Ghost Riders: Travels with American Nomads

‘In America you grow up with that cowboy ideal, that you should be independent and self-reliant and value your freedom above all else. That’s what the films, and TV, and books, and popular culture

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

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

Walker rode on to California, hung up his saddle at his nephew’s ranch in Contra Costa County, and settled down to a calm, pleasant, dignified retirement, with no recorded bouts of nostalgia or restlessness.

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

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

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

We have another sketch by Adolph Wislizenus, a German traveller who encountered Walker, the veteran furman Andrew Drips and their Indian wives in the Wind River Mountains. The two squaws, quite passable as to their features, appeared in highest state. Their red blankets, with the silk kerchiefs on their heads, and their gaudy embroideries, gave the

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