Scouting on Two Continents by R. R. Burnham [Part 3] by Mark Hatmaker

 

We continue with the lessons we can reap from master scout of the Southwest American Frontier & Africa, Mr. Burnham. See Part 1, and Part 2 for full immersion.]

“At this time, I used to practise incessantly with the pistol, with both right and left hands, and especially from a galloping horse.”

·        How you train is how you will fight.

·        Static range time was not the way of these early Hosses.

·        Movement and chaotic movement at that.

Mr. Burnham advises that we learn more from rough times than we do the every day nice and easy times we wallow in, day in, day out.

“In order to know life as it really is, it is necessary once in a while to be the under dog.”

Ask yourself, who is the wiser, the man in the field doing it or the man on the couch viewing the how-to video?

“As compared to Arizona, California seemed a free and happy country where Law reigned but, at that time, was not carried to the point of prescribing what one should say, write, think, eat, drink, love, or hate. The Reformers had not arrived, but if a crime was committed, the offender was usually captured and punished.”

·        Proscriptive laws/mores were hard and fast for the Universal Ethical Standards.

·        The hewing to party creed and punctilios of this or that fashion, not so much.

·        Freedom, responsibility and disdain of lockstep were of higher value.

On lessons learned from the stark Apache Ways.

“Most amateur sleuths and scouts would quit the vigil after three days, and many after one day, but an Apache will lie on a rocky point for many days and make no trail or sign. His whole equipment consists of a gourd of water, a piece of dried meat or jerky, and a little mescal, mesquite beans, or a handful of parched corn meal. Every film of smoke, dust cloud, or glint of light on the desert below will be noted, as well as the flight of every bird and the movements of the few desert animals. Patience, patience, and then more patience! The Indian scout will make a little buried fire of smokeless dry twigs, warm up the ground all the afternoon, bury the embers under the earth, and then lie on the warm spot until toward morning, when it will have cooled again. Then he will make a tiny fire of two crossed sticks, wrap his blanket around him, if he has one, and doze and freeze by turns until the sun once more brings warmth and another day of silence and watching.”

Ask yourself, many of us think of ourselves as Hombres/Hombrettes with grit for a core, how do you stack up against this standard?

On the Apache and like cultures he admires.

“What the white scout has to learn from the Indian is the power to endure loneliness, as well as stoical indifference to physical pain. The Boers of the high veldt, the Tauregs and Bedouins of the desert, and the Apaches, have this power in a superlative degree.”

On making gear choices based on Indigenous experience.

“You keep with you your light shoes or Mexican tawas (a kind of moccasin and legging combined, and very useful in a thorny country.)”

·        I can vouch—I have tested top-rated desert hiking boots in desert and cactus country and moccasins.

·        The moccasins won hands down for contact, comfort and raising the attention game.

A trail-running hack from Mr. Burnham. [Hundreds upon hundreds of such tips and tactics in our upcoming book on El Camino del Hombre del País [Way of the Man of the Country.]

“Again my legs took command — and no Apache could compete. I ran with a strange sense of strength, clinging to the trail, and at dark I reached a sandy arroyo where I doubled on my trail for a hundred yards and then threw myself flat on my back and put my heels on a bit of driftwood a few inches higher than my head. This relieves blood pressure better than anything else I know, and eases the breathing.”

[On the lost art of Indian Running—we revive this skill in the aforementioned book El Camino del Hombre del País [Way of the Man of the Country.]

 

“It was my good fortune to find service, at one time or another, under such remarkable men as Al Sieber, Archie McIntosh, and Fred Sterling. Every commanding officer in the Apache wars suffered from lack of information as to where the Indians were and from the difficulty of getting in touch with them. It was for this reason that Crook, Miles, Chaffee, and Lawton made frequent use of fast-running Indian scouts. It is a mistake to suppose that a cowboy is a fleet man in the mountains. He is a superb horseman, but he will trudge miles to catch a horse so that he may ride a mile. There are very few white men who can or will make long runs on foot, and no horseman can overtake an Apache on foot in rough mountains such as those of Arizona. Through the Indian games of my childhood and my hunting afoot in the mountains of California, I had developed a swift and silent pace which enabled me to scout in the Apache, country without fear of being caught, even if sighted. For an untrained white man to be seen in an Indian country is to be caught if the Indians so mind. There were a few old-time trappers who could out-foot the Apaches, but they were already old men when I was on the frontier.”

[See our article on Apache Running for more insight.]

Much more to be learned from Mr. Burnham and others of his ilk…another day.

Resources for Livin’ the Warrior Life, Historically Accurate & Viciously Verified.

The Black Box Store

https://www.extremeselfprotection.com/

The Indigenous Ability Blog

https://indigenousability.blogspot.com/

The Rough ‘n’ Tumble Raconteur Podcast

https://open.spotify.com/episode/2fTpfVp2wi232k4y5EakVv...

