The Totally Sketchy Reason That I'm Fascinated by Stories About the Natchez Trace

This is from Outlander,
but it totally fits the vibe

The Natchez Trace is a road that runs roughly from Natchez, Mississippi, up through Nashville,
Tennessee. Back in the olden days, it was mostly a one-way road for travelers. Here's why: once people got past the mountains, most commerce flowed down the Ohio and Mississippi Rivers. Going upstream—heading east—was brutal. So, if you were a farmer in Kentucky, Tennessee, or Ohio—basically just past the Alleghenies or Appalachians—everything you made went down the rivers to Natchez or to ports in New Orleans. From there, it got shipped around the Gulf of Mexico (yes, the fucking Gulf of Mexico), around Florida, and back up the East Coast by boat.

So, people would float their goods down the river, sell everything, and then walk back home—on the Natchez Trace. That means the Trace was full of stories. Masses of people trudging through the wilderness, walking huge expanses of land. Pirates and sketchy characters on the way down, and even more likely, highwaymen on the way back, since you were walking home with pockets full of money.

Now here’s the part that’s sketchy as hell, and why I think about it so much.

Let’s say you’re a farmer in Kentucky around 1810. You and your wife and kids spend the year harvesting crops. But to make that crop portable and valuable, you probably distill it into whiskey. You barrel it up. Then you go out into the woods, chop down a bunch of trees, and build a raft—maybe with a little shack on top. You float that raft down the river, not just to sell the whiskey, but also because you can sell the raft itself as hardwood lumber to someone building something down in New Orleans.

But here’s the part that gets dark: you might keep that shack for a couple of days. And you might set it up on the riverbank, and—here’s where it turns—start saying, “Hey, anyone wanna fuck my wife for a dollar?”

So yeah, prostitution. For some extra spending money on the long walk home.

And I said "wife," but honestly? It was probably pretty often a daughter. Which is horrifying.

What a weird country.

Jedediah asked his sister to come this time, too

Happy Thanksgiving 2024!

 

Blood Meridian

 

Staring into the Campfire

At the end of the summer this year I spent almost eight days camping in a patch of desert called Salt Flat, TX.  Every morning Mrs. Slap and I got up just after sunrise and cooked breakfast; when it started to get hot we went up into the Guadalupe Mountains to hike; towards sunset we found some shade, made dinner, then watched the nightly dance.  Sunset in the mountains to the west, Milky Way spiraling overhead, full blood red moon rising over the mountains in the east.  On a busy day we might see five other people.

What passes for reality set in with work, crowds, politics, inflation, family, war, plague all crushing in as we got back to civilization.  I wasn’t right for days.  Weeks.  Months.  I miss it.

I think often about a pair of conversations in the film Jeremiah Johnson:

Bear Claw Chris Lapp: [Seeing the striped military trousers Jeremiah's wearing] Missed another war down there, hmm?

…and later…

Jeremiah Johnson: How does the war go?

Lt. Mulvey: Which war?

Jeremiah Johnson: The war against the President of Mexico.

Lt. Mulvey: Why, it's over.

Jeremiah Johnson: Who won?

No one wins.  The war in Ukraine is going to drag on into another attritional trench war for years, or someone is going to have to decide to cede the East to Russia.  The war in Gaza is… I have no idea where that was going.  Anyone with sense can tell that Iran pushed Hamas into attacking with a bunch a crazy “hail mary”s hoping to provoke an over-response from Israel that would pause or cancel the impending Saudi-Israel formal alliance that was in the works.  I doubt anyone thought Hamas would get as far or do as much damage as it did, or that Israel would have to save face with an endless shock & campaign followed by a ground invasion.  This is the Iran-Saudi cold war turned very hot, and it’s bringing in resources from all over.  Including every American’s tax dollars which are going to munitions fired into Gaza.  All because someone in Tehran got a smart idea.  And people are going to forget about the 1,200 deaths and innumerable attrocities in Israel as the body count goes well into the tens of thousands in Gaza.  No one wins.

And then there’s Trump, who might still be President again despite it all.  The average life expectancy for a male in the US is 77.28 years.  Maybe nature will play the odds and clear the slate.  I’m still holding out for a Romney-Manchin 3^rd party run. 

Via con dios, pards.

Happy Thanksgiving 2023!

 

Happy Thanksgiving 2022!

 

"How come pale face always take more than he can eat?"

Puritan Burlesque to Prepare You For an Early Frontier Thanksgiving

 

Ravenous: “Eat to live. Don’t live to eat.”

