Ghost Riders: Travels with American Nomads

microbes have never got the respect they deserve. Redoubtable and remorseless, clearing the way for civilisation’s advance, and presumably acting with the blessing of God, immigrant germs killed more Indians than the cowboys, the army and the frontiersmen combined. We can posit historical inevitability and say that the more numerous and technically

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

same with all those other diseases Europeans brought us. We didn’t have any immunity to smallpox either, or the common cold, and we still don’t. How long does it take you to get over a cold? Two weeks max, right? For us, it’s thirty to sixty days, and the purer the blood, the longer it takes.’

In New Mexico and California there were Mexican women, but on the whole they lacked the endurance, skills and experience to make good trail wives.

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

‘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

this freed up more time and energy for hunting, trapping and trading – the means by which a married couple survived and accrued wealth, possessions and status. Some mountain men regarded their

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