I might start doing something like this annually.

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This is Frank’s second novel, and although Medicine Woman was good for sure, this one is a level up. Since he drew the comparison himself in the tagline, I feel comfortable comparing it to The Wild Bunch, and I will reference my review of the movie here as if you’ve read it, so you might want to go read that first if you haven’t.

Also, I implore you even more to read the book first before you read this. I can wait. It is excellent. Get it here. Don’t be gay; get the paperback and not just the Kindle version. The paperback comes with a free e-book download anyway. I got my copy delivered on a Sunday, started reading it Sunday night, and finished it Monday night. I devoured the almost 350 pages of this thing in two days because I could barely put it down from the first chapter. I have like five other projects I’m working on at the moment, all of which I have to read for, and I put them all on hold completely for two days for this book.

In case you’re not convinced, I will start this off with a spoiler-free section first, and then warn you before we get into spoilers.

Spoiler-Free Section

This book honestly could take place in the same universe as The Wild Bunch.1 Where The Wild Bunch is set in a dying Wild West, showing the last gasp of the scorpion characters as they are consumed by the ant-world, Once Upon a Time in Argentina is set in more or less current year, where the ant-world won a long time ago and now actively shapes its members into ants. We are shown this in the first chapter as the former Marine Raider protagonist, Ryan McGowan, tries to navigate his life in his oppressively soul-killing office job, with his cuck boss and HR harpy female coworker.

Everyone who has ever worked a job like this (and not had their soul completely wrecked by it) feels the pain of this first chapter, myself included. It’s a little like Office Space, but gayer. Imagine if Bill Lumbergh was an actual willing cuck, and spilled his guts to Peter about it over beers one night.

Of course you know from the back-of-the-book blurb that Ryan isn’t going to stay here. He eventually falls in with a shady PMC type named Mike Hudson and gets recruited for some hardcore wetwork, but what’s interesting is that Frank really takes his time getting there. It takes longer than I expected for Ryan to get into the thick of it, and it’s worth it. We get to sit in his soul-killing misery for a while, and really feel the desperation for adventure that would make a guy want to go start mercing illegal Chinese fishermen.

What’s also interesting is that Mike actually doesn’t recruit Ryan straight from the cuck boss office job. Ryan quits the job on his own initiative first after getting dumped by his stale girlfriend, goes to live in a buddy’s houseboat, and spends six months surfing, working as a bartender, training at a hardcore grungy boxing gym, and generally living like kind of a vagabond. He’s happy with that for a while, and for most men this would probably be enough. It’s enough for Ryan for awhile too, but not forever; he’s more scorpion than that. He’ll take Mike’s offer because, like Mike tells him, he’s “sick of the zoo.”

The idea of this kind of lifestyle as a “zoo” for the spiritual scorpions is an interesting one. In the setting of this story, the ant-world has become much more sophisticated about how it handles the scorpions than it was in Pike Bishop’s day. It provides them with places to let off steam, like surfing or grungy boxing gyms, while not doing anything destructive to the world order. For a select few like Ryan who still won’t be satisfied with that, it gives them actual scorpion work to do for the ant-world’s ends, kind of like Deke Thornton being sent to track down the Wild Bunch. I can’t say too much more about that in the spoiler-free section, so more on that later.

Speaking of the spoiler section, it’s about time to get on to that so I can talk more in-depth about the story. To finish up here, I’ll say that the book is incredibly entertaining and fast-paced. It keeps you hooked from page 1 and doesn’t let go, even during the early chapters when Ryan is languishing in fluorescent hell-world and then the vagabond life. Plot-wise, it is quite a bit more complex than Frank’s debut novel Medicine Woman, with thriller-style hints, twists, and reveals that keep you guessing about what’s actually going on, which is why you should read it for the first time without any spoilers.

It’s also masculine as hell. The guys act like dudes, which is refreshing to read. The only guy who doesn’t act like a dude is Ryan’s cuck boss, and he’s a literal cuck. As you get into the story and Ryan meets the team of mercs he eventually works with, their banter is super realistic too, in both the way they talk and the things they talk about. We even spend some downtime hearing them banter in a way that doesn’t really advance the plot immediately but provides a lot of characterization for them, and it’s nice. With anything like this, there’s always the risk that the banter will end up sounding contrived, but here it sounds very natural, and very realistic to what young, high-T guys talk about when in their own company. Any man who has ever spent time in such a group will get it immediately.

Anyway, let’s get on to the spoiler section.

SPOILERS FROM HERE ON OUT. THIS IS YOUR FINAL WARNING. READ THE BOOK FIRST BEFORE PROCEEDING OR I WILL FIND YOU AND I WILL CALL YOU GAY. DON’T BE GAY. READ THE BOOK FIRST.

THE SPOILER SECTION

Now again, you know from the back-of-the-book synopsis that the job for the mercs is to be a deterrent for the Argentinians against illegal Chinese fishing operations in the Argentine Sea. It’s a job that a guy like Ryan would sign up for purely out of the desire for adventure and danger, because why the hell would he ever care about such a thing otherwise?

But it’s apparent almost from the beginning that there’s something else going on. Mike Hudson, the PMC who finds Ryan at his boxing gym and recruits him for the job, is shady as hell. The owner of the boxing gym even warns Ryan to be careful around him, because while he might not know exactly what Mike it about, he knows there’s definitely something shady about him.

Mike gets even more shady when we get to Argentina. First we find out that this is a black op. No one is supposed to know who these guys work for. Mike is the only liaison between them and the Argentinians, and because of a tense international relations situation, the Chinese are never supposed to find out the team is working for the Argentinians. The whole thing is also insanely well-funded and well-supplied, with two fancy stealth boats, all kinds of tech, and a full-blown base camp on the coast at the far southern tip of Argentina.

Then we meet the team. Everybody has a nickname except for Mike, which seems like another way of setting him apart from the rest of the team. Ryan doesn’t get his nickname until later, but I’ll list it here with the rest. The team consists of:

• Jim (Tex): Surprisingly nerdy-looking Army Ranger from Texas

• Angel2 (Mex): Another Army Ranger who becomes fast friends with Ryan

• Ben (Hulk): Aptly named but friendly combat medic from the 101st Airborne

• Liam (Nord): Quiet and sharp Navy SEAL

• Ryan (Cowboy): Marine Raider whose perspective we’re following

• Bahrawar (Psycho): Afghan Special Forces guy who seems almost as shady as Mike and apparently doesn’t speak English

• Mike: Army Special Forces veteran and leader of the team

Now, the first five guys are pretty normal as operators go. We eventually find out that all of them were booted out of the military for reasons that probably no one would have even cared about 30 years ago, but they are also all solid operators, which makes them ideal for Mike’s purposes.

Psycho is another matter. Mike tells the rest of the team that he doesn’t speak English, and since Mike is the only one who speaks Farsi, he has to do all the communication with him. But Cowboy and Nord sus out pretty quick that Psycho actually does speak English and understands everything they say. He clearly has a history with Mike that the rest of the team doesn’t, which is pretty sus.

This is all excellent mystery/thriller setup. We’re constantly getting hints that something isn’t right with this whole operation, but we can’t really tell what it is exactly. The reveals all happen in an incredibly satisfying way in the book too. It’s much more satisfying than the way I’m about to spell it out, but since you’ve already read the book if you reading this because you’re not gay, I’m sure you won’t mind.

The bottom line is that Mike is a spook working for the CIA. He’s older than the rest of the team and was in Afghanistan early on, even before 9/11, back when he was in Army Special Forces. We get a whole backstory for Psycho when he was a young boy in 2001, and his remote Afghan village was wiped out by the Taliban, after which he became a drifter for a while and eventually found his way into the military. But it’s later revealed that Mike was there posing as a Taliban fighter when Psycho’s village was wiped out. He runs into Psycho again during an op in 2007, by which time Psycho is a hardened killer. This is how the Mike-Psycho relationship got started. Psycho is now a loyal member of Mike’s merc crew, totally unaware that Mike was responsible for the wiping out of his village all those years ago. When Mike has to go to Buenos Aires for meetings with the Argentinians after their ops, Psycho keeps him informed on what the rest of the team is up to. But he redeems himself in the end when he is mortally wounded, and with his dying breath tells Cowboy that Mike is CIA, which gives the rest of the team the heads-up they need to survive.

The fact of Mike being CIA ends up revealing that this whole operation isn’t really about Chinese fishing in the Argentine Sea. In fact, the Chinese in this story are kind of equivalent to Mapache’s Mexican soldiers in The Wild Bunch; they are nameless, faceless ant-like bad guys whose purpose is to shoot and be shot by the heroes. The real villain in the story is Mike, and the real conflict is him vs the team, as we’ll see. The mission is kind of about the fishing, but the truer reason for it is somehow both bigger than that, and more mundane at the same time.

See, Mike’s PMC company is a CIA front. This whole operation is being run by the CIA, which absolutely doesn’t care about illegal Chinese fishing for any reasons that would matter to the regular Argentinians affected by it. What the CIA cares about is higher-level geopolitical relations, and the politics of this China-Argentina situation are threatening to upset those relations somehow. The CIA is getting involved ultimately for the purpose of maintaining some geopolitical balance in the world. That’s it. There’s no plot for global domination or anything like that. The ant-world already dominates the globe, and this is its way of managing it. It’s almost like a higher-level version of what Ryan’s former gay office job was, just with more blood and guts.

The plan is to go down to Argentina, set up shop, and start mercing the Chinese fishermen as a deterrent. Because the Argentinians are getting upset about the fishing, the Chinese have to know they can’t just keep doing it with impunity because of the wider geopolitical implications of this conflict. But for their own political reasons involved with the China relationship, the Argentinians can’t be seen to be directly sanctioning the operations against the fishermen, so they are hiring these mercs through backchannels to do it and spinning the whole thing publicly as the actions of some environmentalist vigilante group once bodies start washing up. Only the Argentinian president himself knows the merc team is being run by the CIA; the rest of the government believes it’s their own internal military intelligence service.

From the CIA’s perspective, they need to get involved because as I said before, they need to maintain some higher geopolitical balance, because “we believe devils need competition,” as Mike’s handler tells him. They don’t want to use their own operators for this because of the high-risk and sensitive nature of the mission, so they will recruit expendable former operators under the guise of a PMC company and then burn them all when it’s over. This is why they recruit guys who’d already been kicked out of the military; they are good operators and would otherwise probably still be in if they hadn’t gotten booted for bullshit reasons, so they can get the job done, but they will also not be missed by any operational military units.

The thing that sets Cowboy apart from the rest of his teammates, and the reason he’s the one we’re mostly following in the book, is that the CIA has identified him as a potential recruit. Mike’s handler tells him:

“Oh, and we want you to keep an eye out for that [Ryan] McGowan. He’s got Company potential, but he’s naive.”

“True believer type?” Mike said. Aware of what the Company considered potential.

“Yeah, but he doesn’t know it,” the Tall Man3 said.

Mike is instructed to try to recruit Ryan as a full-blown CIA spook, but burn him with the rest of the team if he has to. The rest of the team is to be burnt at the end regardless of how the mission goes.

Notice how no one in the CIA, including Mike, gives a single shit about any of the individuals involved here. They might have been scorpions once upon a time, but they have long since been turned into instruments of the ant-world. It’s like if Deke Thornton never had his change of heart at the end of the movie, but kept it up and rose high in the ant ranks. That’s who Mike is, and he’s long since forgotten the value of personal relationships and loyalty that matter so much to the true scorpions.

We see this during one of the team’s operations. They assault a ship larger than any they’ve taken on before, and it turns out Chinese Special Forces are waiting for them. They get ambushed and have to evacuate (this is where Psycho gets mortally wounded), and Hulk is killed… or at least that’s what Mike reports to the rest of the team. Mike was the only one who saw it happen. He says he saw Hulk take a bullet to the head and go down. The other five members of the team have bonded with each other by this point, and they’re all pissed at Mike for leaving Hulk’s body behind. When Cowboy reveals to them that Mike had lied about Psycho not speaking English, they become suspicious that Mike might have lied about Hulk’s death too, and their desire to find out for certain what happened to him, and to retrieve his body if he really was KIA, drives the rest of the plot.

This is the central conflict of the book that develops: Mike’s ant-world indifference to human relationships vs the team’s scorpion-like loyalty and bonding to each other. These five men who have only known each other for a few months, and have no particular reason to care about the mission itself,4 form unbreakable bonds of brotherhood through a shared mission in a short time. By the last couple of gunfights they get into, they are operating together as a well-oiled machine. In the end, Mike seriously underestimates both their competence and resourcefulness, and the lengths they are willing go to for each other.

Unlike in The Wild Bunch, the four remaining team members survive to the end of the story, and led by Cowboy, they get their revenge on Mike. In the final confrontation, Cowboy lays out the core theme of the story:

“Mike, you know your fatal flaw. The one thing that for all your competence, and even your courage, is you were faithless. You thought you were so tough. A one man show. What was it you said, hard power, fire power, will power. You didn’t think you were king of the jungle, you thought you were the jungle. But you know what beats the jungle?”

Mike froze.

“The gang, Mike. The tribe beats the jungle. That’s the whole story. Men burn out the jungle. We make farms, we take wives, we build cities. Men that are loyal only to each other. The gang turns the jungle into a city, and the city into a state. And when the state gets too big it turns everything back into a jungle. And then it starts all over. Well the gang’s back, Mike, and you picked the wrong side.”

The moral of the story is that loyalty to your fellow man comes above all else, before loyalty to some larger organization, state, or other entity, before loyalty to the mission even.5 That’s what the Wild Bunch died for. The team members understand it instinctually, and it’s why they win in the end. Mike either never learned this, or has forgotten it through his time working for the ant-world. I tend to think he probably never learned it, because of what we know about his backstory in Afghanistan before he got heavily involved with the CIA. The CIA probably recruited him in the first place because they realized he was already like this.

Mike doesn’t even really have a relationship with his handler the Tall Man, which we learn through a couple of conversations. He’s been working with the guy for 20 years or something and knows almost nothing about him. When the team finds Mike to take their revenge, he’s retired and living on a ranch in Sinaloa, Mexico, all by himself, with no friends. It’s really a perfect encapsulation of where his career working for ant-world has gotten him: no friends, no family, no loyalty. The organization he’s dedicated his life to barely gives a shit about him, except to provide him with a nice ranch to live on in his retirement. They can’t give him bros though; he would have had to earn those, and he hasn’t. It ends up being almost a mercy that Cowboy kills him in the end.

Minor Gripes

What happened to Hulk?!?!

We never find out! Maybe he really did take one to the dome and die on the deck of that reefer like Mike said. Maybe Mike did see him get domed but was a weasel and didn’t actually confirm him KIA, and he survived (which is surprisingly more possible than you think). Maybe Mike was straight-up lying about seeing him get shot at all; we know Mike lied to the team about a lot of things. Maybe Mike even shot Hulk himself. One of those last two might even be the most likely option since we know Mike intended to burn the whole team when the op was over anyway, so this might have been a convenient chance to get rid of one of them.

Whatever the case, we don’t know. The easygoing and friendly Hulk could be still alive and in some chink cargo hold torture dungeon right now and we wouldn’t know. I wish we knew, and I wish the rest of the team knew.

On the other hand, maybe this is the setup for a sequel where Hulk has a villain arc. He gets tortured and brainwashed by the chinks and turned into some kind of double agent, he’s mad at the team because they left him for dead, and he decides to get revenge. Or maybe the sequel is about the team going on a mission to find him.

The Helicopter

This one will probably not annoy all that many people, but it does me slightly because I happen to have some technical knowledge in the relevant field. At one point in the story, the team gets one of their boats, the Ares, blown up while on a GOPLAT and is left with no means of getting back to shore. Luckily, there is a chink helicopter on the platform, which the Nord knows how to fly (sort of) and they are able to fly it back to the other boat, the Bruiser, ditch it in the ocean, board the boat, and make it back to shore.

