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.

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Music: Blue Frontier by Jim Cornelius

Graphics by Lynn Woodward, Woodward Creative

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

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Music: Blue Frontier by Jim Cornelius

Graphics by Lynn Woodward, Woodward Creative

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. 

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Music: Blue Frontier by Jim Cornelius

Graphics by Lynn Woodward, Woodward Creative

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 the gold boomtown of Johannesburg, who were expected to fight for their civil rights. But the Rising fizzled, leaving the Raiders on their own hook. Boer Commandos surrounded and shot up Jameson’s column and forced them into a humiliating surrender.

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Music: Blue Frontier by Jim Cornelius

Graphics by Lynn Woodward, Woodward Creative

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.

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Music: Blue Frontier by Jim Cornelius

Graphics by Lynn Woodward, Woodward Creative

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 the U.S.

Historian Joseph Allen Stout says, “Filibustering was spawned by the frontier and nourished by the spirit of expansionist adventurism that permeated all facets of American society during the 1850s.”

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Music: Blue Frontier by Jim Cornelius

Graphics by Lynn Woodward, Woodward Creative

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 British took to remove Pontiac’s War and to prevent insurgency from breaking out all over again would have massive unintended consequences. Revolutionary consequences.

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Music: Blue Frontier by Jim Cornelius

Graphics by Lynn Woodward, Woodward Creative

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 that shaped frontier history for the next 150 years.

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Music: Blue Frontier by Jim Cornelius

Graphics by Lynn Woodward, Woodward Creative

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.

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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.

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Music: Blue Frontier by Jim Cornelius

Graphics by Lynn Woodward, Woodward Creative