A big part of Barnabas's background and character is that he grew up in the Fens, a marshy region in eastern England which at least according to this book, was home to independent-minded people who did things like cut peat and smuggled. It's a cool region, where the locals know the labrynthine waterways intimately and anyone else enters at their peril.
In Sackett's Land, Barnabas goes to the New World. Here he returns and has to deal with a bunch of local drama culminating in the Queen believing he has found the long lost royal jewels of King James (he actually only found some roman coins that is what gave him the boost he needed to start his life of adventuring). So there is a price on his head and the first third of the book is him sneaking around England, trying to get back to his ship with his bride-to-be Abigail and his compatriots in order to return to the New World, settle himself and make his way to the mountains.
He escapes and we get some fun ship trading and combat on the way to the Virginia coast. The second half of the book, he and a new gang of adventurers, including a tough Welsh woman named Lila who is his lady's maiden and equally good with domestic skills as with sword and fists, make their way up river trying to find a place to settle.
The portrayal of the new world is odd. L'Amour's rhetoric (through Barnabas' voice) is respectful of the Indigineous people and he recognizes that his arrival foretells a lot of change, much of which will be negative. The individual Native characters are shown to be intelligent and human. However, he also portrays them as in constant warfare and even a culture of weird militaristic excess. This is all contextualized by Barnabas' idea that all men seek to expand and take over other regions, so the behaviour of the white colonists is basically the same as one group of Indigenous people taking over another one. So throughout the second half of the book, even though they are peacefully situated in the territory of the friendly Catawba, they are constantly coming under attack by other tribes. Eventually this becomes like a rite of passage for these other tribes, to try and kill Barnabas. He is seen as almost superhuman and a way to test their young warriors. It feels like L'Amour was quite well-researched on the various tribes (in a similar way that he knew about the Fens and the many other historical details with which he stuffs the book), but wanted to also maintain the colonialist mythology of the west that the land had to be wrested from the warlike natives.
That being said, the portrayal of colonialism here is not as bad as I expected and I think deep down (at least from this book) that L'Amour was an appreciator of the diversity of the people of the world. He has a passage almost a page long describing Barnabas' children's education, emphasizing how they learn from the natives, the Persian doctor, the Welsh woman, their mother, etc. so they have a rich mix of religions and folklore.
The real problem of this book is the pacing and structure. It jumps from years of narrative to a sudden fight scene. There is no real throughline, nor antagonist, nor conflict to hold it all together. It's just Barnabas wanting to go to the mountains and a lot of stuff happening to him. In the last quarter, he is suddenly old and has like 4 sons and one daughter and his wife takes two of the kids back to England forever (she's not mad, just thinks the girl needs to be educated back home and the son is smart). We get an almost throwaway defeat of an earlier sort-of nemesis and then a final attack by the Natives which kills him followed by a coda of how they respected him.
I wasn't going to continue with the series, so I was happy to read this guy's ranking who puts this one way down at the bottom. I speculate that maybe L'Amour was much more interested in the history than in putting together a good story. I'll keep my eye out for the third and pick it up if I find it cheaply.
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