Most of my Substack readers probably don’t know this, but in a prior life I spent a little time flying helicopters in the Navy.6 Ditching a helicopter in water is about the worst idea ever and an absolute last resort; allow me to explain why.

In the military (at least in the Navy and Marine Corps; I couldn’t say about the Army or Air Force), helicopter pilots and crewmen all go through something called Helicopter Underwater Egress Training, colloquially referred to as the “helo dunker.” You have to do this before starting helo flight school, and you have to have periodic refreshers throughout your career.

What happens is that you are strapped into a seat in this mockup of a helicopter cabin, and the whole thing is then lowered into a pool and flipped upside down. Then you have to unbuckle yourself, pull out one of the easy-release windows, and swim out and to the surface. It sounds simple, but having done this myself I can tell you that being flipped upside down underwater is one of the most disorienting things that can ever happen to you. Rescue divers are standing by to make sure no one actually drowns during this training. I had to be rescued by one of them on one of my runs at this; it’s pretty common. Lots of people would drown if the rescue swimmers weren’t there.

Why does the helo dunker flip you upside down? Is it just trying to prepare you for the worst case scenario? Well, yes, but also the worst case scenario (being flipped upside down) is just about guaranteed when you have a helicopter landing in water.

A helicopter’s engine and transmission is right up at the top, directly underneath the main rotor. That makes it top-heavy, which means that if it ever lands in water, it immediately flips upside down. It doesn’t even have to be a violent crash for it to do this.

So there are a couple issues with this in the story. First, I’m actually not sure whether the Nord would know about this or not. We find out later he washed out of Army flight school, which is how he kind of knows how to fly the helo in the first place. If he’d been in Navy flight school, he definitely would have gone through the helo dunker before starting to fly, but like I said before I don’t actually know if the Army does this or not. Obviously Navy helo pilots end up having far more risk of a water crash than Army ones.

Even if the Nord didn’t go through the helo dunker in Army flight school though, it seems likely that either he or at least one of the other team members would have heard about what happens in a water crash. They’re all operators, so likely have spent some time riding in helos. It’s even possible that at least one of them (most likely Cowboy as a Marine Raider or Nord as a Navy SEAL) went through the helo dunker as part of their operator training at some point, and would therefore know about this phenomenon and how bad of an idea it is to ditch a helo in the water.

Anyway, Nord has the other three guys jump off into the water from about a 5-10 foot hover and board the board, which is good. Then he lands gently in the water and gets out himself. This is almost an identical scenario to what the helo dunker simulates, but in the book the helicopter doesn’t flip completely upside down. It just kind of lays over on its side for a minute, Nord climbs out easily, and then it sinks.

To be clear, it is well established in the story why the guys don’t want to just fly the helicopter all the way back to shore and put it down on land. They consider doing this in fact, but they do have good reasons not to. I just think Frank didn’t know about the flipping upside down phenomenon, so he underestimated how dangerous ditching in water was when he wrote it. Ditching in water is an absolute last resort option for like an “I’m imminently about to run out of fuel and will crash if I don’t” scenario.

The reason this is a minor gripe is that let’s be honest, I’m being kind of autistic, and it doesn’t affect the story overall that much. Mechanically, there are probably other ways you could have gotten the team back to shore with the Bruiser and without the helo.

The Censored N*****

Minus 50 man points7 for writing N***** instead of nigger. Lol what a pussy. Bloody Bill Anderson is rolling over in his grave. Smh. Sad.

Does this mean I have to bleep the word out when I do the audiobook reading? I think imma keep it unbleeped because it makes me happy to imagine some libtard intern at ACX having to hear it when they do their QC review.

Nah, I’m joking.8 The testosterone of the rest of the book makes up for it. It happens pretty early on, and I had forgotten about it by the next chapter. But I hereby demand Frank puts two hard Rs in the next book to rectify this error.

Conclusion

Excellent book. Themes very similar to The Wild Bunch, obviously. There’s even a sort of maybe-supernatural-or-maybe-hallucination-based aspect of what happens in the climax, similar to the Loki character from Medicine Woman. Now that I think of it, what happens to Cowboy during the third act reminds me of when Levi Thurston gets staked out on the prairie and left for dead by the Blackfoot. But in both cases, it’s ambiguous enough that the story never jumps the shark.

There’s a love interest for Cowboy that I haven’t talked about at all. It’s pretty good too, but the real heart of the story is the boys hanging out and playing with guns and boats.

I hear tell Frank is now working on a sequel, and I can’t wait.

5 out of 5 orcas.9

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Frank Kidd and his publications Pulp West and The Frank and Brady Show. Also check him out at frankkiddauthor.com.

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The three o’clock hour was always the loneliest of the shift. But Jeff liked it that way. It was the emptiest the roads ever got.

At five p.m. when his shift started, the roads were always a madhouse. You wouldn’t think such a town as Mobile, Alabama would have such an intense rush hour, but you’d be wrong. Bad road design, he supposed. But he was no traffic engineer.

By about seven or eight, the traffic usually tapered off some. By midnight it was pretty sparse, especially once you got further away from downtown. At two a.m. most of the bars in town closed, and that was when you really had to have your head on a swivel for the odd drunk driver swerving around. There wasn’t usually a lot of traffic around that time either, but you couldn’t let that make you complacent. But by three in the morning, any remaining drunks were most likely passed out in bed, and from about then until the end of the shift at five, when the town started to stir and the morning rush hour started to ramp up, there was barely a car to be seen.

Jeff pulled his security vehicle out the parking lot of the latest car dealership on his route and onto Cottage Hill Road, heading west. For twelve hours three nights a week, he patrolled a dozen or so locations, mostly car dealerships and apartment complexes. Security guards in movies seemed to always either be the first guys to get killed, or get caught up in some crazy ass shit like that one guy from Die Hard—or was that an actual cop?

Anyway, Jeff wasn’t an actual cop. His job was mostly to be a deterrent, and to call the actual cops if any crazy ass shit happened, but of course nothing ever happened. The only thing he’d ever called the actual cops for was a random car in the back lot of one of the dealerships that was running one night when he made his rounds, with no human beings to be seen anywhere nearby. Which was weird, but could hardly be considered “crazy ass shit.”

The most excitement he’d had in weeks was two nights ago when a twenty-something woman at one of the apartment complexes had asked him to walk her to her car around midnight or so. Said she’d had a big fight with her boyfriend, was going to go stay with her mom for a few days, and was worried he might try to accost her and do something violent when she left her apartment. But the guy never showed his face, and the walk to the car was uneventful. Maybe he saw her with a strapping young lad like Jeff and decided it wasn’t worth the risk, or maybe he’d never considered trying such a thing in the first place and it was all in the woman’s head. Either way, it reinforced the point that nothing ever happened.

But Jeff didn’t mind the boredom if he was honest with himself, especially at this time of night. If only this job paid more, he wouldn’t mind doing it for a good long while. Working nights kind of sucked as far as his sleep schedule and social life went, but let’s face it, he’d never been the social butterfly type anyway, even when he wasn’t working nights. If anything, it gave him an excuse to not be more social.

At this time of night, he could pop on a five-hour history podcast or an audiobook or something and cruise the empty streets in peace. Or he could drive in silence and ponder the quarter-life crisis he’d been in the midst of for the last six months. He was in his mid twenties and was supposed to have his life figured out by now, right? Working a dead-end job as a security guard was not exactly what eight-year-old Jeff would have had in mind. How was he going to get a woman? Women went for the extroverted, charismatic types with money, and he had none of those things. He told himself the security gig was temporary, just a way to stay afloat while he figured out what he really wanted to do with his life, but that didn’t do much to tamp down the anxiety that was constantly in the back of his mind.

Was a quarter-life crisis even a real thing? Maybe calling it that was just cope for not being able to get his shit together.

It was about ten after three, and the car rolled to a stop for a red light at the intersection of Cottage Hill and Knollwood. He did a double take. That was odd; normally by this time of night, all the traffic lights were switched to their flashing red mode that acted as a four-way stop, since traffic was sparse enough that not much control was needed. But there was a constant red that definitely meant stop, and the light for the cross street was green, so he pulled the car to a stop.

He briefly considered just running the red. There wasn’t a single other car in sight anywhere of any kind, let alone of the actual cop variety. But you never knew about traffic cameras, and Jeff figured it wouldn’t be good to chance getting caught by one running a red light in the company car. So he sat and waited for the light to turn.

The YouTube video he was listening to on his phone over the car’s bluetooth stopped abruptly. He looked down. Buffering. No service. Piece of shit phone. These hiccups in service seemed to be getting more frequent. He should probably get a new one. Not that he could really afford that on a part-time security guard’s wages.

The light for the cross street turned yellow, then red. Good, he’d get out of this random spot of bad service in a second and get back to his hour-long video on Eastern Front field fortifications.

Five seconds passed, then ten, then thirty, and the light stayed red. The cross street light stayed red too. Jeff had the thought that maybe shitty traffic lights were contributing to the stupid crazy rush hours in Mobile. Really, a town of this size had no business having a rush hour like it did. This must be the explanation.

After what must have been a full minute of the lights for both streets staying red, Jeff decided to chance getting in trouble with his supervisor for getting caught by a traffic camera running a red light in the company car. This was obviously bullshit after all. Extenuating circumstances. His supervisor was a reasonable guy; he’d understand.

He was about to move his foot from the brake pedal to the gas, when he realized he didn’t hear the car’s engine anymore. He didn’t remember hearing it quit. He checked the key in the ignition and confirmed it was in the run position. This car wasn’t new enough to have one of those automatic-shutoff-when-you-stop features. He hadn’t run out of gas; the gauge showed almost half a tank.

He pressed on the gas. Nothing. He put his foot back on the brake, turned the key to off, and tried starting it up again. Nothing. What the fuck?

Jeff popped the hood, stepped out, walked around, and opened it up. Yep, that was the engine alright. What did he think he was going to learn by looking at the engine? He didn’t know anything about cars beyond how to change the oil. Checking the engine just seemed like the thing to do, he supposed.

Now what? He figured he’d better call somebody, a tow truck or something. He slammed the hood, reached back in the driver’s door, and picked up his phone from the center console. Oh yeah, no service. Great. He looked up, and both lights were still red. It must have been close to five minutes now since they last turned. Very strange.

That was when Jeff noticed something else strange: there were no sounds at all. This time of night was always quiet, sure, but there should have been something making some noise. Wind rustling the trees, distant highway traffic noise, a red-eye flight passing overhead somewhere. But no. There was nothing.

Jeff stomped his foot, half expecting it to make no sound either, but he heard the familiar sound of boot sole on pavement. Of course you heard the sound, Jeff. Foot stomping makes noise. What were you expecting?

Fog hung like a curtain over the whole scene. That was normal enough. This was the Gulf Coast after all. Unbearable humidity was a constant fact of life, and the early-morning quiet on the roads came with fog most nights, especially in the summertime. It wasn’t even particularly thick tonight. Even so, it was enough to give an extra tinge of strangeness to this whole thing. What whole thing, exactly? There’s literally nothing happening. Nothing ever happens, remember?

Jeff suddenly felt the stillness become oppressive in a way he couldn’t quite put his finger on. The lights on the closed facade of the Walgreens across the intersection took on a ghostly glow through the fog. He hurriedly climbed back into the driver’s seat and shut the door, and immediately felt a little silly for having done so. What was he trying to hide from, anyway? There wasn’t a soul in sight anywhere, nothing in particular wrong except that the car wouldn’t start and he had no cell service and the traffic lights were still both red. He just felt weird.

The traffic lights turned yellow just then. For both streets at once. They also stayed red. That is, the yellow ones came on while the red ones stayed on. Now that was definitely strange. The hairs stood up on the back of Jeff’s neck, and he had the overwhelming feeling that getting out of the car now, for any reason whatsoever, would be the worst mistake of his life, for reasons he couldn’t possibly even begin to explain.

He calmed himself with the thought that again, there was nothing actually happening. Just a strange series of coincidences, with the car dying, the traffic lights going all haywire, the fog, and the weirdly deep silence of this particular night. As soon as that thought went through his head, he realized the night wasn’t completely silent anymore. There was a sound, a kind of low, barely-audible rumble that seemed to come from everywhere at once.

He tried to crack the window to listen outside and see if he could get a better idea of where the sound came from, but then remembered the power windows wouldn’t work since the car was dead. Slowly, tentatively, as silently as possible, he pulled the door handle and cracked the door instead. The door being open made no noticeable difference to the volume of the rumble, and he couldn’t tell any better where it was coming from. As he pulled the door closed again, the dull thud of it shutting sounded a little muffled. Or was that just his imagination?

Something kept drawing Jeff’s eyes back to the traffic lights. For some reason, he felt that if only they’d go back to operating as normal, whatever strange spell was cast over the intersection right now would be lifted and he’d be able to go on about his patrol for the next couple hours, then go home, make himself a nice breakfast of bacon and eggs, and rack out until the early afternoon. The reds and yellows were all still on though, the colors bleeding together in the fog.

The lights for the cross street seemed angled all wrong, like they were all facing a quarter turn towards his side of the intersection. That didn’t seem right. Shouldn’t they be facing oncoming traffic for the cross street? Had they always been like that?

Jeff looked down at his phone again and saw the time. 3:46 a.m. What the fuck? He’d been sitting here over half an hour, apparently. He tried the ignition again. Still nothing. That rumble was noticeably louder now, it had to be. Still quiet, but loud enough to be impossible not to notice.

A shadow moved in the glow of the Walgreens facade. Jeff tensed, his heart in his throat, then again wondered what he was actually getting so jumpy about. It was probably some homeless guy walking past. Mobile had no shortage of those.

The traffic lights changed again, and his eyes were drawn back to them, not against his will exactly but not with a conscious decision on his part either. All of the lights were on now: red, yellow, and green, blending together into a rainbow of color in the fog that had unmistakably thickened. There was a strange beauty to them, Jeff thought. The cross street lights looked to have made another quarter turn towards him while he’d been looking away. But that was obviously crazy. Traffic lights didn’t move. Nothing ever happened.

Jeff looked down at his phone on the center console again. 4:37 a.m. His shift was almost over. There ought to be a fair bit of early-morning traffic on the roads by now, but he still didn’t see a single car. The minutes on the phone screen counted up as he watched, past five, six, seven o’clock, then the phone went dead. No hint of sunrise; the light outside hadn’t changed at all.

That rumble was definitely louder. Jeff decided he wanted a closer look at those lights, strangely beautiful as they were. Mechanically, he opened the door again and stepped out of the car. His boots made no sound on the pavement this time. Or was it just that he couldn’t hear them over the rumble?

The shadow from the Walgreens parking lot moved again, closer this time. Jeff couldn’t see whatever the thing was, but felt its presence. It hovered in the fog, just outside the circle of rainbow light bathing the intersection.

It moved again, into the light. Jeff’s eyes widened as he saw it. He stepped forward.

Each set of traffic lights, all of them in unison, slowly turned of their own accord to face directly towards him. He stared back into them, eyes reflecting their rainbow glow through the fog. The rumble was deafening now.

Nothing was happening.

Nothing ever happened.

Grandma was born in 1928, grew up during the Great Depression, and lived most of her life in rural Iowa. She met my grandfather at a dance in June 1949, and they were married in January 1950. They were married for 55 years until grandpa passed in 2005. They had eight daughters and three sons, plus one more son who was stillborn. My mother was the middle of the eleven kids. Grandma was 97 years old when she passed, and right up to the end she never had any major health problems. The only times she was ever in a hospital were for childbirth, and her own death via heart failure. 97 years is a good long run.

The days of our years are threescore years and ten; and if by reason of strength they be fourscore years, yet is their strength labour and sorrow; for it is soon cut off, and we fly away.

