Ghost Riders: Travels with American Nomads

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

I was expecting a wealth of amateur historians, with an encyclopedic knowledge of the fur trade and fresh insights to borrow, but the first twenty people I talked to had never heard of Joe Walker. Reading history books, it turned out, was not a popular

And the third: Indian society trained its women to be incredibly obedient and hardworking, and resentful of any attempts by their husbands to help out with the camp chores. It was akin to insulting her, announcing to the rest of the camp that she was inadequate and worthless.

deserts on their horses, to raid or conquer or exact tribute. The prophet Jeremiah was probably thinking of the Scythians, the first recorded nomadic warriors in history, and by any civilised standard they were a fearsome and barbaric

Geographical curiosity and his abiding love for wilderness travel seem to have been the main reasons for these journeys, but he usually managed to find some practical, economic rationale: a railroad survey, a party of miners that wanted to be guided to some remote mountain range, a potential livestock market that called for investigation. In 1858 h

The question seemed to decide or confirm something for Joe Walker. He replied sharply that he was going back to live with the Indians because ‘white people are too damn mean’.* He left soon afterwards, riding west, and

For fifteen years, on and off, he has been talking about making a four-thousand-mile horse trip across the steppes from Russia to Mongolia. He figures that Mongolia – a vast, unfenced expanse of plains, deserts and mountains still inhabited by horse nomads – is as close as he’s going to get to Wyoming in the 1820s, which is where he really wants to

‘to seek a final refuge against society in the broad and tenantless plains of the west’.

John Clymer) – Lance has achieved a radical degree of nomadic freedom