Have you seen this movie yet?  If not, do so with utmost haste.  It really is a marvel, and if I write very much about it I will be giving away some of the great twists.  In short, Ravenous is the story of a US Army officer who, after being grievously wounded in the Mexican War, is assigned to a sparsely populated “fort” in deep in a mountainous frontier.  Things go… strangely, and a substantial amount of mayhem, murder, and madness ensue.  Add in fantastic acting (from Guy Pearce, Robert Carlyle, Jeffrey Jones, Jeremy Davies, John Spencer, Neal McDonough and David Arquette), beautiful scenery, and a haunting score, and it’s a winner. 

It might be a horror movie, a cannibal movie, and/or a western, and one film critic saw it as a gay romance.  See it and let me know.

Quick Shots: Texas Rising

 Boy, do I love the Texas Rising miniseries that the History Channel put out.  Except, well…

The costumes are great but off by about 20 years.

Santa Anna deserved a better actors than Oliver Martinez.

I’m usually not one to shout “RACISM!!!” like an SJW, but what’s the deal with Amen Igbinosun’s portrayal of Nate?

At some point, someone has to acknowledge that slavery was illegal in Mexico and a big motivator for the revolution was the expansion of slavery-based cotton farming.

The quickdraws with flintlocks looked ridiculous.

At least it’s more historical than Ancient Aliens and Pawn Storage Wars.

Besides all that, I really enjoyed it.  The series has a great feel to it, a pretty wide group of interesting characters, and I really enjoyed the “not quite soldiers, not quite outlaws” nature of the Rangers.  They also did a nice job of seating the Texas Revolution as an engagement between nations and all the accompanying geopolitics.  If you want to break out from the typical western, see some great (if slightly anachronistic) costumes, and catch some snappy dialog by great actors, check out a few episodes.  It's a shame there's not season 2, I would have loved their promised take on the Comanche Wars.

Oh, and the “Yellow Rose of Texas”, the mixed-race prostitute that saved Texas by spying on the Mexican army, plays a prominent (and sometimes) naked role.

Complaining About The Comancheros

Pandemic, death, cancer, inflation, political instability, people who won’t wear their stupid masks at the gym… of all the things happening in the world, you know what really ticks me off today?

The Comancheros, starring and ghost-directed by John Wayne.

It’s been nearly a year since I watched it and it till makes me mad for being a stupid piece of trash.  Here’s my biggest beeves with this crapfest:

• The main character, Paul Regret, starts the story in 1843 New Orleans by killing a US Army officer in a duel over a woman.  He flees the country for the then-independent Republic of Texas. Despite his name, he never shows regret over the killing.  This is our hero.  
• The main character, Paul Regret, starts the story in 1843 New Orleans by killing a US Army officer in a duel over a woman.  He flees the country for the then-independent Republic of Texas. Despite his name, he never shows regret over the killing.  This is our hero.
• The movie goes on with a range of shootouts, Indian attacks, and double crossing.  The “Comanches” look like someone’s idea of northern plains Cheyenne from central casting, and their scenes are mostly just groups riding in formation at the camera with lots of disjointed yelling and shooting in the air.  If you’ve noticed the label “Outdated Cultural Reference” on movies lately, it’s because of nonsense like this.
• By the end of the film, the entire body of Texas Rangers (led by Wayne) outright lies to United States authorities about Regret’s whereabouts and actions so he can avoid being held responsible for his actions.  Again, these are the heroes.

Why does this film still bother me, a year after I watched it?  Perhaps because it’s a little close to the “Ra! Ra! Truth, Justice, American Way! Law & Order! As long as it’s convenient and doesn’t conflict with my poorly defined sense of personal freedom!  January 6 was an FBI plot!  It was ANTIFA!  It was a peaceful protest!  F your feelings!  Own the libs!” attitude that my least favorite cable news promotes.

Qanon Shaman and Congressman Gaetz would fit right in with Wayne's Texas Rangers

(Before the flame begins, IMHO their competitor is almost as bad and I find John Stewart and Rush Limbaugh equally contemptable).

The Comancheros is also filled with a bewildering number of errors and anachronisms that a viewer with an even vague grasp of history and geography will note; the following list comes (with light editing) from the Internet Movie Database.