— Psalm 90:10 (KJV)

As far as I’m concerned, anything I get after my threescore and ten is gravy, and that goes double for anything after fourscore. Grandma got to live another whole seventeen years after that. Since I’m already using my real name and don’t really worry about opsec, you can read her full obituary here if you’re interested.

One highlight from the obituary is the fact that grandma had no less than 22 grandchildren, which means I grew up with a lot of cousins. 20 cousins to be exact, since my brother and I account for two of those 22 grandchildren. And that’s not even counting my dad’s side of the family, which is smaller, but still pretty big by today’s standards. Grandma also had 10 great-grandchildren (with more on the way, including another one of my own kids due this spring), and even one great-great-grandchild already. I have a first cousin once removed (child of my first cousin) who is only a couple years younger than me, even though he is technically of the same generation as my 2-year-old daughter.

Family gatherings were kind of like an assembly of a small town, and were always a little confusing. You knew everybody there was related somehow, either by blood or marriage, but it wasn’t always easy to remember who everyone was and what the relationships were. There were a few cousins, aunts, and uncles that I knew pretty well and always hung out with, but it seemed there were always at least a couple new people at any given gathering who I didn’t know from Adam. The gathering for grandma’s funeral was no exception.

Our family seems to have gotten reamed pretty hard by the boomer-era cultural hollowing-out of America, and there’s been a lot of scattering. There’s never been a time since I’ve been alive when the family was all together in one place, or even mostly together in one place. Not even a large minority, in fact. Everybody scattered from Iowa, and today we have members in places as far-flung as Hawaii, California, Arizona, Colorado, Texas, Oklahoma, Kansas, Arkansas, Nebraska, Iowa, Wisconsin, Florida, Tennessee, and probably a dozen other states I’ve forgotten about. We got together for certain holidays, anniversaries, weddings, funerals, and other major life events, but mostly didn’t see each other outside of that except in small groups. I supposed a little bit of cliquishness isn’t too surprising in such a large family.

Another interesting thing about such a big family is seeing the range of life outcomes that people end up with. I suppose every family has a range, but it’s magnified in such a big family. Grandma’s funeral was the biggest family gathering in 20 years or more, probably since grandpa’s funeral in 2005 when I was only 11 years old. I have cousins my age who I have not seen since 2005, so we’ve grown up in each other’s absence, some of us keeping in touch only through social media off and on. Out of respect for other people’s privacy I won’t go into any details, but through catching up this week I’ve found that some of us seem to be doing pretty well for ourselves, while others have some pretty serious issues. Again, probably not too surprising with a sample size this large. You win some, you lose some.

The last time I saw grandma before she passed was maybe a year and a half ago. My wife and I took the trip from Oklahoma up to Iowa so she could meet my daughter, who was maybe about 9 months old at the time. She had lots of visitors in her last few years of life, mostly her kids coming to check on her, especially one son who was taking care of her basically full-time. One thing I heard at the funeral gathering was that for months after our visit, she was talking to everyone who came to see her about our little daughter and what a happy baby she was. I pray that when I’m that age, my grandkids will be bringing their kids to meet me.

Anyway, I guess I should come to the point of this ramble, if there is one. Grandma was my last surviving grandparent, so her passing marks the ending of a generation of my particular family line (although she and grandpa actually both still have surviving siblings—longevity runs in the family). The ending of an era such as this naturally prompts some reflection. For whatever stupid reason, I was reminded of that silly line from that terribly stupid Star Wars sequel: “Let the past die. Kill it if you have to.”

I know, it’s a stupid movie, and I don’t know about killing the past, but there is a certain sense in which the past has to die for the sake of the future. The old ones die, the new ones are born, and the world marches on. It’s, like, the circle of life, bro. One day, God willing, I’ll be 97 years old and my kids will be taking care of me.

This trip to Iowa was something of a farewell for me, since I likely won’t have a reason to go up there again for the foreseeable future now that grandma is gone. It brought up a lot of childhood memories of holidays and other gatherings on grandpa and grandma’s farm. And of course, catching up with cousins who I haven’t seen for 20 years and probably won’t see again for another 20 years.

Sometimes, hearing the stories of grandma’s childhood, or even my mom’s childhood, I get nostalgic for an era I never even experienced. An era without the internet or AI, before America was flooded with infinity Pajeets and Somalians, when everyone could still comfortably rest in the shade of the post-WWII consensus myth. Of course, that era had more than its fair share of issues too, as the spiritual gutting of the boomer generation can attest to.

But that past is dead. Even the 1990s era of my own childhood is dead. I didn’t kill it; it’s just dead because all things on this mortal plane die.

One thing that strikes me about this side of my family is that there’s been a bit of a bottleneck. Grandma was the middle of seventeen (yes, you read that right) children. Of course, back in her day a lot more kids didn’t survive childhood. One of her brothers died of pneumonia as a teenager because they didn’t have penicillin yet. I can’t remember offhand how many siblings grandpa had, but I know it was also a lot. Then they had 12 of their own. Then in the next generation, the boomers, I’m pretty sure none of grandma’s kids had more than four kids of their own. Some of them never had kids at all. My mom had two. Among my cousins, some of them have kids of their own but a lot of them are genetic dead ends. Some of them don’t have kids yet, but still have hope.

This all means that my kids won’t grow up in a big extended family with lots of cousins their age running around. My wife and I are the first of any of our siblings to have kids, so our kids don’t have any first cousins yet (although they do have some second cousins). We’re also both the oldest children in our respective families, so there’s still hope for having some first cousins, but it’s limited since she only has two brothers and I have one.

Anyway, that past is dead. My wife asked me this week who the new patriarch or matriarch of the family is now that grandma is gone, and I said there probably isn’t one really. The family crown is waiting to be picked up. Certainly none of the boomers are going to take it.

I told my wife it’ll be us. We’ll be the ones picking up the crown and hosting the small-town-sized family gatherings 50 years from now. We’ve already started. The past can’t be re-created, or held onto for too long. The spark can only be carried forward, with the memory of the past, and the hope of the resurrection to life eternal.

O God of spirits and of all flesh, Who hast trampled down death and made powerless the devil and given life to Thy world: Give rest also to the soul of Thy departed handmaiden, Theresa, in a place of brightness, a place of verdure, a place of repose, whence all sickness, sorrow, and sighing have fled away. Pardon every sin which she has committed, whether by word or deed or thought; for Thou art good and lovest mankind, and there is no man who liveth and sinneth not, for Thou alone art without sin, and Thy righteousness is to all eternity, and Thy word is truth.

For Thou art the Resurrection and the Life and the Repose of Thy departed servants, O Christ our God, and unto Thee we ascribe glory, together with Thine unoriginate Father and Thine all-holy, good, and life-giving Spirit, now and ever, and unto ages of ages. Amen.

1. The First Book of Nephi: His Reign and Ministry

2. The Second Book of Nephi

3. The Book of Jacob, the Brother of Nephi

4. The Book of Enos

5. The Book of Jarom

6. The Book of Omni

7. The Words of Mormon

8. The Book of Mosiah

After a brief hiatus, I am back with another Book of Mormon summary. As part of the research for my upcoming podcast series, I am reading the Book of Mormon in its entirety and summarizing it for the curious among you who don’t care enough to read the whole thing. This article will cover the 13 chapters of the eighth book, Mosiah.

We’ve jumped back from Mormon’s time to the main timeline of the history of the Nephites, during the reign of Benjamin. I think the author of this book is supposed to be Mormon again. I don’t think it’s Mosiah because it talks about Mosiah in the third person, and it’s previously been made pretty clear who the author of any given book is (“I, Nephi, did such and such a thing,” etc.). Remember that Mosiah is the name of Benjamin’s father, and in this book we find out it’s also the name of one of his sons.

Anyway, here we go.

The Book of Mosiah

Chapter I

We’re back in the reign of Benjamin at Zarahemla. After repelling the Lamanite invasion, Benjamin enjoys peace for the remainder of his reign. He has three sons: Mosiah, Helorum, and Helaman. Nearing the end of his life, he calls Mosiah to him and tells him he will make him his successor to the throne. He also tells Mosiah this:

And moreover, I shall give this people a name, that thereby they may be distinguished above all the people which the Lord God hath brought out of the land of Jerusalem; and this I do, because they have been a diligent people in keeping the commandments of the Lord.—And I give unto them a name, that shall never be blotted out, except it be through transgression.

Two things about this. First, it seems like “all the people which the Lord God hath brought out of the land of Jerusalem” implies that there are even more groups who left besides the Lehites and the people of Zarahemla. Which kind of makes sense given the parable of the olive tree back in the Book of Jacob.

Second, Benjamin tells us he’s going to give the people a name, but doesn’t say what the name is. I’m making special note of this to make sure I remember to pester him about it if he doesn’t tell us soon. I was under the impression that the people were already called the Nephites, but I guess they need a new name now since they have joined with the people of Zarahemla.

Benjamin calls all the people together, tells them Mosiah is going to be the next king, and preaches a sermon which seems like pretty standard Mormon stuff. Follow God’s commandments and you’ll be blessed, don’t and you’ll suffer damnation. Detailed prophecy of Christ, made possible by the fact that Joseph Smith in the 19th century knows all about Christ. Also a kind of weird section about how all human beings are lower than dirt in their carnal state. This probably has some connection to gnosticism, but I’m not digging deep into theology here.

Chapter II

The assembled multitudes see their filthiness before God and cry out for forgiveness. The Holy Spirit comes upon them and they rejoice. Benjamin continues preaching, this time on generosity towards the poor, telling the people that they are beggars before God and so should be generous towards beggars coming to them. Still no mention of what the people’s new name is.

Chapter III

The people accept Benjamin’s teachings, and he lets us know what name he will give them:

And now, because of the covenant which ye have made, ye shall be called the children of Christ, his sons, and his daughters: for behold, this day he hath spiritually begotten you; for ye say that your hearts are changed, through faith on his name; therefore, ye are born of him, and have become his sons, and his daughters. And under this head, ye are made free; and there is no other head whereby ye can be made free. There is no other name given, whereby salvation cometh; therefore, I would that ye should take upon you the name of Christ, all you that have entered into the covenant with God, that ye should be obedient unto the end of your lives. And it shall come to pass that whosoever doeth this, shall be found at the right hand of God, for he shall know the name by which he is called: for he shall be called by the name of Christ.

The only way the name can be lost is through the people’s own transgressions.

Chapter IV

The people all accept the name of Christ. At 476 years since Lehi left Jerusalem, Mosiah is 30 years old, and Benjamin passes the kingship on to him. Three years later, Benjamin dies, and Mosiah enjoys a peaceful reign.

Chapter V

This chapter gives us yet another wild twist. Remember in the Book of Omni when a second expedition left Zarahemla during the reign of Mosiah’s father Benjamin to try to find the original land of Lehi-Nephi but was never heard from again? Well, they’re going to be heard from again now.

After three years of reigning peacefully, Mosiah decides he wants to find out what happened to that expedition, so he sends out another expedition of sixteen men led by a guy named Ammon. They wander in the wilderness for 40 days but eventually find the city of Lehi-Nephi, which I guess is supposed to be the original city the Nephites founded when they showed up in America.

There is a king in the city named Limhi, who is initially suspicious and imprisons Ammon and his men, but lets them out once he finds out who they are. Through Limhi, we get the story of what happened to the last expedition. It was led by a man named Zeniff1 and did in fact find the land of Lehi-Nephi. Zeniff was made king, and once he died he passed the throne down to his son Noah, who in turn passed it down to his son Limhi, who is king now.

My question at this point is who lives in the land of Lehi-Nephi? Is it just the people of the Zeniff expedition? Or were there Nephites still there from the group that stayed behind when Mosiah2 led a portion of them to find Zarahemla? I’m pretty sure the book doesn’t answer this, but I would think there should still be Nephites there, in which case how did they let some guy from Zarahamla show up and become their king? Strange.

But it gets more strange. It turns out that Zeniff’s people are now in bondage to the Lamanites, whose king at this time is, conveniently enough, named Laman. Apparently Laman was a crafty one, and tricked Zeniff into signing an unfavorable treaty and putting his people under a heavy tax obligation to the Lamanites. I have to say, this is pretty impressive progress for a people who not that many years ago were borderline animals, wearing nothing but loincloths and eating raw meat and drinking the blood of wild beasts. Now they’re running some kind of tax racket on the Nephites.

So Zeniff’s people are paying half of everything they have to the Lamanites, which is not very cool at all. Limhi says he actually sent an expedition of his own back to try to find Zarahamla again and maybe get some help, but they weren’t able to find it.

It’s at this point that I have to question the logistics of this. Remember that after leaving Zarahemla, Ammon’s men wandered 40 days in the wilderness before finding Lehi-Nephi, which puts the two places at an absolute maximum distance apart of 40 days’ travel by foot. Given that “wandered” seems to imply that they didn’t take the most direct route or hoof it at top speed, I think we can safely assume they’re quite a bit closer together than that even.

Also remember that it has only been two generations since the Zeniff expedition left Zarahemla.3 Probably there are still people alive who were alive at the time of the expedition; it’s still in living memory. You mean to tell me that Zeniff’s people just forgot how to get back to Zarahemla in two generations? Maybe this would make sense if they’d been separated for centuries, or if the two places were much further apart. But as it stands, Zeniff’s people apparently forgot within two generations how to get back to the land they just came from, which is no more than a few weeks away by foot.

Limhi’s expedition didn’t find Zarahemla, but he says they did find something else. They found the ruins of a city, with the scattered bones of many men. By the looks of them it was a wealthy city, and they find gold plates inscribed with the records of this mysterious people, written in an unknown language. Limhi wants to find a seer who can translate the gold plates. Ammon says he can’t do it, but Mosiah, the king of Zarahemla, has the gift of revelation and can translate them.

Chapter VI: The Record of Zeniff

In this chapter, we’re backing up in the timeline a little bit. The author is Zeniff, the guy who led the original expedition out of Zarahemla two generations before Limhi.

Zeniff tells of how his people found the Lamanites near the original land of Lehi-Nephi. Zeniff wanted to make some kind of treaty with the Lamanites and try to be friends with them, but another leader of the expedition doesn’t want to and the people are split. They actually end up in a mini civil war over this, and some of the people go back to Zarahemla. Apparently they never make it though, because we haven’t heard about anybody ever coming back from this expedition.

Zeniff leads the remaining people to the city of Lehi-Nephi, and another city Shilom. Now things get weird. Zeniff says:

And I went in unto the king, and he covenanted with me, that I might possess the land of Lehi-Nephi, and the land of Shilom. And he also commanded that his people should depart out of the land, and I and my people went into the land, that we might possess it.

Why the hell would a king just voluntarily move his people out of their land so someone else could take it over? What did Zeniff offer him that was worth giving up his people’s land for? The text doesn’t tell us, that’s for sure.

There is the possibility that the king he’s talking about here is supposed to be Laman, king of the Lamanites. If that’s the case, then I suppose this is all part of Laman’s devious plan to enslave Zeniff’s people and make them his tax cattle.

If that’s the case, then the first thing I’ll say about it is that it’s very clunky and unclear in how it’s presented in the text. There’s enough ambiguity to make me do exactly this double take on my first pass reading it.

Also, it makes no damn sense for Laman to do something like this. The next thing we find out is that Zeniff’s people build and improve the city, start farming, and live peacefully for twelve years, and only after that does Laman make any aggressive move toward trying to enslave them. So Laman’s crafty master plan is to just move out and let Zeniff have the city, wait twelve years, and then come back and try to enslave him? What is going on?4

And when Laman does attack, Zeniff’s people drive the Lamanites off. We’re even given very specific casualty numbers for the battle where this happens: 3043 on the Lamanite side to 279 on Zeniff’s side.5

Zeniff’s people live peacefully in Lehi-Nephi and Shilom for many more years after this. We’re told 22 years, but I’m not sure if that means 22 years total, or 22 years after the initial twelve. They’ve been there either 22 years or 34 years, I’m not exactly sure. I guess Laman was really playing the long con when he craftily decided to hand over the city to Zeniff.

