I shall briefly run through a list of ultra masculine war heroes from the 1800s who have fallen into obscurity and have been utterly eclipsed in the historical narrative by a more tame and domesticated contemporary of their same time, region, and appropriate station.

1. Lewis Wetzel and Daniel Boone both explored the Appalachian Mountains and Ohio Watershed against Native American opposition. Daniel Boone was a poor Indian fighter who was saved by others twice. He did however work for moneyed interests in the east and founded taxable settlements. If it was not for Wetzel keeping the best Indian Warriors busy hunting him as he hunted them Boone would have had less success. In a balanced narrative Boone is the leading figure with Wetzel and other hard-case frontiersmen like Simon Kenton getting honorable mentions. Instead it is Boone’s story alone and Wetzel is difficult to even locate in a book. If you had asked the Indians who they honored the most they would have scoffed at Boone as a lying runway woman and shivered at the mention of ‘Old Death Wind’ Wetzel.

2. Nathan Bedford Forest & Robert E. Lee fought the vast forces of the Northern Army of Aggression for over three years. Bobby Lee followed the doomed course of slugging it out with superior forces until his army was ground to dust. He never forgave himself and named Forest the best soldier of the war, hinting that if the man who could have done more with a few thousand men over the vast western theatre to hamper the Union advance than he had done in the narrow east with ten times the men, would have led the Confederate military, the outcome might have been different. Lee retired into relative obscurity. But Forest galled Yankee congressmen, disbanded the KKK after he realized he was supporting a pack of hooded goons, socialized with negro leaders, suggested freeing enslaved blacks in Africa and bringing them to the U.S. as a labor force, and beat a negro to death in a fight. These reconstruction era happenings mirrored his tumultuous military career in which he won all but one battle in which he commanded, threatened to slap his incompetent superiors if only they were ‘any part of a man’, killed five men with his hands, had 30 horses shot from under him, and once charged a Union regiment by himself, and not only survived, but returned to his lines with a prisoner. Surely Forest could retain his honor? Now, he is only remembered for letting his men massacre a black army unit and for founding the KKK, which he did not, though he called for its disbandment. Bobby Lee is still admired. Forest is the devil—because he was a man among men; the man Bobby lee wished he had been.

3. Liver-Eater Johnson & Kit Carson were contemporaries in the exploration of the American West. Carson deserves more credit in any balanced narrative, and I suggest a reading of Hampton Sides’ Blood and Thunder. However, in any conceivable meeting of the two men, or their presence on the same expedition, Carson would have deferred leadership to Liver-Eating Johnson and advised the Indian fighter. Carson accomplished many things, but paled in masculine terms to Johnson. However, Carson worked for a rich boy who married the daughter of a richer man. So Carson, who once agonized over his inability to save a single white woman from a band of Indians, ‘won the west’ while the man who defended the persons and honor of two white women and two red women against fierce tribes of warriors is entirely erased from general histories and even specific histories of Mountain Men, of which he was The Example Par Excellence. Could it be because Johnson acknowledged no master, had no employer?

4. Looking Glass & Chief Joseph were respectively the war leader and camp leader of the fugitive Nez Perce Indians who out marched and out fought three superior army detachments with their women and children and elderly in tow. Looking Glass ranks as a military genius, and it is because of his efforts that Chief Joseph actually got to have his negotiation with General Nelson Miles in which he famously said, “From where the sun now stands I will fight no more forever.” Unable to beat the warriors the general trained his artillery on the women and children, Looking Glass now dead on the battlefield. Chief Joseph—a wronged Indian if ever there was one—went down into history as his people died of disease in a hostile climate. Looking Glass, without whom Chief Joseph would have remained anonymous, cannot be a Native American hero because he fought and died like a man and did not bow his head before the white man.

5. Toussaint & Dessalines were two rebel generals who alternately fought for and against their French masters in the hell on earth known as French San Domingo, or later Haiti. Toussaint is regarded as the man who beat the French and founded Haiti, while Dessalines is unknown to history. Many a black American sings the praises of Toussaint and does not know the name of Dessalines. The facts are that both dealt with the French shamefully when necessary. Toussaint invited white slave owners back to the island and gave them black slaves! After Toussaint was rotting in a French prison, and Dessalines, famed ‘butcher of the negroes’, was now ruling the rebel slave colony, he invited the whites back and promised them slaves like Toussaint—and then killed everyone of the bastards! Dessalines was the first ruler of a free black nation founded by rebellious slaves, not Toussaint. But Toussaint was a manipulator, a sweet talker, a fancy dresser—the kind of negro the whites were comfortable with. Dessalines was a killer, a man with a brutally primal sense of honor and expediency, who cannot be remembered, for he triumphed, and he did so by his own hand, not by cutting deals like Toussaint.

This was just a brief survey of the men who lived their lives side by side lesser men in the same time and place with the same aims, and in all cases the more masculine, more honored, more defiant, more tribal man is forgotten. Whether it is ‘Old Death Wind’ Wetzel gliding through the forest hunting Shawnee warriors, Dessalines chopping maroons to bits with his machete, Liver-Eating Johnson staking a fresh batch of Blackfoot heads over the graves of Crazy Woman’s children as she sits wild-eyed in her half-finished cabin, General Forest convincing another sissy Union general to surrender to his ragtag force, or Looking Glass once again outsmarting the clumsy white soldiers, the men who gained honor at the expense of a vision of the world of Man as a garden of submissive plenty, must have their honor stripped by the slaves that write our Masters’ story.

The historical narrative of the United States of America is our rich masters’ river of self-justifying bullshit, that must forever flow uphill into a limitless future by hook, or by crook, with all honor assigned to the Godfather sitting in the Big House and the pantheon of exulted Founding Fathers that orbit his overwritten memory. In terms of honor, the hairy brute that first shoved a sharp stick up a lion’s ass had more of it than all such suited seat-shining takers of other men’s credit that have come since.