Frederic Remington’s Fight for the Waterhole
The Running Iron Report is an outfit made up of writers from varying walks of life — law enforcement, journalism, civil service, the arts and the academy, and more — who have all come to a painful realization: the country and civilization we have served in our individual capacities is dying.
The natural entropy that wears down empires is already at play in the United States, and the West generally. We’re skeptical that that quasi-biological process can be reversed. We’re not a serious nation anymore; we’re a reality TV show — and we’re not going to change that by voting one cast off the island and electing a new one.
It’s never easy to watch something we love die, but we’ve come to the inescapable conclusion that that’s what is happening. It will probably be a very long time before we hear a death rattle — none of us will live to see it — but the patient is terminal.
The hardest part is to stop worrying about it and instead to use that energy plotting a way forward through the wreckage. That’s what RIR about: improvising, adapting, overcoming, and building a resilient community of capable, compassionate, creative, honest people who are refusing to be led around by unsustainable models of consumption, antique political parties, and digital angst. We believe in timeless values and virtues — courage, sacrifice, self-discipline, self-reliance, physical and mental toughness. Those are precisely the qualities that serve us best — and that is what will carry the fire forward into the future.
Editors:
Jim CorneliusBorn in the suburbs of Los Angeles, Jim Cornelius grew up dreaming of distant frontiers, of mountain men, long hunters, African explorers. His older brother gave him a tattered copy of Allan W. Eckert’s The Frontiersmen, a biography of Simon Kenton, and the twig was bent.
Graduated from the University of California, Santa Cruz, Jim received honors in History even though he primarily focused on a self-directed course in woods running. He now resides on the high desert of Central Oregon, where he makes his living with his pen. A musician and a songwriter, he also remains a woods runner dreaming of distant frontiers. He is the keeper of the blog Frontier Partisans.com and the author of the book Warriors of the Wildlands: True Tales of the Frontier Partisans.
Craig RullmanCraig Rullman is a writer, photographer, filmmaker, and occasional buckaroo. He is the author of The Bunkhouse Chronicles: Field Notes from the Figure 8 Ranch, and Director and Producer of a forthcoming documentary film — The Outside Circle: A Movie of the Modern West.