He plays the con too long, because he dies, and his son whose name we’re not told takes over the throne of the Lamanites. He attacks Zeniff’s people again, and Zeniff, by now an old man, leads his people out to battle and drives off the Lamanites again. We are told that the Lamanites believe they were driven out of Jerusalem rather than choosing to leave, and that they are generationally aggrieved against the Nephites going back to the time of Nephi and the original Laman.

Zeniff gets old and passes his kingdom on to his son. We still have no explanation of how Zeniff’s people came to be paying half of everything they produce to the Lamanites, but it appears the flashback is going to continue in the next chapter, so maybe there’s more coming.

Chapter VII

Zeniff passes the kingship on to his son Noah.6 Noah turns out to be a wicked king, doing polygamy,7 winebibbing, idolatry, whoredoms, removing all the good priests and installing false ones, the whole nine yards. He builds a tower that overlooks all his land, which seems reminiscent of the Tower of Babel. The people in turn fall into wickedness.

God chooses a man named Abinadi to prophesy to the king and correct the people’s wicked ways. The normal stuff is prophesied: repent or the people will be destroyed, etc. Of course Noah doesn’t like that and commands his false priests to kill Abinadi, but he has the Spirit of God upon him and the priests find they aren’t able to touch him. Abinadi recounts the Ten Commandments to Noah and his priests.

Chapter VIII

Abinadi continues prophesying to Noah and his false priests. He prophesies about Christ and quotes the Suffering Servant passage from Isaiah. Then he gets into some stuff that seems pretty important for Mormon theology, which I’m not going to get into great detail on here but it seems important to at least quote this part:

I would that ye should understand that God himself shall come down among the children of men, and shall redeem his people; and because he dwelleth in flesh, he shall be called the Son of God: and having subjected the flesh to the will of the Father, being the Father and the Son; the Father, because he was conceived by the power of God; and the Son, because of the flesh; thus becoming the Father and Son: and they are one God, yea, the very Eternal Father of Heaven and of Earth; and thus the flesh becoming subject to the Spirit, or the Son to the Father, being one God, suffereth temptation, and yieldeth not to the temptation, but suffereth himself to be mocked, and scourged, and cast out, and disowned by the people.

So the Son is the Father. Also the Son is Flesh and the Father is Spirit or something (but not the Holy Spirit?), and the Son’s will is subjected to the Father’s will, even though they’re the same person apparently.

Is that actually modalism? I don’t know; I’m not a scholar of christological heresies. But whatever it is, it ain’t Christian, lest we forget that Mormons aren’t Christians even in the loosest possible sense. Even if they may use some of the same words to describe their theology, the doctrine expressed here is so radically different from Orthodox monarchical trinitarianism that they can’t even be said to be worshipping the same God. They’re not called prairie Muslims for nothing I guess.

Anyway, Abinadi prophesies about the Resurrection and Last Judgment as well.

Chapter IX

A whole lot of stuff happens in this chapter.

Noah and his priests beat and scourge Abinadi for criticizing them, and we’re told:

And it came to pass that they took him, and bound him, and scourged his skin with faggots,8 yea, even unto death.

Finally, they burn him to death when he refuses to recant his prophecy of God coming to earth in the flesh.

One of Noah’s people, Alma, hears and accepts Abinadi’s teachings before he dies. He repents of his wickedness, escapes, and starts teaching whoever will listen about Abinadi’s prophecies. He starts baptizing people in water at a place called Mormon, baptizing a total of “about two hundred and four souls.”9 His followers from that time on are called the Church of God, or Church of Christ.

So Christ didn’t establish the Church, you see, Alma did. This is your brain on Mormonism.

Alma also teaches:

And again Alma commanded that the people of the Church should impart of their substance, every one according to that which he hath; if he have more abundantly, he should impart more abundantly; and he that hath but little, but little should be required; and to him that hath not should be given.10

Eventually Noah gets wind of Alma and his followers and goes out to hunt them down, but they scatter and he can’t find them. His army starts to dissent among themselves, and a guy named Gideon11 leads the anti-Noah faction. Gideon goes to kill Noah, but Noah flees and holes up in a tower in the city. Gideon’s pursuit is interrupted by a surprise Lamanite invasion.

Now we finally find out how the Lamanites come to control the Nephites in this region. Given the current state of weakness and internal division in Noah’s kingdom, his armies are easily defeated by the Lamanites, but the Lamanites take pity on them and decide to spare their lives, on the condition that they hand over Noah and also agree to pay half of all their income to the Lamanites in perpetuity.

Noah flees rather than submitting to be captured by the Lamanites. He is eventually killed by his own people, and his son Limhi is chosen by the rest of the Nephites as their new king. Which begs another question: why are the Lamanites, who wanted Noah dead, agreeing to have their just-conquered enemies led by the son of that same Noah? For that matter, how do the Lamanites even make rational decisions at all? Remember not too long ago they were a degenerate, animalistic race who eats raw meat and drinks the blood of wild beasts. This makes no sense.

Anyway, Limhi makes peace with the Lamanites, but Noah’s false priests are still at large in the wilderness somewhere. They find some Lamanite women gathered together for dancing and steal 24 of them, which prompts the Lamanite king to invade Nephite land again, thinking the Nephites did the woman-stealing. The Nephites defeat the Lamanites in battle and capture the Lamanite king, which kind of begs the question, why are the Nephites paying tribute again? If they can defeat the Lamanites in battle, how are the Lamanites enforcing the tribute agreement? Are we to believe the Nephites are just so faithful to their oath that they keep paying even though the Lamanites don’t actually have the strength to make them?

Limhi irons out the situation with the Lamanite king, making it clear that he and the Nephites as a whole did not sanction the woman-stealing. The whole thing was just a big misunderstanding, and Limhi makes peace and returns the Lamanite king to his own people.

The Nephites are still paying tribute to the Lamanites though. Eventually they get sick of it and try to fight them, but get defeated in battle three times. Why are they marching out to attack the Lamanites? If they want to stop paying tribute, why not just stop paying tribute? They have a demonstrated ability to defeat the Lamanites when the Lamanites attack. Why do they have to march out to attack them? Again, this makes no sense.

After three defeats in battle, the demographics have changed a little bit among the Nephites:

Now there was a great number of women more than there was of men; therefore king Limhi commanded that every man should impart to the support of the widows and their children, that they might not perish with hunger: and this they did, because of the greatness of their number that had been slain.

Is this the first inkling of how the Mormons eventually come around to condoning polygamy? I don’t know; I guess we’ll find out.

Anyway, this is the situation in which Ammon finds Limhi’s people when he eventually arrives from Zarahemla. Limhi initially took him and his boys to be the renegade priests of Noah, which is why he was suspicious at first. Limhi’s people now desire to be baptized, but nobody can find Alma and his followers, and Ammon says he doesn’t have the proper authority from God to baptize people.12

Chapter X

Gideon proposes to Limhi that the Nephites take advantage of drunken Lamanite guards to escape their lands. Limhi agrees, and led by Ammon, they give the Lamanites the slip. After “many days in the wilderness” they make it back to Zarahemla,13 where king Mosiah receives them with joy. Once the Lamanites realize they’re gone, they pursue, but lose their trail in the wilderness.

Chapter XI

The lost followers of Alma settle in a new land of their own, called Helam, and become prosperous. Alma becomes beloved by the people and they ask him to be their king, but he refuses, saying that it’s not expedient for the people to have a king.

But he saith unto them, Behold, it is not expedient that we should have a king; for thus saith the Lord: Ye shall not esteem one flesh above another, or one man shall not think himself above another; therefore I say unto you, It is not expedient that ye should have a king. Nevertheless, if it were possible that ye could always have just men to be your kings, it would be well for you to have a king.

Interesting glimpse into how Joseph Smith conceives of what it means to be a king. It just means you’re esteemed above other people. Very egalitarian, Enlightenment Republican sentiment expressed here. Very American, if you will. A bit further on:

I desire that ye should stand fast in this liberty wherewith ye have been made free, and that ye trust no man to be a king over you; and also trusting no one to be your teachers nor your ministers, except he be a man of God, walking in his ways and keeping his commandments.

How does an individual member of the church determine whether any given man claiming to be a teacher is in fact a man of God or not? Of course there’s no coherent standard in Mormonism for determining a true teacher vs a false teacher.

Anyway, back to the summary.

The Lamanite army who lost the trail of Limhi’s people keeps wandering in the wilderness, and eventually they find the still-at-large group of Noah’s false priests, led by one named Amulon. Amulon’s priests find favor with the Lamanites and are brought on as teachers, presumably still teaching false doctrine.

At some point, Amulon and the Lamanites find Alma’s people and reestablish control over them, imposing heavy burdens. It gets bad enough that Alma decides to flee. God puts their Lamanite guards into a deep sleep, allowing them to slip away, and they go wandering in the wilderness again. After twelve days in the wilderness, they find Zarahemla.

This has some more implications for the geography of everything going on here. Previously we established that Zarahemla could be no further than 40 days’ journey by foot from Lehi-Nephi. Now in this chapter we establish that Helam can be an absolute maximum of twelve days’ journey by foot from Zarahemla. This time around, they’re not said to “wander” like last time, so let’s be generous and assume they took a reasonably direct route.14 That still puts Zarahemla and Helam less than two weeks’ journey apart by foot. Additionally, we are told that Helam was eight days’ journey from wherever Alma’s people were previously, which must have been pretty close to Lehi-Nephi given that all of this fighting with the Lamanites has been taking place in seemingly the same general area between Lehi-Nephi, Shilom, Shemlon, and Helam.

So assuming Helam is eight days’ journey from Lehi-Nephi in one direction, and Zarahemla is another twelve days’ journey from Helam in the same direction, that puts Lehi-Nephi no further than twenty days’ journey from Zarahemla. Any deviation in direction from a straight line connecting all three places would put Zarahemla even closer to Lehi-Nephi, but they are at most just shy of three weeks’ foot journey apart. How again did Zeniff’s people forget how to get back to Zarahemla within two generations?

Anyway, whatever the case, they make it back to Zarahemla and Mosiah receives them with joy. Now all of the Nephites and people of Zarahemla are together again. Here we get some idea of relative numbers:

Now there were not so many of the children of Nephi, or so many of those which were descendants of Nephi, as there were of the people of Zarahemla, which was a descendant of Mulok,15 and those which came with him into the wilderness; and there were not so many of the people of Nephi and of the people of Zarahemla as there was of the Lamanites; yea, they were not half so numerous.

In case the language is too dense, what that says is that there are more people of Zarahemla than there are Nephites, but that the Nephites and Zarahemlites together are less than half as numerous as the Lamanites.

King Mosiah gathers the people together to hear the stories of Zeniff, Limhi, and Alma. The people of Zarahemla are officially incorporated into the Nephites, and they will all be called Nephites from here on out. The high priest Alma establishes a Church on Mosiah’s authority. This is actually kind of interesting to quote:

And it came to pass that king Mosiah granted unto Alma, that he might establish Churches throughout all the land of Zarahemla; and gave him power to ordain priests and teachers over every Church. Now this was done because there was so many people that they could not all be governed by one teacher; neither could they all hear the word of God in one assembly; therefore they did assemble themselves together in different bodies, being called Churches; every Church having their priests and their teachers, and every priest preaching the word according as it was delivered to him by the mouth of Alma; and thus, notwithstanding there being many Churches, they were all one Church; yea, even the Church of God: for there was nothing preached in all the Churches except it were repentance and faith in God. And now there was seven Churches in the land of Zarahemla. And it came to pass that whosoever was desirous to take upon them the name of Christ, or of God, they did join the churches of God; and they were called the people of God. And the Lord did pour out his spirit upon them, and they were blest, and prospered in the land.

Now remember, we are still in the B.C. times right now. Christ has not come to earth as a Man yet, and won’t for another hundred years or so. Even so, we have the founding of a “Church” going on right now. Lest anyone still doubt my assertion that Mormons are not Christians, here we have the founding of a “Church” that cannot be the Body of Christ, because Christ didn’t establish it, and hasn’t even taken on a Body in the Incarnation yet. Is Joseph Smith trying to one-up Christ by having one of his “prophets” establish a church before Christ? I think he might be.

Anyway, the people enjoy peace and prosperity for a while in Zarahemla. Then a movement led by the younger generation arises and grows, departing from the path and not believing in the traditions of their fathers. Mosiah’s four sons Ammon,16 Aaron,17 Omner, and Himni join the movement and become leaders, along with Alma’s son, also named Alma. Their numbers grow and they start persecuting the church to the point where Mosiah has to put out a decree that says no persecution allowed.

Then, Alma Jr and the sons of Mosiah have a regular road-to-Damascus moment where the angel of the Lord appears to them and tells them to stop persecuting the church. This is basically just a straight-up copy of the story of St Paul’s conversion from the book of Acts, but not as good. The angel of the Lord is a bit long-winded in this one. It’s super weird that Joseph Smith is recapitulating Acts and the founding of the Church a century before Christ. But at any rate, Alma Jr and the Mosiah boys stop their persecution and become good prophets of God.

Chapter XII

Mosiah’s sons request permission from their father to go preach to the Lamanites and try to get them to repent and give up their hatred of the Nephites. After consulting God, Mosiah grants their request. None of the sons want to accept the kingship once Mosiah is gone. Mosiah translates the records Limhi’s people recovered from the ruined people. We’re not told anything about this people yet, except that their records go all the way back to the creation of Adam and the Tower of Babel.

Of course, Mosiah uses seer stones to translate the records.

And now he translated them by the means of those two stones which was fastened into the rim of a bow. Now these things was prepared from teh beginning, and was handed down from generation to generation, for the purpose of interpreting languages; and they have been kept and preserved by the hand of the Lord, that he should discover to every creature which should possess the land, the iniquities and abominations of his people: and whosoever has these things, is called seer, after the manner of old times.

A not-so-subtle way for Joseph Smith to legitimize his own use of seer stones to “translate” this book.

Chapter XIII

Since none of Mosiah’s sons want to be king after him, Mosiah convinces the people to embrace democracy and elect judges instead of having a king. He waxes eloquent about how monarchy is bad because not all men are just, and if you end up with an unjust king, great wickedness can happen. Yes, very American sentiment. He says this:

Now it is not common that the voice of the people desireth any thing contrary to that which is right;18 but it is common for the lesser part of the people to desire that which is not right; therefore this shall ye observe, and make it your law to do your business by the voice of the people.

In other words, embrace democracy. I guess Mosiah hasn’t read his Plato and Aristotle. A little bit further on:

And now I desire that this inequality should be no more in this land, especially among this my people; but I desire that this land be a land of liberty, and every man may enjoy his rights and privileges alike, so long as the Lord seeth fit, that we may live and inherit the land; yea, even as long as any of our posterity remaineth upon the face of the land.

Wow, super convenient for Joseph Smith that the ideals of these 1st century B.C. Jewish-descended immigrants to North America just happen to align perfectly with the 18th and 19th century Enlightenment founding ideals of the United States of America. Truly amazing. Many people are saying this.

Anyway, the people take Mosiah’s advice and embrace democracy. Alma Jr is elected the first chief judge, and also has the office of high priest bestowed on him by his father. Alma Sr dies at age 82. Mosiah dies at age 63, in the 33rd19 year of his reign. We’re also told this happens in year 509 from the time Lehi left Jerusalem, which should put us right around 90 B.C. or so.

Conclusion

This wasn’t a terribly long book, but boy did a lot happen in it, especially in the second half. By the way, I usually write these chapter summaries as I finish each chapter, rather than waiting until I finish the whole book to write them all. So when I write the summary for Chapter IV for example, I haven’t read the later chapters yet. That way you, dear reader, get to experience the book as I do. It’s more fun that way.

