Jack Perry does an excellent job of weaving a tapestry of defiance, a nuanced overview of the anti-government men of the American frontier. Thinking of these men as iconic symbols of America we often fail to realize that they were escaping America, that what the nation that followed them like an all-devouring blob of corruption has become, is far more stifling than what they were escaping at the time. There is a reason that men such as Hugh Glass and Liver-Eating Johnson are impossible to heroize in their actual form, in this, our sick end time, because they, in their infinity of liberty, stand against What America Is.

If you want an idea of how thoroughly The Mountain Men rejected a much less intrusive America 200 years ago, speak to some hard core homeless men today, the kind that don’t use soup kitchen and build their own cardboard and plastic tent cities in the only true wilderness [a concept Perry discusses] left in North America, the “tweener spaces” of our blighted urban wastelands.

Also, read Surviving On The Streets: A Loompanics Classic