times this morning:

The early American settlers called it “the starving time,” and accounts of the winter of 1609-1610 were so ghastly, and so morbid, that scholars weren’t sure if the stories were true.

George Percy, then president of the English settlement of Jamestown in Virginia, wrote that settlers ate horses, then cats and dogs, then boots and bits of leather, and, finally, one another.

“One of our colony murdered his wife, ripped the child out of her womb and threw it into the river, and after chopped the mother in pieces and salted her for his food,” wrote Percy, who then ordered the man executed.

“Now whether she was better roasted, boyled or carbonado’d [barbecued], I know not, but of such a dish as powdered wife I never heard of,” added the famed settler John Smith. “This was that time, which still to this day we called the starving time; it were too vile to say, and scarce to be beleeved, what we endured.”

Until now: Researchers said Wednesday that they have discovered the first forensic proof that cannibalism happened at Jamestown during one of its darkest periods.

 

The Smithsonian’s lengthy press release can be found here.

I pulled a chair up in the garage, looking out on the trees, and fired up the laptop to watch the PBS American Experience documentary on Billy the Kid.

It’s well worth the 53 minutes. All that was missing was a good cigar.

The doc features some fine historians and storytellers. Frederick Nolan is the ace Billy the Kid scholar. His “The West of Billy the Kid” is one of the very best volumes of Frontier Partisans history ever produced. Then there’s Kid biographer Michael Wallis, historian Paul Hutton and Western historian and writer Drew Gomber.

The telling of the Kid’s story hits just the right note, creating an understanding of how an orphan kid in the mining camps, hustling to survive, would stray into petty criminal activity. Twice it is noted that when Billy had a chance to go straight — working for English rancher John Tunstall and receiving a pardon from Gov. Lew Wallace — he took it.

Henry Antrim, alias Billy the Kid, wasn’t bad to the bone. He wasn’t a sociopath like John Wesley Hardin or Jesse James. He was a hard luck kid, a juvenile delinquent who became an outlaw n large part by force of circumstances.

The documentary also does a good job of laying out the sordid state of New Mexico commerce and politics in the 1870s. Lincoln County, where Billy found his fame, was run by a pair of ruthless operators Named Lawrence Murphy and Jimmy Dolan, known colloquially as The House. They more closely resemble urban mobsters than any Western stereotype.

When the young Englishman, John Tunstall, tried to horn in on their action, The House’s bought-and-paid for sheriff put together a hit squad posse and murdered him.

Billy and Tunstall’s other hands formed the Regulators to exact revenge, which included shooting Sheriff Brady to doll rags in an ambush on the streets of Lincoln. Billy would become a preeminent warrior in the nasty Lincoln County War.

“The remarkable thing about the Kid is that he’s the only one of the ‘soldiers’ who was in every single skirmish, every fight, every faceoff, every ‘no you don’t — and he just kept getting better at it.”

—   Frederick Nolan, on Billy’s role with the Regulators in the Lincoln County War

Billy really did play the role of the social bandit, warring with a corrupt establishment.

As historian E. A. Mares notes:

“The people he was fighting against, even the  ones who were on the side of the law, were crooks!”

On the other hand, as New Mexico Governor Bill Richardson notes, he was also a cop killer and a thief.

The Hispanic folk of New Mexico liked the Kid because he liked them — and they also liked someone taking it to the Anglo sharpers who were in the process of stealing the whole territory.

In the end, it was Billy’s connection to that community that would do him in. He should have cut and run like most of the surviving Regulators did, but he had a girlfriend named Paulita Maxwell, and we all know what we were like when we were 21 years old and stupid in love.

Pat Garrett tracked him down in Fort Sumner and gunned him down. The AE piece makes no bones about the fact that Garrett got the bulge on the Kid and shot him down without giving him a chance to either surrender or fight.

Overall, it’s a sympathetic but realistic  portrait of a legendary outlaw.

The film is part of the American Experience Wild West Collection, which includes documentaries on Wyatt Earp and Geronimo, (available through Netflix streaming), Jesse James, Buffalo Bill and more. The Earp bio is equally good, and the Geronimo piece is excellent, too.

Next up: Annie Oakley. And a cigar.