The next book, Alma, is by far the longest book in the entire Book of Mormon. It has 30 chapters and takes up close to a third of the page count on its own. So it’ll probably take me longer to get the next part of this series out, but when it does come out it should be a good and long one. I’ll see you then.

After seeing it though, I can easily see why my dad probably wouldn’t have liked it or showed it to me as a kid. It’s not that I wasn’t allowed to see it or something; I just don’t remember it being on my radar at all until I was already an adult. I don’t remember any of the classic movie channels we watched ever playing it; go figure. For a while I had heard it mentioned on various lists as a great movie but just never got around to seeing it, until an old article called The New Western Myth popped up in my “From the Archives” Substack recommendations.

Frank mentions it there alongside Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, released the same year, as an archetypal example of the anti-western. And boy is it ever an anti-western. Spoilers ahead, you have been warned.

In case it makes a difference, I am basing this review off the director’s cut. I haven’t seen the theatrical cut so I don’t know what the differences are, but I can see a few places where they probably would have trimmed some stuff out to keep the pacing a little quicker. But I also think it’s a near-perfect movie this way.

Setting and Weapons

The first thing that tips you off to the fact that this movie is going to be different is its setting. The time period is somewhat indeterminate, but it’s definitely early 20th century, specifically during the decade of the Mexican Revolution from about 1910-1920. This is a very late setting for a western. The classic “western” setting goes from about the end of the Civil War in 1865 to maybe the late 1880s or so, and usually if you get into the late 1880s or 1890s you’re starting to genre-bend into a hybrid between a western and something else. A great example is the 1997 John Milius miniseries Rough Riders, which is a hybrid western/war movie set in 1898 during the Spanish-American War. The Wild Bunch is set almost a whole two decades later than even Rough Riders.

This is a bit of a side note, but the cool thing about having such a late setting is that we get to see 1910s-era weapons showcased which are almost never seen in westerns. In your typical western you get six shooters and lever guns of various makes and models, maybe some muzzleloaders if it’s an early setting and maybe a Gatling gun, some dynamite, or a Sharps rifle or two if we’re feeling adventurous.

The Wild Bunch shows us all kinds of cool shit right off the bat. In the opening scene, the members of the outlaw gang are all disguised as US Army soldiers and armed with the Colt M1911, which was the army’s new sidearm of the World War era. Several are also armed with Winchester M1897 and M1912 pump shotguns, both of which were adapted for use as trench guns in the world wars. And of course we get another classic, the Springfield M1903, a bolt-action rifle which was the army’s replacement for the older Krag-Jørgenson used during the Spanish-American War. The M1903 was the standard-issue infantry rifle during WWI and was phased out in favor of the semiautomatic M1 Garand in WWII, but continued to see service as a sniper weapon all the way up to Vietnam. We have the Mauser M1910, which seems to be played in the movie by the stand-in Mexican Mauser M1936. We also have grenades, and the pièce de résistance, a Browning M1917 machine gun.

These weapons can help us date the setting to at least 1912, or alternatively, at least 1917. While looking into this, I’ve found that people generally believe the machine gun to be an anachronism, and the setting is supposed to be 1913 or 1914 based on a mention of Victoriano Huerta, president of Mexico from 1913-14, who died in 1916. I could just as easily believe it’s supposed to be 1918, the machine gun is era-appropriate, and the mention of Huerta is the anachronism.

I don’t really care either way, it’s just cool to see all these more modern weapons in a western. Early 20th century western is an underexplored aesthetic, honestly. It makes it almost feel like we’re starting to bend genres into a Prohibition-era gangster flick, even though this movie isn’t really that at all.

I even happened across a Reddit post by a “history nerd” who had his “emersion” ruined at first because the studio just kind of used whatever weapons they had on hand and didn’t bother to get period-accurate ones for this western which was clearly supposed to be set in the late 19th century because it’s a western after all. The post is kind of funny, but at least the OP eventually realized he was retarded and changed his ways.

Anyway, that’s enough about the setting for now, although we’ll come back to it later because it’s very important to the overall themes of the movie.

The Opening Scene

This movie has one of the absolute best opening scenes you’ll ever see, in the sense that it expresses in microcosm everything the movie is going to be about. It also tells you exactly how the movie is going to end, although you won’t know it yet. There’s enough going on in this first scene alone that you could probably write a whole book about it, so it’s worth breaking down in some detail.

As we watch a squad of soldiers ride into the South Texas town of Starbuck, the shots are intercut with shots of a group of kids watching a swarm of ants attack several scorpions in a little insect battle royale arena. You can tell the scorpions are losing. They are much bigger and stronger than any individual ant, but there are just too many ants forming an unstoppable tide that swamps them.

This is symbolic of the outlaw main characters of the movie and their relationship with the growing civilization of early 20th century America. They are larger-than-life outlaw figures with a long and storied history of violence. They are more aggressive, more capable, more decisive than your average men, but like the scorpions being devoured by the swarm of ants, it’s not going to matter. The Wild West is dying. There are too many ants, and the tide of civilization is too big. It will eventually devour them. They are also aging. They’re not as aggressive, capable, and decisive as they used to be, and if they can’t find an exit strategy from the outlaw life soon, the end is right around the corner.

In addition to the symbolism, the ants vs scorpions battle royale also functions as a much more literal foreshadow of how the movie is going to end, but like I said we don’t know that yet at this point. More on that later.

As the soldiers ride into town, we find out pretty quick that they’re not actually soldiers, but outlaws disguised as soldiers. They’re here to rob a shipment of silver from a railroad payroll office, which is supposed to be their exit strategy from the outlaw life: the “one last job, then I’m retiring” trope.

But it turns out to be a setup. Deke Thornton, a former partner of the outlaw chief Pike Bishop, has been hired by a corrupt railroad man to take Pike down. He has figured out that they’ll be hitting this particular payroll office, and has a motley crew of bounty hunters gathered on a nearby rooftop staking it out. The bounty hunters are also symbolic ants, by the way, as will become clear as the movie goes on.

Pike and his main crew enter the payroll office, leaving one soldier-disguised man guarding the horses and several other men watching the street, dressed in civilian clothes to disguise their association with the soldier-outlaws in case of a shootout. While the outlaws are inside the payroll office, the incompetent bounty hunters get jumpy, start moving around too much and showing their guns above the rooftop wall. Angel, a younger Mexican member of the outlaw gang, spots them and alerts Pike. Now they know they’ll have to shoot their way out.

Angel is an important character in the rest of the movie, as is another younger member of the gang, Clarence “Crazy” Lee. Pike assigns Lee, who really does seem to have a screw loose, to guard a group of several hostages, and we get this exchange:

Lee: I kill ‘em now?

Pike: No. Hold ‘em here as long as you can, until after the shootin’ starts.

Lee: I’ll hold ‘em til hell freezes over, or you say different.

Being a younger member of the gang, Lee isn’t as over-the-hill and jaded as Pike and his older friends. He dreams of the gunslinger life and is hungry to prove himself to Pike. We find out later that he is the grandson of another Pike associate, Sykes, who isn’t here at this robbery but we’ll meet later. Sykes will ask later how he did, and although this isn’t stated outright, it seems to be hinting that this might be Lee’s first job. It could be that Pike didn’t want to take Lee on as a member of the gang, but did it as a favor to Sykes. The point is, Lee is fiercely loyal to Pike and will carry out his orders with zeal, if also with some embellishment.

Happening at the same time as the robbery is a meeting of the South Texas Temperance League. A parson gives a little sermon on the evils of alcohol, then has a very apathetic-looking congregation (most of them dour-looking women) recite an oath to never drink. A marching band strikes up the tune “Shall We Gather at the River?” and a parade marches down main street, directly toward the payroll office with the outlaws inside. It turns out the railroad man who set up this sting didn’t bother to tell any of the townspeople about it.

Pike sees his opportunity to make a getaway. He’ll use the parade as cover for the gang to make their exit from the payroll office, thinking that whatever law officers are on the opposite rooftop will hold their fire to avoid civilian casualties. What he doesn’t count on is the fact that these incompetent hired guns just aren’t going to give a shit about civilian casualties at all; if anything they’re excited by the idea.

Pike picks his moment, and shoves a payroll office employee out the door to kick off his escape. The jumpy bounty hunters open fire without stopping to wonder if this man is actually one of the outlaws or not, and he is immediately gunned down in the street.

The outlaws burst out of the payroll office and open fire in return, and what follows is a confused, chaotic, hyperviolent gunfight between outlaws and bounty hunters, with innocent bystanders running all over the place caught in the crossfire. Half the gang is obliterated, several bounty hunters are hit, and bystanders go down. Pike makes eye contact with Thornton on the rooftop during the chaos, and Thornton takes a shot at him, but Pike is saved by a random tuba player from the band who happens to step in front of him at that exact moment and takes the bullet meant for him. Then his horse tramples a random lady to death on the way out of town.

Six gang members ultimately make good their escape: Pike, Angel, Pike’s old friend Dutch Engstrom, brothers Tector and Lyle Gorch, and a sixth unnamed man who is badly wounded. This man has taken a shotgun blast to the face which has blinded him. On the way out of town, he falls off his horse, says he can still ride, and begs Pike to help him get back up on the horse, but instead Pike shoots him dead, leaving five surviving gang members. This is important, so remember it for later.

But wait, there’s one more surviving gang member. Remember Crazy Lee? He’s still inside the payroll office guarding the hostages like he was told. Pike and the other gang members who escaped seem not to even notice that he’s missing; they probably assume he’s been killed in the shootout. But no, he’s still there carrying out his orders from Pike because he wants to prove himself. He’s also crazy and psychotic, so he just can’t resist messing with the hostages he’s guarding. He creepily licks an old woman’s ear, and makes them all sing “Shall We Gather at the River?” like the band has been playing. Predictably, this causes the hostages to eventually try to run during the shootout, and Lee guns them all down1 before muttering to himself that if they didn’t want to get shot they shouldn’t have run. Then Lee gets gunned down himself by the railroad man, but not before taking out three more of the bounty hunters.2

As the outlaws ride out of town, Thornton and several townspeople yell at the railroad man for making the town into a battleground and causing all this collateral damage. Thornton tells him, “The next time, you better plan your massacre more carefully or I’ll start with you.” Then, after townspeople tell him they’re going to hold the railroad responsible for the loss of life, the railroad man says, “We represent the law!” There’s another theme: the civilization about to devour the old outlaws is not a force for good in this world. It is corrupt; it has one of the former outlaws (Thornton) working for it, along with all these dregs-of-society bounty hunters acting as its hired guns. It is very ant-like in the way it doesn’t care about individual loss of life.

To reinforce this point, we see the degenerate bounty hunters excitedly picking over corpses for loot in the aftermath of the gunfight. Two of them had even deliberately targeted a rich-looking civilian in the chaos, and they argue over the loot they find on his corpse in particular. As long as the scorpions are dead in the end and the queen ants are safe, it doesn’t matter how many workers are killed in the crossfire.

Speaking of the ants, we cut back to the kids with the insect battle royale arena at the end of this scene. The kids throw straw on top of the writhing mass of ants and scorpions and set it on fire, incinerating them all together and showing that the fight never really mattered in the first place.

It’s a profoundly nihilistic image,3 and to reinforce that, when the outlaws get to their safe house in the desert and go to divide the loot from the robbery, we find out that instead of the silver coins they expected, the bags contain worthless steel washers. It seems the railroad officials didn’t want to risk actual money in this sting, so they switched out the shipment of silver. The outlaws have lost half their gang and killed a bunch of random people for nothing.

The stage is set for what it looks like is going to be a pretty depressing and nihilistic movie. However, I’m not entirely convinced that the movie is ultimately as nihilistic as it may appear, or as people normally say it is. In fact the more I think about it, the more convinced I am that it’s not that at all.

Finding a Mission

The rest of the movie revolves around the outlaws trying to come up with another exit strategy, since the hit on the payroll office failed. After the robbery-gone-wrong, the remaining gang members flee to their initial safe house, which seems to be a remote ranch where they find the aforementioned Sykes, a cantankerous old man who decides to tag along with the gang to Mexico because he’s an old friend of Pike’s.

But there is a pervading feeling that there’s not really anything for them to do with their lives even if they do come up with a successful exit strategy. As the oldest members of the gang, Pike and Dutch especially focus on this. Sitting around a campfire at the ranch, they have this exchange:

Pike: This was gonna be my last. Ain’t gettin’ around any better. I’d like to make one good score and back off.

Dutch: Back off to what?

Long silence

Dutch: Have you got anything lined up?

Pike: Pershing’s got troops spread out all along the border. Every one of those garrisons are gonna be gettin’ a payroll.

Dutch: That kind of information is kinda hard to come by.

Pike: I didn’t say it was gonna be easy, but it can be done.

Dutch: They’ll be waitin’ for us.

Pike: I wouldn’t have it any other way.

There are two different ways to read this exchange, depending on what you think Dutch means by asking if Pike has anything lined up. The first is that he’s asking whether Pike has any potential targets lined up for that “one good score” he was just talking about. If that’s the reading, then Pike’s next line is just a straightforward response to that with an idea about who to hit for the score.

The other possible reading is that Dutch is asking whether Pike has anything lined up to “back off to” after he makes his last score. If read this way, Pike’s next line is actually ignoring the question and using the ambiguity as an opportunity to change the subject, because he knows the true answer is that no, he doesn’t have anything lined up for after the score and he doesn’t want to admit it. Judging by the look on Dutch’s face as Pike responds, I’m going with this latter reading. It also fits the theme of the movie better, with Pike being in denial about the fact that he has nothing to show for his whole life.

Honor and Loyalty

They leave the ranch and cross the border into Mexico. We’re about to find out what Angel is like. I said before he’s a very important character, and as a way of setting this up, we need to look at some of the characters and their attitudes towards loyalty.

While all this is going on, Thornton has been ordered by the corrupt railroad man to track down the Wild Bunch. The backstory we get is that he’s been in Yuma prison for an indeterminate amount of time after getting caught following a previous job with Pike; Thornton was caught, but Pike got away. Thornton doesn’t want to go after Pike for the railroad, especially after seeing the indiscriminate massacre of townspeople during the payroll office ambush, but the railroad man threatens him with going back to Yuma if he refuses. As the story goes on and he chases Pike and the gang, Thornton’s reluctance grows and he feels more and more of a kinship with his old friend Pike, rather than the ragtag bunch of bounty hunters he is now leading.

The next character to look at is Pike. While the gang crosses the desert, the old man Sykes leads the group down a steep sand dune which leads to all their horses losing their footing and sliding down. Luckily no one is hurt, but Tector Gorch is pissed at Sykes for leading them that way. We get this exchange:

Tector: What in the hell’s the matter with you, old man?

Pike: Leave him alone!

Tector: He’s gonna get us all killed! I’m gonna get rid of him.

Pike: We’re not gettin’ rid of anybody. We’re gonna stick together, just like it used to be. When you side with a man, you stay with him, and if you can’t do that, you’re like some animal! You’re finished! We’re finished! All of us! Mount up.

Everybody mounts, but Pike’s stirrup breaks and he falls off his horse.

Tector: ‘pears Brother Pike needs help, Brother Lyle.

Lyle: Ridin’ with Brother Pike and Old Man Sykes makes a man wonder if it ain’t time to pick up his chips and find another game.

Tector: How in the hell are you gonna side anybody when you can’t even get on your horse?

Pike gets back on his horse without the stirrup, and they ride away.

There’s a small time skip montage, and then we pick it up again with the gang still riding across the desert. Pike and Sykes talk privately, away from the rest of the group:

Sykes: Hey, uh, that was a mighty fine talk you gave the boys back there about stickin’ together. Eh, that Gorch came near killin’ me. Or me him! Hehe. Damned old fool like me’s not worth takin’ along!