• The shootouts use guns that are completely anachronistic; the guns used in the movie are Colt single action revolvers model 1873, Henry lever action rifle look-alikes model 1860, and Winchester lever action rifles model 1892. The only correct period guns used were the single-shot percussion-cap dueling pistols used in the opening scene
•  John Wayne is shown wearing a Texas Ranger Badge. These badges were not introduced until the 1880s, 37 years after the year the movie story takes place (1843).
• There is a reference of guns being stolen from Fort Sill and a character having served five years in Yuma Territorial Prison. As the film is supposedly set before 1848, neither is possible. Yuma Territorial Prison was opened in 1876, while Fort Sill was first established in 1869. Both occurred after Texas voted to become a state.
• The movie takes place in 1843, but the song Red Wing (sung at various times throughout the movie) was not written until 1907.
• The White cowboy characters wear vaquero-style cowboy boots which were not commonly worn by Americans until around the time of the Civil War. Anglos did not wear vaquero style clothing as that could have resulted in their being mistaken for Mexicans or even the eponymous Comancheros, the film's antagonists.
• The majority of characters, including the lead actors, are shown to be clean-shaven which was rare at the time, especially outside of areas where clean water wasn't readily available. Additionally, most men wore at least a mustache, if not a full beard as it was the fashion at the time.
• Several characters wear pants with belts running through the available belt loops even though this was not the custom until the 1920s at the earliest.
• Paul Regret (Stuart Whitman) mentions to Melinda Marshall (Joan O'Brien} that he understands that her husband had been dead for four years. She answers that he was killed at the Battle of San Jacinto. The movie takes place in 1843 and the Battle of San Jacinto was fought in 1836, seven years earlier, not four.
• Wayne’s character is supposedly taking Regret back to New Orleans, Louisiana from Galveston, Texas after they get off the paddle wheel steamboat. The land on that route along the Gulf coast of Texas and East Texas does not have mountains, buttes or mesas.
• The Texas Rangers are presented like a squad that congregated around a headquarters and rode out like a posse. In fact, there were very few rangers and each was assigned a territory of thousands of square miles. Modern day rangers have offices in various locations around the state with a handful assigned to each office.
• The central headquarters in Austin, as depicted, is in an arid location surrounded by mesas, sand and scrub. In fact, Austin is very green, filled with rivers and lakes, and has the same relative humidity as Honolulu, Hawaii.

Watch it for the scenes with Lee Marvin, though, he’s great.

Quickshots- Call Down Thunder

 

I’m aging myself to think that anyone remembers the old Disney movie Davy Crocket and the River Pirates, but if you do you may remember Mike Fink, King of the River.  In that movie Fink was a bully juxtaposed against the good hearted King of the Wild Frontier.  The light but great Call Down Thunder by Kerry Newcomb follows Mike Fink’s career from a young ranger in frontier Pittsburgh to a keelboat captain along the Mississippi through the Red Stick War and Battle of New Orleans.  Fink’s more of the good hearted King in this book, and Newcomb introduces a different sociopathic bully riverman counterpoint that mirror’s Disney’s Fink and serves as the main villain for the story.  Bloody fights, frontier mayhem, and a little bit of sexy times makes for one of my favorite reads.

Gaming notes- As usual, I’ve spent way too much time trying to make Mike Fink as a D&D character (in Pathfinder a good River Kingdoms rogue/ranger/horizon walker or barbarian/river druid, maybe even a skjald if you like the hybrid classes). 

 

Manifest Destiny- Lewis & Clark & Monsters

Every friendship needs a Lewis and a Clark.  This was the conclusion of one of my closest friend, President Thomas Jefferson, as we gathered to ruminate on life one day.  One to be a starry-eyed dreamer, one to confront reality.  We conducted this conversation as His Excellency and I switched roles in our friendship, where my Meriwether Lewis years of being a student of history and philosophy were being overtaken by a life of Clark-style tearing up the corporate ladder, interspersed with adventures on mountains and in deserts.  In honor of this notion of our friendship His Excellency, who has settled into the role of Lewis to my Clark, gave me the graphic novel Manifest Destiny, the true story of why Thomas Jefferson sent Lewis & Clark to the West.

President Jefferson implores you to go West

Vampires.  Monsters.  Buffalo minotaurs.  Crazy plant creatures that turn you into walking moss.  Yes, the French conned us back is in 1802, because the Louisiana Purchase was just one vast Dungeons & Dragons adventure.

In the kind of story that works best in comic books, Manifest Destiny tells an alternate version of the Lewis & Clark expedition, including the secret, undocumented army of river rats and convicts brought up river as cannon fodder and Sacajawea’s warrior princess skills.  The keelboat is full of guns, wooden stakes, and Greek fire, and our heroes dutifully slay monsters with dreamy wistfulness or ruthless precision, as fits their particular styles. 

