Ghost Riders: Travels with American Nomads

The early Texas cattleman Charles Goodnight found a Comanche war shield stuffed with a complete history of ancient Rome (its rise, efflorescence and fall to nomadic barbarians from the north). Nomad tribes carry their culture

Gathering. It’s not my scene but I’ve got to hand it to them. They have succeeded in creating a functioning anarchist utopia.

(who thought white notions of romantic love were amusingly silly).

Tribal society produced very few loners, a type that was common among the mountain men.

August 1876, and Walker died two months later. He was seventy-seven years old. The cause of death, says Bil Gilbert, was nothing more or less than ‘having lived long enough’. How to distil that life into six lines, containing

Walker soon became disgusted by Frémont’s self-promoting histrionics and rank cowardice in the field – a combination he found particularly loathsome. They

Like many a wandering male, before and after him, he was dealing with his emotional pain by trying to outdistance it geographically. For the rest of his life he avoided the central Rockies

Instead, he did something which was to become a standard American response to the blues: at the age of fifty he went to California and made a fresh start. And it seemed to work for him. He was soon exhibiting all his old vigour and efficiency. He arrived in the autumn of

Is there a nesting instinct in women? A natural female affinity for hearth and home? Absolutely not. Looking back over human history, it is clear that these are social constructs, peculiar to sedentary