Pike: We started together, we’ll end it together.

Sykes: By God, that’s the way I see it! That’s the way it’s always been with me! Eh, sorry about Deke. Never figgered him that way. Say! Back there in Starbuck! How’d my boy do?

Pike: Your boy? Crazy Lee?

Sykes: Yeah, C. L.! Clarence Lee! My daughter’s boy. Not too bright, but a good boy!

Pike: Why didn’t you tell me he was your grandson?

Sykes: Well, you had enough things on your mind. Besides, he had to pull his own weight just like the rest of us. I just wanted to make sure he didn’t let you down, run when things got hot. Huh? Huh?

Pike: No, he did fine. Just fine.

Sykes chuckles.

The contrast here is interesting. Pike seems to have a pretty confused attitude about loyalty. On the one hand, he’s ride-or-die for Sykes, but on the other hand, it seems like he and everybody else completely forgot about Lee until this very moment. Do they even know what happened to him? Probably not. This becomes doubly ironic when you remember how Pike handled the unnamed guy in his gang who was blinded by the shotgun blast; he just killed him. You maybe could call it a mercy killing, but I have my doubts. Is Pike really ride-or-die, or does he just abandon his boys if they’re incapacitated or otherwise unable to handle themselves?

It seems to me the important difference is the generational one. Pike and Sykes go way back, as we’re told back at Sykes’ ranch. Lee was from a younger generation, one that thinks they want to be like the old men but maybe don’t really “get it”. They’re also not really built for the world Pike and Sykes came up in. That new ant-swarm civilization is coming which is going to swamp the old scorpions, and the Lees of the world don’t really understand that. They want to be scorpions, but they don’t know yet that they can’t be, and their aspirations to be scorpions are a little bit disordered as a result, which is why Lee is Crazy. Angel is also from Lee’s generation, which will be important in a minute.

Tector and Lyle Gorch, younger than Pike, Dutch, and Sykes but older than Lee and Angel, seem to have something of a foot in both generational worlds. They’re more experienced than Lee, fully capable of being scorpions, but they’re pragmatically starting to realize that they might need to hitch their cart to a different horse soon, or “pick up [their] chips and find another game” as Lyle says. The old scorpions are weakening.

Pike’s loyalty is confused but leans toward his own generation; he’s clinging to the past. Lee’s loyalty to Pike and his orders just gets him pointlessly killed. The Gorch brothers are in the process of figuring their shit out.4 Dutch is definitely ride-or-die for Pike, but he’s also concerned about what all this is for and where they’re headed. Angel is his own thing.

Angel is the kind of guy you could easily imagine Pike or Dutch being in their younger years. Like Lee, he’s loyal to a fault, but unlike Lee, he’s not crazy. He’s talented, idealistic, passionate, and emotionally high-strung, and if he’d been born 50 years earlier he’d probably have been among the greats of the gunslinger world. But it’s the 20th century now, and his passionate idealism is just going to get himself and everyone else into heaps of trouble.

Since the gang is wandering fairly aimlessly at this point, they decide to pay a visit to the rural Mexican village where Angel grew up. While riding into the village, he tells the other gang members, “I have invited you to my village, to my home. Any disrespect to my family, or to my people… I will kill you.” This is Angel’s character: old-fashioned loyalty to his own people and family, in a young man. But once they get to the village, he’s in for a rude awakening to the reality of their situation.

Pike speaks to the village elder, Don José, about a recent attack on the village by Mexican federal troops, as part of the ongoing Mexican Revolution. Angel’s father was killed in this attack, and this is where we first get some real insight into his character.

Pike: How bad did they hit you?

Don José: Seven of the villagers were killed, two of them hung, our horses, cattle, and corn stolen.

Pike: What about the federal troops? Didn’t they give you any protection?

Don José: They were federal troops, commissioned by the traitor Huerta.

Angel, who was formerly not involved in the conversation, overhears and walks up.

Angel: The soldier who shot my father, what was his name?

Pike: What the hell difference does it make?

Don José: Your father died like a man. Names in this matter do not have an importance.

Angel: How was he called?

Don José: Mapache!

Angel: That is name enough.

Don José: In Mexico, Señor, these are the years of sadness. But if we had rifles like these…

He holds up a Springfield ‘03 belonging to one of the gang members.

Angel: And Teresa? Did they molest her?

Don José: No la molestaron. She went with them because she wished to. She became the woman of Mapache, and the others. She went with them laughing, drunk with wine and love.

Angel walks away, visibly shaken, tears in his eyes.

Don José to Pike: To him, Teresa was like a goddess, to be worshipped from afar. Mapache knew she was a mango, ripe and waiting.

Pike: Angel dreams of love and Mapache eats the mango.

It seems Angel might be a bit of a simp for this Teresa, and she’s now given herself to the most powerful man around, Mapache, the same man who killed Angel’s father. A galling thing for a young man such as Angel. If this were a classical western, he would find Mapache, kill him, and ride off into the sunset with Teresa, who really did want to be with him all along.

But this is an anti-western, and one of the purposes of Angel’s character is to show us what happens to angels like him in the new ant-world. It’s not pretty. The older and wiser Pike knows where he’ll be headed if he tries to go down the romantic avenger road, and tries to warn him.

Later that night, there is music, dancing, and drinking. Angel has had a fair bit of tequila, and he comes up to Don José, Pike, Sykes, and Dutch all seated together.

Angel: You must tell me, where is Mapache?

Don José: Why do you wish to know? For your father? Or for the whore?

Angel looks down in silence. Pike points a stern finger at him.

Pike: Either you learn to live with it, or we’ll leave you here.

Angel considers for a moment, then raises his tequila bottle.

Angel: I go with you, jefe.

Pike gives him a nod, and Angel takes a swig of tequila and walks off.

The old men are having none of Angel’s puppy love. Pike needs him to straighten up or he’ll be a liability to the gang. Angel agrees to come along with the bunch, and accepts that he’ll need to learn to live with it. But the Arrested Development narrator would break in here and say, “He did not, in fact, learn to live with it.”

The gang rides out of the village the next morning. In another bizarrely beautiful scene, they get a sendoff from the villagers reminiscent of medieval knights riding out to battle. It reminds me of that scene from The Return of the King where Faramir has been ordered out to take back Osgiliath by his mad father, and the Gondorians send him off knowing that he and all his men are about to die. There’s poignant singing, there’s girls giving them flowers, there’s the village elder Don José giving a solemn, approving wave to Angel. The song is apparently a well-known Mexican folk song called La Golondrina (The Swallow). According to the translation I found, this is what the lyrics are in English:

Where can it go,
rushed and fatigued,
the swallow passing by?
Tossed by the wind,
looking so lost,
with nowhere to hide.

By my bed
I’ll put your nest,
until the season passes.
I too, O heaven,
am lost in this place,
unable to fly.

When they leave the village, the wild bunch still seems to have nowhere in particular to go. They end up at the town of Agua Verde, which is garrisoned by Mexican federal troops led by, wouldn’t you know it, a general named Mapache. There’s some kind of feast going on, and Mapache rocks up in his car. Yes, you read that right, a car in a western, because it’s the 1910s and this is another sign that the world is moving on from the days of the gunslinger. The gang sits down at a table in view of Mapache’s dais and another meaningful exchange follows:

Dutch: Ahhh, generalissimo, hell. He’s just another bandit grabbin’ all he can for himself.

Pike: Like some others I could mention.

Everybody laughs except Dutch and Angel.

Dutch. Not so’s you’d know it, Mr. Bishop. We ain’t nothin’ like him. We don’t hang nobody. I hope someday these people here kick him and the rest of that scum like him right into their graves.

Angel: We will. If it takes forever.

It seems Dutch might still have a streak of the idealistic in him too, and we see the inklings of a new mission forming. Dutch’s attitude here fits with the scorpions vs ants theme of the movie. Being federal troops, Mapache’s men are sort of the Mexican counterpart to the American railroad men who hired the bounty hunters to ambush them. They are the forces of the ant civilization, but here in Mexico their hold over the country is weaker than it is in America these days. They’re in the middle of a revolution, and the outcome isn’t decided yet.

I don’t think any of the gang members have any concrete idea of what they want to do here at this point, but before they can do anything, Teresa appears with a new horse as a gift to Mapache. She’s his woman now, remember. Obviously Angel is galled by this, so he catches her eye and pulls her aside, chastising her for leaving the village. She says she left that dirty, dingy village and got with Mapache to avoid starvation, but now she is happy living with the big boss. Mapache is a bit of an ugly motherfucker, but as we enlightened gentlemen know, women will overlook a lot of shortcomings in the looks department for a man who is rich and/or powerful and can give her security, which is exactly what Teresa is after.

Well as she gets all lovey-dovey with Mapache, Angel flies off the handle, pulls his 1911, and shoots her dead right there in Mapache’s lap. About a hundred Mexican soldiers pull their guns on the gang immediately, but they show them their hands and are able to convince them that Angel was trying to shoot the girl and not Mapache.5 What’s probably even more galling from Angel’s perspective is that once Mapache is convinced that he wasn’t the target, he doesn’t even seem to care that Teresa is dead. She was just one woman among many to him, and Angel gets off with a light beating from the soldiers.

But Angel’s idealism and emotional nature have only just begun to cause problems for the wild bunch. Mapache happens to have two German military advisors with him, and one of them figures out that the bunch are outlaws from the U. S. government.6 They need just such a bunch to pull off a job for them, namely stealing a rail-borne weapons shipment from the U. S. Army so Mapache’s men can be the best-equipped force in Mexico. They’ll pay $10,000 in gold. This is the score Pike has been looking for.

The shipment is supposed to contain 16 crates of Springfield ‘03 rifles and ammunition, enough to equip Mapache’s men. But the idealistic Angel, now hating Mapache more than ever, doesn’t want to supply Mapache with guns to kill his people. He says he’s not coming along on the job, and we get this exchange:

Pike: Angel, you’re a pain in the ass.

Angel: Would you give guns to someone to kill your father, or your mother, or your brother?

Pike: 10,000 cuts an awful lot of family ties.

Angel: My people have no guns. But with guns, my people could fight. If I could take guns, I would come with you.

Dutch: Hey, um, how many cases of rifles did Zamorra say was in that shipment?

Pike: Sixteen.

Dutch: Well… give him one.

Long pause.

Pike: Alright. One case, and one case of ammo, but you give up your share of the gold.

Angel: I will.

Pike: We know you will.

Even though he considers Angel a pain in the ass, Angel’s idealism is starting to grow on Pike, and on Dutch too. This becomes important later when Pike is forced to reevaluate his stance on killing or abandoning his own men when they become incapacitated, like he did with Lee or the shotgun-to-face victim. Angel is becoming a man he has decided to “side with” and “stay with”, maybe because Pike sees something of his own younger self in him.

Thornton and the Train Heist

The next act is the most “traditional” western this movie ever gets. Probably not accidentally, Pike is seen carrying a western-style six-shooter for the heist, when for most of the rest of the movie he’s using his 1911. The train heist goes off basically without a hitch, but there’s still something to the scenes of it.

We’ve been cutting back to Deke Thornton and the dozen or so bounty hunters with him periodically, and it’s clear he feels no loyalty or kinship with the bounty hunters at all. He considers them “gutter trash” as he says in his own words. He’s always riding separate from them. There’s next to no characterization for any of the bounty hunters; they are mostly faceless ants, like I said earlier. Thornton is still under pressure from the railroad to find the wild bunch or he’ll be thrown back into the Yuma prison. He has correctly sussed out that Pike plans to hit the army’s weapons shipment.

There is an escort of 20 or so soldiers going with the train,7 but they are mostly green recruits and Thornton knows they’ll be no match for the outlaws, so he and the bounty hunters go with them too.

The mechanics of the heist are as follows. The outlaws hide at a water station along the tracks in the middle of the desert and wait for the train to stop for water. They get the drop on the guards standing watch on the freight cars, then detach the passenger car where the rest of the escort and the bounty hunters are riding, and chug off with the freight cars carrying the weapons. A couple miles down the track, they stop, transfer the weapons to a wagon they have waiting, and they’re home free.

Throughout the heist, Thornton is the only one on the army’s side who has any idea what’s going on at all. He notices the outlaws detaching the passenger car and leads his bounty hunters out after them, but the train outpaces their horses and the gang gets away. The transfer of weapons from train to wagon gives Thornton some time to catch up, and after they’ve made the transfer, the outlaws send the now-empty train back down the tracks in the direction they came.

This whole time this is happening, the escort sergeant is running around shouting and making a whole lot of noise trying to get his soldiers and their horses off the train cars and into the pursuit, but nothing is really happening. It’s pretty funny to watch actually. He’s so slow at getting unloaded that there are still men and horses on the cars when the empty locomotive comes back and slams into them.

The wagon gets temporarily held up on the bridge over the Rio Grande back into Mexico, which gives bounty hunters and soldiers more time to catch up. Since the soldiers were so slow getting off the train, the bounty hunters get there first and start exchanging fire with the outlaws on the bridge. The outlaws hold them at bay until the literal cavalry comes riding over the hill… only for the bounty hunters to get confused and start firing on them. The soldiers are just as incompetent as the bounty hunters, so they start shooting back at them while the outlaws get away.

This is all another showcase of how weak the agents of the ant-world are individually. If they hadn’t had a scorpion of their own (Thornton) leading them, then the scorpions would have gotten away totally clean, without even a challenge. To top it all off, Thornton and the bounty hunters get dumped in the river when Pike and his boys blow the bridge with dynamite. We see Thornton completing his character arc in his next couple of exchanges, with only himself plus four of the bounty hunters left:

Thornton: You stupid bastards. Why did you fire at those soldiers?

A bunch of bounty hunters all start talking at once, all blaming each other for the mishap.

Thornton: Shut your mouths!

Bounty Hunter 1: Are we goin’ after ‘em?

Thornton: We are, unless you wanna go back and face a firing squad.

Then a few minutes later while they try to pick up the trail again:

Bounty Hunter 1: Hell, we lost ‘em.

Bounty Hunter 2: I don’t see how we lost ‘em, unless it was in that big valley where the ground was so hard.

Bounty Hunter 1: Wasn’t but one way they could take a wagon outta there and this here is it!

Thornton: They didn’t take it out, and we haven’t lost ‘em. I could point to ‘em right now.

The bounty hunters start looking around at the surrounding hills.

Thornton: Sit still, dammit! Do you think Pike and old Sykes haven’t been watchin’ us? They know what this is all about, and what do I have? Nothing but you egg-suckin’, chicken-stealing gutter trash with not even 60 rounds between you. We’re after men, and I wish to God I was with ‘em. The next time you make a mistake, I’m going to ride off and let you die.

Even though he’s on the side of the ants, Thornton is a scorpion at heart, and he hates being with the ants.

The End of the Scorpions

Throughout the heist, Angel really shows he has the skills to belong in the gang, even saving Dutch’s life at one point. He should probably rob trains with the boys more often instead of simping for hoes, and then everybody would be better off.

The last act is about to bring a whole bunch of these threads we’ve been talking about full circle. As we get into it, the gang takes stock of their haul from the train robbery. In addition to the rifles they expected, they discover grenades and the M1917 machine gun in the weapons shipment they just stole. They deliver the single crate of rifles to Angel’s friends, then head back towards Agua Verde to deliver the rest to Mapache.

The scene where they drop off the crate with Angel’s friends is worth looking at for a minute. The guys seem to be associated with Angel’s village somehow, but don’t actually live there, so we’ve never seen them before. They seem to just materialize out of the desert without anyone in the gang noticing until they’re just there holding machetes to everyone’s throats. If they were enemies, they’d have killed the entire gang without even being seen. After speaking to them in their own language, which seems to be not Spanish but some Indian language, Angel says, “They apologize and ask you to forgive them for their lack of trust, but only by caution do they remain alive.” These are hardcore desert guerrilla fighters, resisting Mapache’s federales. Pike asks about them while they take their crate of rifles away:

Pike: These people from your village?

