It's 1875 and Mexican warlords have overrun South Texas with their personal armies, stealing cattle with impunity and driving them back to Mexico.

One man named Leander McNelly and his Texas Rangers decide to do what the US Government refuses to do and stop it themselves. 🧵 The Nueces Strip is the part of Texas between The Rio Grande and the Nueces River. After the Civil War Anglo-Texans had moved into the area to take advantage one history's great arbitrage opportunities - local longhorn worth $2 could be sold up north for $40.

Blood Meridian is based on a first hand account of scalp-hunters found in a book called My Confession by Samuel Chamberlain.

Reading through it highlights for me how little of Blood Meridian was dramatized by McCarthy.

Here are a few excerpts I thought were interesting: Samuel Chamberlain was a young man from Boston who ended up riding with the Glanton Gang. Some think that the Kid in Blood Meridian is loosely based on him. Here he is meeting Glanton for the first time.

Part 2 of a thread on the Comanche, their reign as the horse lords of the Southern Plains, and how they were eventually defeated by the Anglo-Texans. 🧵

(Part 1 👇)

https://twitter.com/VanDiemen_/status/1773921657331253373?t=gYMKZJrlCk6y3mfW5jgW5Q&s=19

The southern edge of Comanchería was the Balcones Escarpment, or what Texans today generally call the Hill Country, which ran in an arc from roughly Dallas to Austin to San Antonio, and is the point at which the Great Plains fall down into the more fertile Coastal Plains.

Thread on what made the Comanche the most brutal and feared American Indian horse warriors, how they halted European expansion for generations, and how the Anglo-Texans eventually learned to defeat them. 🧵

(Part 1) If North America had a geographical "Womb of Nations", like Mongolia or Scandinavia in the Old World, it would be Wyoming. It was a cold, bitter, liminal place that forged peoples into the hardest forms of homo sapiens. The Comanche are a Shoshone speaking tribe from Wyoming.

In order to understand the history of North America, it's good to review the three very different approaches each of the major colonial powers took with regard to the Indians:

1. French - Trade
2. Spanish - Assimilation
3. English - Land Ownership

Let's go over each: 1. French

The French were the greatest traders with the natives. Obviously they envisioned the fleur-de-lis flying over all of North America, but this was to support their primary interest which was mercantile. French trappers and traders wandered the furthest as a result.

A lot of people don't know that it's entirely legal to general contract the construction of your own home. It used to be very common, but doesn't happen as much anymore.

Here's a step-by-step guide for how to save 20% of the cost of your new home by building it yourself. (🧵) This is totally possible without any construction experience. You shouldn't have to self-perform any of the work yourself. You won't need to swing a hammer. All you're going to do is put together the team and hire the subcontractors yourself.

Many dream of building their own custom home someday, but those who get the opportunity often launch into the endeavor with very little training as to what makes a home beautiful and timeless. I've got three book recommendations that I think every future builder needs to read: Failing to follow the rules of good architecture leads to "McMansions". The objection to the McMansion isn't that it's mass produced, it's that it is large without being tasteful, that the builder of the home had a layman's lack of understanding in what makes a home attractive.

The Jews have been a diaspora people not since the destruction of the temple in 70 AD, but since the Babylonian exile in 586 BC.

Most Jews lived outside Palestine during the life of Christ.

I think there are several important insights from remembering this historical context: The Jewish diaspora began in 586 BC when the Babylonians conquered Judea and took most of the population back to Mesopotamia.

Small groups started returning to Jerusalem in 538 BC (Ezra, Nehemiah), but 586 BC was really the last time that a majority of Jews lived in Palestine.

In order to understand the history of the American West, you need to understand South Pass.

The entire geography of the continental United States funnels into this choke point in Wyoming about 30 miles across. (1/8): If you were to try to get to Oregon or California in the early 1800s, you would inevitably hit a wall of mountains. Lewis & Clark went up the Missouri and ran into the Bitterroot Mountains of Montana/Idaho. Zebulon Pike ran into the Colorado Rockies about the same time.

The Royal Navy in the Age of Sail didn't have any DEI initiatives or HR quotas, and yet they iterated a nearly perfect system over hundreds of years for finding the most competent officers for their battleships, and then conquered the world with it. I think it's worth examining: Being the captain of a battleship in the Age of Sail is probably the most high-stakes, high-risk endeavor that I know of in history. Not only do you have the danger from rocky coasts and storms at sea, but you also engage regularly in naval combat with skilled peers.

Ukrainian language and culture was intentionally fabricated by academics in the early 1800s for explicitly anti-Russian political reasons. They took the vernacular accent of the peasants in the area and called it "Ukrainian" in order to produce a Ukrainian national consciousness. Ivan Kotliarevsky was a Russian military officer who thought that Ukrainian peasants were folksy and funny, so he wrote a poem in their dialect in 1798. This was the first time anyone had ever published anything serious in "Little Russian". Anyone of any class spoke Russian.

Deep in the deserts of the American southwest I once found something that I believe very few modern people have laid eyes on: The area north of Lake Powell in Utah is one of the least hospitable and sparsely populated areas of the US. The Escalante River and the Henry Mountains were the last major river and mountain range surveyed in the lower 48. Nobody lives out there. Rough terrain. Very dry.