Ghost Riders: Travels with American Nomads

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

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

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

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

‘Women, above all, are the guardians of continuity,’ he writes, ‘if the hearth moves, they move with it.’

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

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.

Most of this trail, like so many others first ‘discovered’ by Joe Walker (or, more accurately, pieced together from existing Indian trails), is now a state highway.

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