Angel: They are part of the village, but not from it. They are puro indio [pure Indian], and these mountains belong to them.

This scene, and the existence of these desert mountain people, are incredibly important to the overall meaning of the movie. Angel tells the leader he’ll see them soon, then they leave and the gang keeps talking about them.

Dutch: I’d say those fellas know how to handle themselves.

Sykes: They been fightin’ Apaches for a thousand years, that’s a sure way to learn.

Pike: They ever get armed, with good leaders, this whole country’ll go up in smoke.

Sykes: That it will, son. That it will.

Lyle: They made damn fools out of us, Mr. Bishop. It’s gettin’ so a feller can’t sleep with both eyes closed, for fear of gettin’ his throat cut.

Like the scorpions, these people live outside the encroaching ant-world. They’re something else entirely. They remind me a bit of the Scraps from Demolition Man. They’re something that ant-world can’t account for and doesn’t know how to deal with. They’re even more capable than the scorpions we’ve been following for the whole movie, shown by how they catch them completely unawares and could have killed them all with ease if they’d wanted to, even though they’re armed only with machetes.

In addition to that, remember that ant-world’s hold on Mexico is much weaker than its hold on America at the moment. These people are different from the scorpions in that they’re not trying to fight ant-world directly, but instead mostly trying to fly under its radar. They might actually stand a fighting chance of carving out their own existence separate from ant-world. Keep them in mind as we get back to the scorpions’ fight.

Angel’s high-strung, idealistic nature is about to get everybody into trouble again. After dropping off the rifles with the Indians, they deliver the rest to Mapache. Neither Mapache and his men nor the gang trust each other, and we actually hear Mapache tell one of his lieutenants to kill the gang members if they don’t hand over the rifles, so the delivery itself is somewhat complicated and dramatic, but ultimately it goes through and the outlaws get paid the promised sum of gold. They even hand over the machine gun as a gesture of good faith, even though it wasn’t part of the original bargain, and Mapache’s men immediately start blasting away randomly with it for fun. I’m actually surprised we don’t see any random people die when this happens, given how free with collateral damage the movie was in the opening scene. There’s only one real problem with the delivery.

Dutch and Angel ride into Agua Verde to make the last part of the delivery. Remember Angel just got done saving Dutch’s life during the train heist not too long ago. After handing over the last gold payment to Dutch, Mapache has one of his lieutenants ask how many crates of rifles they took from the train. Dutch answers that they took sixteen and lost one on the trail, repeating the prepared lie to cover Angel’s delivery. Then Mapache reveals that he knows Angel stole the last crate because Teresa’s mother told him.

Importantly, Mapache does not know that the whole gang was in on it. He thinks Angel did it on his own, without the knowledge of the rest of the gang. And the loyal, idealistic, ride-or-die Angel covers for his boys. He instantly turns and tries to ride off, but is captured by Mapache’s men and roughed up while Dutch watches helplessly. He looks pleadingly at Dutch, and you can see the wheels turning in Dutch’s mind. Angel just saved his life during the train heist, and he owes him a debt, but there’s nothing he can do. No choice but to ride back to the rest of the gang and then try to come up with some kind of plan. Dutch tips his hat to Mapache:

Dutch: Well, I’m wastin’ time here. Adios.

Mapache: ¿Y Angel?

Dutch: He’s a thief. You take care of him.

Mapache laughs.

Mapache: Buen viaje, mi amigo. Buen viaje.

Dutch rides off slowly while Mapache and his men all bust up laughing at Angel.

Now Pike is about to be stuck in a predicament. Remember his conflicted attitudes about loyalty to his men. Are we going to see ride-or-die Pike, or shoots-his-own-men Pike? If Dutch has anything to say about it, they’re going to rescue Angel.

Lyle: Well, he had guts.

Pike: We’re just lucky he didn’t talk.

Dutch: He played his string right out to the end!

Lyle: Her own momma turned him in, like some kind of a Judas.8

Dutch: Sykes says we oughta go after him.

Lyle: How in the hell are we gonna do that? They got guns and 200 men.

Pike: No way. No way at all.

Lyle: Is that Sykes?

At this moment, Sykes has been off retrieving the horses from the wagon that carried the weapons. The wagon is to be left for Mapache. A long way off, the gang sees Sykes start taking fire from Thornton and his bounty hunters on a hill, somewhat near Sykes but a long way from the rest of the gang. Sykes is hit in the leg and has to go hide, not being able to make it back to the gang. The gang keeps talking.

Dutch: Damn that Deke Thornton to hell!

Pike: What would you do in his place? He gave his word.

Dutch: Gave his word to a railroad!

Pike: It’s his word!

Dutch: That ain’t what counts! It’s who you give it to!

Stare-down between Pike and Dutch for a minute.

Lyle: We can stay up here and kick hell out of ‘em, that’s what we can do.

Pike: No, we’re runnin’ short of water.

Dutch: Make a run for the border?

Pike: They’d follow us every step of the way, I know Thornton. I’m tired of being hunted. Go back to Agua Verde, let the general take care of those boys.

Lyle: You’re crazy. That general’d just as soon kill us as break wind.

Pike: He’s so tickled with those guns he’ll be celebratin’ for a week, and happy to do us a favor. Thornton’s not gonna follow us in there. While they’re busy pickin’ over Freddy [Sykes], we’ll find a back trail off this mountain and head for town.

Dutch: What about our gold?

Pike: We’ll take one sack to pay our way. Bury the rest. Together.

It appears we’re getting shoots-his-own-men Pike. He apparently doesn’t even care about helping Sykes, the very man to whom he previously said, “When you side with a man, you stay with him, and if you can’t do that, you’re like some animal!” It’s also worth mentioning at this point that with the loss of Sykes and Angel, it’s now four gang members to six members of Thornton’s party. Not even very long odds, especially accounting for the bumbling incompetency of everyone but Thornton in the bounty hunter gang. Why don’t they just fight Thornton’s boys and try to help Sykes?

Whatever it is, they make it back to Agua Verde. Sykes meanwhile evades Thornton’s boys and gets picked up by the same Mexi-Indians they gave the crate of rifles to, so he survives. Back at Agua Verde, the gang finds Angel still alive, but barely. He’s being dragged around behind Mapache’s car while everybody laughs at him, a powerful image of what the new civilization does to those who hold onto youthful idealism about the old world. On the surface-level reading, this contributes to the movie’s nihilism. The young, romantic idealist is brutally punished for being dumb. It also reminds me of the scene from the Iliad where Achilles drags Hector’s corpse behind his chariot, like Angel is being compared to a dead Homeric hero. As the gang watches Angel get dragged:

Pike: God, I hate to see that.

Dutch: No more’n I do.

When they ride in, the car dragging Angel stops in front of the gang, and Angel is dragged to his feet. He’s all bloodied from being dragged and beaten, and looks eerily similar to the guy from the opening scene who took a shotgun blast to the face and then got killed by Pike. The resemblance is probably not an accident, because it fits with the theme of Pike figuring out where he actually stands on the issue of loyalty to his men. This time, he’ll make a different decision.

Pike: I wanna buy him back.

Mapache: I don’t think he look worth too much.

Mapache’s Lieutenant 1: I don’t think he’s gonna live too long.

Pike: I’ll give you half of my share for him.

Mapache: I need no gold, and I don’t sell this one.

Pike: Why not? You’ve had your fun with him.

Mapache’s Lieutenant 2: El generalissimo is happy with the guns. Why don’t you go and get a drink? Enjoy yourself! There are women everywhere! ¡Muchas bonitas! Don’t be foolish and change his mood.

Pike has a brief stare-down with Mapache, then Mapache moves on, still dragging Angel behind his car. Some random soldier comes by and asks the gang if they want girls, and Pike says, “Why not?”

The gang finds some whores while Mapache and his men party on a porch with their own women with the machine gun conspicuously set up on its tripod in the middle of them. Interestingly, Dutch is the only one of the four remaining gang members who doesn’t partake in the whores. He sits outside whittling while the others do.

In the last scene before the finale, Pike pulls on his clothes after his session while his whore washes herself. He sees her baby crying on the floor in the same room. In the next room, the Gorch brothers have finished with their whore (they both had the same one, because apparently they do everything together), and now they’re arguing with her about payment.

There is a ton going on in this scene, but honestly I don’t think I’m up to explaining it. All I know is that this is when Pike decides he’s going to die today. I would love for someone to explain to me everything that’s going on. There’s barely any dialogue, but Pike comes out of his room and gives a look to the Gorch brothers. They have a full-blown conversation through looks alone where they decide they’re going to get Angel back, or die in the attempt. The only dialogue spoken between them is:

Pike: “Let’s go.”

Lyle: “Why not?”

Pike has decided he’s going to literally be ride-or-die Pike after all. The three men come out of the brothel and stand in front of Dutch, who instantly knows what they’ve decided without any dialogue being spoken, and cracks a smile. Still without a word, they arm themselves and walk to the porch where Mapache is partying.

Pike demands Angel back. Mapache drags him out, still alive, and cuts his bonds as if to release him, then cuts his throat. Angel is dead. The four gang members blast Mapache together with shotguns and pistols, and he falls dead. Dozens or hundreds of Mapache’s soldiers see this happen, but they’re shocked into silence and no one does anything. There’s a brief, tense standoff while everyone thinks about what just happened, but no one fires at the gang. Dutch lets out a giggle, followed by Tector, and for a moment it seems like nothing is going to happen. The soldiers don’t have a commanding officer anymore after all.

Then Pike sees one of the German military advisors, who has barely even appeared in the movie up to this point. Pike shoots the German dead, the smile is wiped off Dutch’s face, and all hell breaks loose. The wild bunch fights their way onto the porch, taking out Mapache’s lieutenants and the second German advisor while the soldiers scramble to return fire. Interesting to note that all of Mapache’s top officers get killed immediately, leaving only nameless, faceless rank-and-file soldiers left to fight the wild bunch.

The wild bunch makes it to the porch with its machine gun still mounted on the tripod, and what follows is exactly the ants vs scorpions battle royale from the opening scene. First Tector, then Lyle, then Pike jump on the machine gun and mow down hordes of faceless Mexican ants. Dutch throws grenades. Everybody takes multiple gunshot wounds. Just like the opening scene, there’s plenty of collateral damage, with women getting gunned down left and right in the crossfire. One wings Pike and he blasts her with a shotgun. Dutch uses one as a human shield at one point. Ultimately the ants win, because there are too many of them even for the scorpions, and all four gang members die there on the porch.

The movie doesn’t end there though. Thornton and the bounty hunters, still nearby, are drawn to the sound of gunfire and watch some of the fight from afar, then come into Agua Verde to see the aftermath while hungry buzzards look on. Just like in the opening scene, the degenerate bounty hunters whoop and holler in excitement over the loot they’re about to get from the dead.

Thornton finds Pike’s corpse with a six-shooter still in its holster, unused because Pike was using his 1911, shotgun, and the machine gun in this fight. Thornton picks up the six-shooter and cradles it, like he’s reminiscing about the old days. He can’t take ant-world anymore, and he lets the bounty hunters load up the corpses of the wild bunch and ride away back to Starbuck, not going with them.

Thornton told them the next time they made a mistake, he’d ride off and let them die, and now he’s true to his word. While Mexicans clean up the battlefield, Thornton sits quietly by himself on the edge of town. Gunfire is heard in the distance, and he smiles. It turns out to be Angel’s Mexi-Indian friends killing the bounty hunters, and a short time later they come riding into town with Sykes and Don José at their head. Then we get this:

Sykes: Didn’t expect to find you here.

Thornton: Why not? I sent ‘em back. That’s all I said I’d do.

Sykes: They didn’t get very far.

Thornton: I figured.

Sykes: What are your plans?

Thornton: Drift around down here, try to stay outta jail.

Sykes: Well, me and the boys here, we got some work to do. You wanna come along? It ain’t like it used to be, but uh, it’ll do.

Thornton smiles. Sykes chuckles. Thornton smiles wider. Sykes busts up laughing. Thornton gets up and goes with them. La Golondrina plays again over a montage of the dead gang members laughing. Fade out, the end.

Conclusion, and Some More Analysis

This review really blew up and got away from me. I did not intend to summarize the whole plot like this when I started writing it. The more I thought about the movie though, the more there was to think about and dissect. There really is not a single wasted line of dialogue in the whole thing. Every single exchange is packed with meaning, and that alone gives the lie to the common opinion that this movie is just a big nihilsm-fest.

For example, let’s go back to Pike’s conversation with Don José the village elder that I quoted from above. Immediately after Angel gets his entire world wrecked by finding out his father is dead and the girl he simps for has run off with his father’s killer, Pike laughs at the Gorch brothers, who have been flirting with a young village girl,9 as they go to help her fetch water for her mother’s beans.

Pike: Now that I find hard to believe.

Don José: Not so hard. We all dream of being a child again, even the worst of us. Perhaps the worst most of all.

Pike: You know what we are, then.

Don José motions to Pike and Sykes, who’s been sitting there listening the whole time.

Don José: Yes, just so, the both of you.

Pike: And you!

Pike, Sykes and Don José all bust up laughing while an enraged Angel some distance away yells:

Angel: Where is Mapache!?!?

“You know what we are,” Pike says. What are they?!? The worst of them? I’m sure this is answered in subtext somewhere and I’m too much of a peasant to pick up on it.

So what does it all mean, and why am I not convinced it’s ultimately nihilistic like people tend to think? Well of course it all revolves around the scorpions vs ants symbolism from the opening scene, specifically how the scorpion characters are reckoning with the inevitability of the ant-world.

I’ve mentioned how the final shootout is the same image as the scorpions vs ants fight from the beginning; it’s literally Homeric heroes gunning down waves of faceless nobodies and ultimately being swamped by them. The one thing I can’t quite figure, though, is where is the analogous part to the kids throwing burning straw over the battle royale and just burning the whole thing? The obvious surface-level reading from the beginning is that it’s a statement of how the fight was pointless from the start, but it’s not clear to me where the analogy to this is in the ending scene. There are a couple of possibilities I can see.

One interpretation might be that there’s not an equivalent image in the final scene. The kids threw straw over the insect fight because that fight was pointless. An equivalent image at the end might be to just have a tornado come through and kill everyone or something. But nothing like that happens, because the movie is saying that whatever this fight was, it wasn’t pointless like the insect fight. Also, the insect fight was still in progress when the kids threw the straw over it. In contrast, the fight between the wild bunch and the Mexicans was allowed to play out to completion without outside interference.

That interpretation seems a little unsatisfying to me though. I think there’s more to it. For another possible interpretation, consider that in the opening scene, the kids themselves are part of the growing ant-world civilization, and they’re the ones who throw the burning straw over the insect fight. The insect fight is ultimately pointless from their perspective, or in other words, from the perspective of the ant-world itself.

The fight in Agua Verde is similarly pointless to the ant-world. Angel’s loyalty, Pike’s conflicted feelings and ultimate change of heart, Dutch’s feelings of loyalty towards Angel, none of that matters one iota to the railroad men who hired Thornton to track them down. From their perspective, it’s actually better that all the bounty hunters get killed in the end and Thornton doesn’t come back, because now they don’t have to pay them. All that matters to them is that the scorpions of the wild bunch aren’t going to bother them anymore.

The movie is about a time when the old world is rapidly going away, if not gone already, and the larger-than-life heroes of the old world just can’t live the way they used to. What it’s showing us is the variety of ways the old heroes try to cope with that reality. Some fight it, some try to work with it or join it, some try to continue on like nothing has changed, and some ultimately adapt and survive. The gunfight at the end is the tragic downfall of the ones who try to fight it.