Tales of Soldiers & Civilians by Ambrose Bierce

 

The fighting of the day before had been desultory and indecisive. At the points of collision the smoke of battle had hung in blue sheets among the branches of the trees till beaten into nothing by the falling rain. In the softened earth the wheels of cannon and ammunition wagons cut deep, ragged furrows, and movements of infantry seemed impeded by the mud that clung to the soldiers' feet as, with soaken garments and rifles imperfectly protected by capes of overcoats they went dragging in sinuous lines hither and thither through dripping forest and flooded field. Mounted officers, their heads protruding from rubber ponchos that glittered like black armor, picked their way, singly and in loose groups, among the men, coming and going with apparent aimlessness and commanding attention from nobody but one another. Here and there a dead man, his clothing defiled with earth, his face covered with a blanket or showing yellow and claylike in the rain, added his dispiriting influence to that of the other dismal features of the scene and augmented the general discomfort with a particular dejection. Very repulsive these wrecks looked—not at all heroic, and nobody was accessible to the infection of their patriotic example. Dead upon the field of honor, yes; but the field of honor was so very wet! It makes a difference.—“One Kind of Officer”

Tales of Soldiers & Civilians first appeared on the scene in 1892 with 16 tales, more were added later. This volume contains the rightly famous and well-known “An Occurrence at Owl creek Bridge.”

I decided to feature a lesser-known story so that one could get a feel for the fact that Mr. Bierce was no one-trick pony.

His own harrowing wartime experience and dyspeptic [realistic] view of life is to the forefront in this tale.

The war images smack of the real. No romanticism. Stark—terse, brutal.

The interactions with humanity come off no better, perhaps worse in this tale.

What never fails is Bierce’s gimlet eye.

Captain Ransome sat motionless and silent on horseback. A few yards away his men were standing at their guns. Somewhere—everywhere within a few miles—were a hundred thousand men, friends and enemies. Yet he was alone. The mist had isolated him as completely as if he had been in the heart of a desert. His world was a few square yards of wet and trampled earth about the feet of his horse. His comrades in that ghostly domain were invisible and inaudible. These were conditions favorable to thought, and he was thinking.

Many a fine critic has offered that Bierce’s Civil War tales are the best example of American war writing, exceeding that of Stephen Crane and Hemingway [Clifton Fadiman being a dissenting opinion—I myself, dissent from Fadiman—so much is done with so little text, it’s rather remarkable.]

In the next offering there is a cynical humor in this muddled exchange made all the more, well, horrifying, when one has read the tale and understands the import of what is being communicated and horrifyingly ignored.

Here, during the hottest of the fight, he was approached by Lieutenant Price, who had just sabred a daring assailant inside the work. A spirited colloquy ensued between the two officers—spirited, at least, on the part of the lieutenant, who gesticulated with energy and shouted again and again into his commander's ear in the attempt to make himself heard above the infernal din of the guns. His gestures, if coolly noted by an actor, would have been pronounced to be those of protestation: one would have said that he was opposed to the proceedings.

All told, brief tales, sparsely written, dripping with a cynicism likely borne of experience.

The only heroic characters here are the peripheral ones who must suffer the mistakes of those who point and say, “Go.”

Strong brew.

If the South Had Won the Civil War by MacKinlay Kantor

 

A young staff captain, Hubert Gaines, had the presence of mind to swing from his horse to run forward, drawing his revolver in the same moment. He fired two shots into the animal's ear and the great beast lay still. Then Grant could be remove--his uniform covered with clay, and blood issuing from his nose and mouth. Mr. Charles A. Dana himself escorted the white-faced little Frederick Grant away.

This slim volume from the Pulitzer Prize winning author of Andersonville begins with a simple premise—General Grant dies beneath a recalcitrant horse.

Kantor then proceeds to detail the ramifications in billiard ball fashion what follows from this single mishap.

It is written as if it were true history, complete with mighty convincing footnotes throughout.

My copy clocks in at a brief 112 pages but that does not mean this is not a jam-packed work.

Kantor tells us not just how the South prevailed but then follows along with the seldom considered aftermath and how a successful secessionist nation might regard future such attempts.

Our alternative history takes us through until the 1940s as we see just how far ramifications may reverberate.

I found this a remarkably well-informed thoughtful work.

An easy read, yet there is nothing “easy” about what the piece insinuates.

Fascinating.

Calico by Lee Goldberg

 

‘You’re probably right, but you have to admit this case is weird,’ Amanda said. ‘It’s like he walked out of the 1800s and into the path of a motor home.’

A curious one here—an author I’ve enjoyed before offers us a neo-Western and a kinda/sorta traditional Western at the same time.

I tip nothing to say we have twin timelines: literally.

One—A police procedural in the Michael Connelly mode, or even in the mode of the author’s own Eve Ronin series [a few of which I have read and enjoyed.]

Two—The second timeline, a time-travel to the Old West tale.

Allow me to state, I have enjoyed other work from this author and was looking forward to this tale.

But…this one strikes me as either rushed or as a prose draft of an idea intended to be a television script.

Exposition is fast and to the point, but, again, but…many chapters feel as if, “Yeah, this is where the commercial break would be.”

“This is where David Caruso would slide off his sunglasses and deliver his out-the-door line.”

The book is a bit of a déjà vu in the sense that when it is set in the modern era, I am reminded of Michael Connelly’s Renee Ballard series without the complexity.

And once we have the time-travel timeline I kept harkening back to Michael Crichton’s Timeline which dealt with the mechanics of how this would occur with far more conviction. That novel also deals with the time-culture shock in an interesting manner.

Here, our time-traveler arrives in a new timeline and seems to go “Wow, I’m in the Old West. Weird.”

We have none of the cognitive struggle that I would presume ensue as one slowly comprehends the anomaly that is occurring.

Here, the move from realization to coping is staggeringly blithe.

I end with, Mr. Goldberg is a talented author and an indulgent man [he was kind enough to correspond with me on a topic years ago—Thank you, Sir!]

This is simply a misfire for this single reader as many seem to enjoy this one very much.

Let us assume the majority has it right.