The Frontier Partisans Podcast

The primed musket of conflict finally goes off, with devastating impact on the Plymouth Colony community of Swansea. This episode lays out the strategic and tactical advantages and disadvantages held by the Wampanoag and Puritan settler combatants, and describes the way a conflict that might have been contained escaped that containment and became a widening and extremely destructive war across New...

When the Pilgrims landed in Plymouth in 1620, they found allies and partners in the Wampanoag people. For a generation that alliance was beneficial to both peoples. But by 1675, the partnership had broken down and the Wampanoag and the Plymouth settlers found themselves on teh brink of war. Works cited: So Dreadfull a Judgment: Puritan Responses to King Philip’s War, 1676–1677; Richard Slotkin, Ja...

Tiburcio Vasquez was a rock star. He had everything that a bandit needs to become a folk hero. He was handsome and charismatic, a swashbuckler who carried an air of daring and danger — but he could plausibly claim that he’d never taken a life. He could — and did — claim to be a rebel fighting for the oppressed. The image doesn’t hold up to much scrutiny, but since when has that mattered? People wa...

The ambush slaying of Sheriff James R. Barton and three of his deputies in January of 1857 was the worst act of violence against law enforcement in Los Angeles history until the Newhall Incident of 1970, when four highway patrolmen were gunned down during a traffic stop north of the city. The Barton killing led to a massive manhunt and an orgy of savage vigilante violence. Here’s how it went down....

The story of the murder of cowboy and ranchero John Rains has all of the classic elements of LA Noir crime fiction — greed, dysfunctional families, foul murder and wild gunplay. Only this tale took place in the 1860s, when Los Angeles was a wild frontier town. Support The Frontier Partisans Blog and Podcast through Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/frontierpartisans Music: Blue Frontier by Jim Corn...

The Spanish ranchos of Southern California bred some of the finest horses to be found in North America. this made them a target for freebooting Mountain Men and Indians, who raided the ranchos and drove off thousands of horses across the Mojave Desert to sell into the ravenous markets of the Southwest and Southern Rockies. Support The Frontier Partisans Blog and Podcast through Patreon: https://ww...

If anyone ever deserved hanging, it was David Brown. A scalphunter with the notorious Glanton Gang, David Brown survived the gang’s demise and continued his career of violent mayhem in 1850s Los Angeles. One murder too many put him at the end of a hangman’s rope. Here’s a link to a fine musical telling of Davy Brown’s story... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1fOZ0GCb9b0 Support The Frontier Partis...

Los Angeles is steeped in real-deal frontier history — it’s just buried under acres of cement in what L.A. writer D.J. Waldie called “the landscape of amnesia.” So join me and let’s rip up some cement and rattle the bones of the Frontier Partisan history that lies beneath it.    Support The Frontier Partisans Blog and Podcast through Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/frontierpartisans Music: Blue F...

The Jameson Raid, which took place at the turn of the year 1895/96, in the Transvaal in Southern Africa, was one of the most spectacular military cock-ups of all time. The Raiders, who had the backing of the imperialist diamonds-and-gold magnate Cecil Rhodes, and the tacit support of British Colonial Secretary Joseph Chamberlain, was supposed to be in support of a rising of aggrieved Uitlanders in...

William Walker dreamed imperial dreams, and thousands would die amid the destruction his visions wrought in Mexico and Nicaragua. Including him. Ultimately, his dream would end at the rifle muzzles of a Honduran firing squad. Support The Frontier Partisans Blog and Podcast through Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/frontierpartisans Music: Blue Frontier by Jim Cornelius Graphics by Lynn Woodward, Wo...

Filibuster is a corruption of a Dutch word meaning “freebooter.” As in buccaneer. As in semi-piratical adventurer. Filibustering is a privately raised and funded military expedition into a country with which America was at peace, for the purpose of fomenting revolution and/or secession. The filibusters would then either run the country as an American-loyal personal fiefdom or seek annexation to th...

There’s no dramatic season finale to Pontiac’s War — and no clear winner, either. The British Empire was able to not only retain but fully secure its new holdings in the interior of North America — but they were forced to reassess their policies toward the native peoples and reverse or mitigate the high-handed policies that had provoked the insurgency in the first place. And the actions the Britis...