For all the wilderness adventure and original monsters, Manifest Destiny excels as a character driven story.  The relationship between the two men has been explored in Steven Ambrose’s Undaunted Courage and in M. R. Montgomery’s Jefferson & the Gun-Men.  But while Manifest Destiny is a fictional fantasy, I felt like I got to understand the nature of the two men, particularly the violent and taciturn Clark, in a way that I haven't before.

Manifest Destiny!  Still being published monthly by Image, with two trade volumes out and a third on the way.  Go buy a copy today!

Smart, Horny, Foolish, Outdoorsy

I started writing in this blog years ago as a way to define what I liked most about westerns.  While my enthusiasm to write regularly has waned, my enthusiasm for westerns has not.  My definition of a “western” is quite wide, meaning almost anything taking place between the late 17^th century and the early 20^th century on a North American frontier.  It was while reading The Dakota Cipher, third in William Dietrich’s series about Napoleonic era rapscallion Ethan Gage, that I stumbled upon the recipe for a perfect western.  A perfect western should take place in the time and place described above, and have a hero who is smart, horny, foolish, and outdoorsy.   

Allow me to explain.  A good yarn should allow the audience to identify with the characters and at the same time have elements of wish fulfillment. 

I have a fondness for main characters that are smart and horny, because, well, that’s me.  It sounds pompous to say that I’m smart, but it’s true (despite what a lack of solid proofreading in this blog might suggest).  As to horny, a quick tour through this blog (particularly anything tagged Randy Cowpoke) will show that is an apt description as well. 

Foolish?  Let’s instead call that prone to acting with without thinking, and the start of the wish fulfillment phase.  I typically think before acting, drink very little, never gamble, and rarely exceed the speed limit.  Frankly, it’s boring, and in fiction I love when otherwise smart characters leap into danger without forethought as I long to do, especially when their boldness is rewarded when danger slaps them upside the head.

Let’s turn outdoorsy into at home in the wilderness.  The older I get the more handy I become in the woods, the desert, the mountains, the river, and with a kayak, tent, fire, and axe.  I’m still no mountain man and would probably go under after a week alone in the woods (mostly because of my cardiac issues).  In my dreams, though, I read the wilderness like the back of my hand as I stride through the plains and can capably fell deer and owlhoots alike with a smokestick, tomahawk, or my bare fists.

So let’s take a look at some of my favorite characters and how they stack up.

George MacDonald Fraser’s Flashman

Smart, stupidly horny, undoubtedly foolish, but although his adventures often take place in far flung frontiers he is much more at home in the parlor. 

Any hero in a Louis L’Amour story

Smart and outdoorsy to a man, but rarely horny and seldom foolish.

Robert E. Howard’s Breckenridge Elkins

Somewhat horny, very foolish, so outdoorsy he barely fits between four walls, but Breck can hardly be considered smart (I’ve mapped him out as a D&D character many times, never with an intelligence greater than 7).

William Dietrich’s Ethan Gage

Now this is the stuff.  Gage is smart.  He’s a savant, a scientist of the Ben Franklin persuasion, known as a master of electricity in a world still lit by candles.  After a spell at Harvard he spent time as a fur trapper in the Great Lakes, learning woodscraft, sharpshooting, and tomahawking.  Gage then made his way to Paris during the Revolution, and picked up the habit of leaping into danger, usually also involving first leaping between the legs of whatever woman happened to available at the time.

Gage is “lazy as an aristocrat, but without the manners,” and finds himself in various adventures across the globe, often as not tied to ancient mystical conspiracies.  In one spectacular tale (the aforementioned Dakota Cipher) Gage tumbles in and out of Louisa Bonaparte’s petticoats before hightailing it to the wilderness of North America, running from cultists and British spies while searching for, of all things...

 

Don't fuck with Thor's hammer

Sadly, I don’t believe that Dietrich managed to take Ethan Gage back to North America over the course of the series, which was cut short at eight books out of a planned fifteen.  Gage does set a high bar for the smart, horny, foolish, outdoorsy hero that I love to read about.

Gay Space Cowboy

Recently a gaming buddy suggested that we take a break from our Pathfinder D&D game and try the new Star Wars system.  He asked if I would rather play a scoundrel on the edge of the frontier or a rebel against the Empire.  I deliberated for some time (I love the frontier, but the chance to try out an ahimsa insurgent?) until he got bored, finished his beer, and found someone else to talk to.  Late last night, though, the answer struck me.  Frontier, of course, because in what other game would I have a chance to play…

A Gay Space Cowboy.

Rainbow Rocket Ranger to the Rescue!  The Empire will never see him coming.  So here are some space cowboys, or gay cowboys, or gay space cowboys, for you to consider.