Pontiac’s War took on a different character in the forests of western Pennsylvania — territory the British colonists thought of as “the backcountry,” while the Delaware, Shawnee and Mingo of the Ohio Country saw it as lands that had been lost to them — and the edge of an encroaching frontier. The small but devastating raids on the Pennsylvania frontier created widespread terror, and set patterns t...

Pontiac’s forces besiege Fort Detroit. Treachery and bloody firefights and ambushes ensue. The war that would shape the North American frontier is underway in earnest. Support The Frontier Partisans Blog and Podcast through Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/frontierpartisans Music: Blue Frontier by Jim Cornelius Graphics by Lynn Woodward, Woodward Creative

The Siege of Detroit begins, and British posts fall like dominos through the Great Lakes and Illinois Country. Support The Frontier Partisans Blog and Podcast through Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/frontierpartisans Music: Blue Frontier by Jim Cornelius Graphics by Lynn Woodward, Woodward Creative

Victorious in the French & Indian War, Great Britain sought to assert its dominance over the interior of North America. The Indian peoples of the region did not see themselves as a conquered people. As British officials sought to reset terms of trade relationships, trouble began brewing — trouble that would, in 1763,  rip open the frontier in a spasm of extreme violence. Support The Frontier Parti...

After tragedy in Rhodesia, Frederick Russell Burnham and his family pulled up stakes and sought fortune in the Klondike Gold Rush of 1897-98. But the quest for fortune would be interrupted by the trumpet call of war, and Brunham would return to Africa to serve as Chief of Scouts for the British Army in South Africa. Further reading: Scouting On Two Continents — Frederick Russell Burnham A Splendid...

Frederick Russell Burnham dreamed of Africa. In 1893, he and his wife Blanche and their young son Roderick set out to make those dreams a reality — and they rode straight into war.  Further reading: Scouting On Two Continents — Frederick Russell Burnham A Splendid Savage: The Restless Life of Frederick Russel Burnham — Steve Kemper An American Family on the African Frontier — Mary and Richard Brad...

Frederic Russell Burnham was a romantic who aspired from his youth to be a frontier scout. On his own on the Arizona frontier as a teenager, he apprenticed to old-timers and trained himself in the skills he prized — and tested himself in feud and on patrol in the late days of the Apache wars. Further reading: Scouting On Two Continents — Frederick Russell Burnham Taking Chances — Frederick Russell...

Johannes Lodewikus Lee was one of the more wayward and eccentric hunters who penetrated the interior of southern Africa in the middle of the 19th Century, on the hunt for elephant ivory. He loved many women — though not well — and sired a great brood of children while building a weird stone castle, and shooting himself into a modest fortune. You can now support The Frontier Partisans Blog and Podc...

Frederick Courteney Selous dreamed of Africa as a youth, and ultimately became a frontier hunter in the 1870s and 1880s, then a pioneer of what would become Rhodesia. His books on hunting adventures in southern Africa remain classics of the genre and they would make him famous and a friend to luminaries from President Theodore Roosevelt to the bestselling novelist H. Rider Haggard. In 1896, he wou...

Frederick Courteney Selous dreamed of Africa as a youth, and ultimately became a frontier hunter in the 1870s and 1880s, then a pioneer of what would become Rhodesia. His books on hunting adventures in southern Africa remain classics of the genre and they would make him famous and a friend to luminaries from President Theodore Roosevelt to the bestselling novelist H. Rider Haggard. You can now sup...

Coenraad de Buys was larger than life in every way — a giant of a man, a frontier hunter, trekker and rebel. Frontiers: The Epic of South Africa's Creation and the Tragedy of the Xhosa People You can now support The Frontier Partisans Blog and Podcast through Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/frontierpartisans Music: Blue Frontier by Jim Cornelius Graphics by Lynn Woodward, Woodward Creative

An introduction to the Southern African frontier and the tribe of Boer hunters who trekked into the interior of this wild and beautiful land. You can now support The Frontier Partisans Blog and Podcast through Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/frontierpartisans Music: Blue Frontier by Jim Cornelius Graphics by Lynn Woodward, Woodward Creative

With the dying of the Rocky Mountain Fur Trade, Jim Bridger founded a trading post to serve emigrants. He would also lead numerous hunting, military and scientific expeditions across his beloved mountain West. Additional reading: Jim Bridger: Trailblazer of the American West by Jerry Enzler You can now support The Frontier Partisans Blog and Podcast through Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/frontie...