This movie is kind of a Greek tragedy if you think about it. The old heroes go out in a blaze of glory rather than submit to the ant-world, and even though they’re dead, there’s something kind of noble about that, even if the ant-world doesn’t see it that way. Thornton and Sykes adapt and survive.

In that sense, this depressing-ass downer of a movie actually ends on a hopeful note. Thornton, who has come to hate doing the work of the ant-world, and old man Sykes join Angel’s Mexi-Indian friends for whatever “work” they’re going to go do, finding a way to continue existing as scorpions under the radar of the ant-world. It’s not the same existence they had in their glory days, but it’s better than being ants. Like Sykes tells us, it ain’t like it used to be, but it’ll do.

Addendum

I’m adding this many weeks after originally writing this. I was talking about this to a friend this weekend, and he brought up another thing that I should have thought about while writing this but didn’t.

My take on this movie overall is that it’s ultimately a rejection of the ant-world perspective. The relationships between the members of the Wild Bunch, and their loyalty to each other, don’t matter to the ant-world, or really to anyone outside their own inner circle. The spiritual ant, the ant-world worker drone, would say it therefore follows that their relationships and loyalty don’t matter period. Because they’re not affecting anything on some grand societal scale, they don’t matter. My take is that the movie is rejecting this perspective, and saying that individual life, loyalty, valor, and virtue do matter, even if they don’t affect things on some grand societal scale, because they matter to the people involved.

What my friend brought up is that these relationships, and the virtuous acts associated with them, also matter to God. Big duh moment for me when I heard him say that, because obviously they matter to God, and being a Christian, I should have thought of this. When we struggle against sin and do virtuous acts, God sees it and appreciates it, even if not a single other human being does.

The main characters all struggle with loyalty, especially Pike and maybe with the exception of Angel. Pike has probably the starkest turnaround in his attitude regarding this. I don’t think there’s anything explicitly Christian about the movie or its characters, but this reading does kind of underscore how there’s something of a kinship between Christian virtues and pre-Christian or Homeric virtues.

The point is that nothing is pointless. Everything matters immensely, first because God sees it, and second because it affects the people around you. Very anti-nihilism.

1. The First Book of Nephi: His Reign and Ministry

2. The Second Book of Nephi

3. The Book of Jacob, the Brother of Nephi

4. The Book of Enos

5. The Book of Jarom

6. The Book of Omni

7. The Words of Mormon

8. The Book of Mosiah

As part of the research for my upcoming podcast series, I am reading the Book of Mormon in its entirety and summarizing it for the curious among you who don’t care enough to read the whole thing. This article will cover the single chapter of the seventh book, the Words of Mormon.

I said in the last article that I hoped we would find out who Mormon is and how he’s related to the previous authors, but we don’t, other than the fact that he is a Nephite. But anyway, here we go.

The Words of Mormon

Chapter I

There has been a huge time skip since the end of the last book. It is now hundreds of years after Christ. Mormon tells us that he has witnessed the near-total destruction of the Nephites and that he fears his son Moroni will witness their complete destruction.

He tells us he has searched through the records handed down to him and has collected and preserved the plates which contain the previous writings from Nephi down to Benjamin. He has more records of the Nephite kings from the time of Benjamin onward, which it seems we will be getting back to in the next book. Lastly, he writes of a large-scale Lamanite invasion during the time of the righteous king Benjamin, and how Benjamin repelled the invasion and restored peace.

Conclusion

That’s it. This is the last of the short books for now, and it seems like kind of a weird insertion. The next book is called Mosiah and has 13 chapters. Remember Mosiah is the name of the Nephite king who leads the people to Zarahemla in the Book of Omni, and he is Benjamin’s father, so I think the next book will be continuing the records from the time of Mosiah onwards.

This just begs the question, why has Mormon insert himself here, hundreds of years after the events being described, to tell us about his record-keeping? It seems odd to me, but I sort of have a half-baked theory about why Joseph Smith would write it this way. He is very focused on establishing the chain of custody of the records themselves. In a way, this book is telling more of a story about the plates than about the Nephites. I think Smith is eventually going to want to tell you how the plates got to where he found them in the 1800s, and establishing a record of their whereabouts is paramount to him.

We’ll see if my theory pans out. The next will probably take me a little longer to put together than these last few have; I have a couple other things to read at the moment, and Mosiah is much longer than the last few books have been. But we’ll get ‘er done. See you next time.

1. The First Book of Nephi: His Reign and Ministry

2. The Second Book of Nephi

3. The Book of Jacob, the Brother of Nephi

4. The Book of Enos

5. The Book of Jarom

6. The Book of Omni

7. The Words of Mormon

8. The Book of Mosiah

As part of the research for my upcoming podcast series, I am reading the Book of Mormon in its entirety and summarizing it for the curious among you who don’t care enough to read the whole thing. This article will cover the single chapter of the sixth book, Omni.

This book is another short one, but it’s kind of wild and a lot happens in it. It is unique so far among the books as the first one with multiple authors, five to be exact.1 The first author only gets two paragraphs, then the next three get one paragraph each, and the rest of the book, only a couple of pages, is authored by the fifth guy.

The Book of Omni

Chapter I

Omni tells us he has kept the plates according to the instructions of his father Jarom. Omni is a warrior who has killed many Lamanites in battle, and he also tells us he is a wicked man and has not kept God’s commandments. At the end of his life, 282 years have passed since Lehi left Jerusalem. He passes the plates on to his son, Amaron.

Amaron tells us that during his stewardship of the plates, a portion of the Nephites who were wicked were wiped out, but the righteous part were spared. At the end of Amaron’s stewardship, it has been 320 years since Lehi left Jerusalem.2 He passes the plates on to his brother, Chemish.

Chemish doesn’t tell us much other than that he has kept the plates, then passes the plates to his son, Abinadom.

Abinadom is another warrior; he only tells us he has killed many Lamanites in battle before passing the plates on to his son, Amaleki.

Amaleki is the author for the rest of this book, and he tells us some really wild stuff. First of all, a leader named Mosiah is instructed by God to lead a righteous portion of the Nephites out of their land, to a place called Zarahemla. It really seems like these people are living in a state of perpetual Exodus, which is kind of interesting for Mormon theology as well as their later history in America.3 It’s not stated why they needed to leave the land of Nephi, other than that God commanded Mosiah to go.

When they get to Zarahemla, there are already people living there. Where is Zarahemla? Good question; I have no idea, but it must be somewhere in North America. In an absolutely wild turn of events, it turns out that the people of Zarahemla are also descended from Jews who left Jerusalem just before the Babylonian exile, which must have been not long after the Lehites left.

You read that right. Not one, but two separate groups of Jews left Jerusalem just before the Babylonian exile, wandered in the wilderness, and ended up sailing across the ocean to North America, apparently without ever knowing about each other for close to 400 years.

The people of Zarahemla4 have denied God since leaving Jerusalem, and their language has become corrupted to the point where they and the Nephites can’t understand each other anymore. This is remedied pretty quick though; the people of Zarahemla learn the language of the Nephites, and the two peoples are united into one with Mosiah as their king. Mosiah finds a stone engraved with the history of the people of Zarahemla, and is granted the ability to interpret it by God. Amaleki writes:

And [the engravings] gave an account of one Coriantumr, and of the slain of his people. And Coriantumr was discovered by the people of Zarahemla; and he dwelt with them for the space of nine Moons. It also spake a few words concerning his fathers. And his first parents came out from the Tower, at the time the Lord confounded the language of the people; and the severity of the Lord fell upon them, according to his judgments, which is just; and their bones lay scattered in the land northward.

None of this is ever mentioned again in this book. Who is Coriantumr? What is a Moon? Does that just mean one waxing and waning cycle the way the Injuns say “many moons”? What the hell is the Tower? Does that mean the Tower of Babel, since it’s when the Lord confounded the languages? If so, who the hell is this Coriantumr who can trace his lineage all the way back almost to Noah’s Flood?

Also, Coriantumr apparently didn’t leave Jerusalem with the people of Zarahemla, since the Zarahemlites “discovered” him when they were already in North America. So does this mean that another random guy from the ancient Near East somehow found his way to North America? So many questions that I fear will remain unanswered. Maybe Joseph Smith wanted his own version of the Bible’s Nephilim and “mighty men of old, men of renown.”

Anyway, Amaleki tells us that he was born during the reign of Mosiah, and that Mosiah’s son Benjamin5 took over as king after Mosiah’s death. Benjamin turns out to be a righteous king, and since Amaleki has no sons, he hands the plates over to Benjamin at the end of his life.

The last thing Amaleki tells us is that an unspecified “large number” of Nephites, led by a “stiffnecked man,” decides to leave Zarahemla and try to reclaim the land of Nephi where they came from. This expedition ends in disaster as all but 50 of its members are killed, with the remnant returning to Zarahemla. Another “considerable number” takes another journey into the wilderness some time later, including Amaleki’s brother, but this group is never heard from again.

Conclusion

Well this one got unexpectedly wild for only being about three and a half pages long. We can’t be sure exactly how many years it has been since Lehi left Jerusalem, because like I said before we don’t get another definite time reference after the 320 years at the end of Amaron’s stewardship of the plates. But the author of most of this book, Amaleki, is the grandson of Amaron’s brother, so I’m guessing it’s around 400 years now, which would put us at approximately 200 BC.

It seems like this is the point in the story where the showrunners kind of ran out of ideas and had to come up with some wild twist to keep us interested. And it kind of worked I guess. The next book is called the Words of Mormon, and it’s the last short book before we get to the next long one. After a quick glance through the Words of Mormon, I’m not sure how or if Mormon is related to the authors of the previous books, but I guess we’ll find out in the next article.

1. The First Book of Nephi: His Reign and Ministry

2. The Second Book of Nephi

3. The Book of Jacob, the Brother of Nephi

4. The Book of Enos

5. The Book of Jarom

6. The Book of Omni

7. The Words of Mormon

8. The Book of Mosiah

As part of the research for my upcoming podcast series, I am reading the Book of Mormon in its entirety and summarizing it for the curious among you who don’t care enough to read the whole thing. This article will cover the single chapter of the fifth book, Jarom.

Jarom is even shorter than Enos at just two pages in my edition. Not much to say by way of intro, other than Jarom the author is the son of Enos, the author of the last book.

The Book of Jarom

Chapter I

As Jarom begins to write, 200 years have passed since Lehi left Jerusalem. Jarom says he is writing for the benefit of “our brethren, the Lamanites,” but never explains how exactly these writings are supposed to benefit them, and also reminds us that the Lamanites1 love murder and drink the blood of wild beasts.

The Nephites have multiplied greatly and become prosperous, but the Lamanites have multiplied even more and have come against the Nephites in war many times. The Nephites have built fortified cities (plural) to withstand them, even though there can’t be more than a few thousand Nephites even now. The prophets of the Nephites keep admonishing the people to follow the laws of God, and they do.

As Jarom finishes writing, 238 years have passed since Lehi left Jerusalem.2 He passes stewardship of Nephi’s plates on to his son, Omni.

Conclusion

It seems like the Nephites are managing the feral blacks fairly well so far.

The next book is, you guessed it, Omni. The next article will cover it, and it also has a single chapter. There are a couple more short ones before we get to the next longer book.

1. The First Book of Nephi: His Reign and Ministry

2. The Second Book of Nephi

3. The Book of Jacob, the Brother of Nephi

4. The Book of Enos

5. The Book of Jarom

6. The Book of Omni

7. The Words of Mormon

8. The Book of Mosiah

As part of the research for my upcoming podcast series, I am reading the Book of Mormon in its entirety and summarizing it for the curious among you who don’t care enough to read the whole thing. This article will cover the single chapter of the fourth book, Enos.

As I said in the last article, Enos, the author of this book, is the son of Jacob, the author of the previous book. I’ve looked ahead a little bit and it looks like this will be the pattern for the next few books at least; the son of the current author will be the author of the next book.

Other than that, this is the shortest book so far, so there’s not much of an intro for this one.

The Book of Enos

Chapter I

Enos takes the words of his father Jacob to heart, and while on a hunting trip in the wilderness prays fervently to God for the forgiveness of his sins, which is granted. He prays also for his people, the Nephites, and for the Lamanites. He obtains a promise from God that even if the Nephites are destroyed one day, their records will be preserved for posterity, and also prays for the eventual salvation of the filthy evil Lamanites1 who are always trying to destroy the Nephites and their records.

Enos comes back to the people and prophesies to them about what he has seen and heard from God. I’ll just quote what he says about the Lamanites:2

And I bare record that the people of Nephi did seek diligently to restore the Lamanites unto the true faith in God. But our labors were in vain; their hatred was fixed, and they were led by their evil nature, that they became wild, and ferocious, and a blood-thirsty people; full of idolatry, and filthiness; feeding upon beasts of prey; dwelling in tents, and wandering about in the wilderness, with a short skin girded about their loins, and their heads shaven; and their skill was in the bow, and the cimeter, and the axe.—And many of them did eat nothing save it was raw meat; and they were continually seeking to destroy us.

So the Lamanites have apparently degenerated to a barbaric, borderline animalistic state since falling away from the true faith and now the Nephites have to deal with feral blacks harassing them all the time. Truly a nightmare.

By the end of Enos’ life, 179 years have passed since Lehi left Jerusalem, which should put us somewhere around 430-420 BC or so.

Conclusion

That’s it for this one. Not much to say about it, except that I hope the Nephites can figure out how to get along with the feral blacks.

The next article will cover the fifth book, Jarom.

1. The First Book of Nephi: His Reign and Ministry

2. The Second Book of Nephi

3. The Book of Jacob, the Brother of Nephi

4. The Book of Enos

5. The Book of Jarom

6. The Book of Omni

7. The Words of Mormon

8. The Book of Mosiah

As part of the research for my upcoming podcast series, I am reading the Book of Mormon in its entirety and summarizing it for the curious among you who don’t care enough to read the whole thing. This article will cover the 5 chapters of the third book, Jacob.

Jacob is the first book in the Book of Mormon not purportedly authored by Nephi. The author is instead Nephi’s younger brother Jacob, born during the eight-year trek through the wilderness.

The Book of Jacob, the Brother of Nephi

Chapter I

It has now been 55 years since Lehi and his family left Jerusalem. Nephi is getting old, so he commands his younger brother Jacob to continue his teachings and writings. He appoints a new king to reign over the Nephites, then dies an old man. The kings of the Nephites come to be called after the name of Nephi; whenever a new king comes to the throne, his name becomes Second Nephi, Third Nephi, etc., regardless of whatever his name was before.1

After Nephi’s death, the people start to fall away from God.2 Jacob and his brother Joseph will have to do their priest thing and try to keep the people on track.

Chapter II

Jacob admonishes the Nephites for the sin they have fallen into since Nephi’s death. The first main topic he speaks on is their love of money. It seems they have been finding abundant gold and silver in the new land; of course some have found more of it than others, and the ones who have found more have started to be puffed up with pride and considering themselves better than the ones with less. That has to stop.

The second and more important topic is polygamy.

Wait, what?

Yeah, the Nephites have been doing polygamy after the manner of the biblical kings David and Solomon, and Jacob tells them this is forbidden by God and that they are only to have one wife and no concubines. He tells them that even the black people3 have been keeping this commandment! If such a cursed and filthy people as them are doing right by their women, how much better should the white Nephites be doing? In fact, Jacob says that if they don’t change their ways, they’ll be even blacker than the Lamanites in the last days.

Of course, this is all very interesting considering what we know about Mormons and polygamy. I can’t wait to see how this teaching will eventually end up being reversed.

I also have to wonder at this point how many Nephites there are exactly. They only left Jerusalem with two families, Lehi’s and Ishmael’s. Lehi had four sons when they left, and two more were born during the eight years in the wilderness. It’s never stated how many children Ishmael has, but we know he has at least four daughters because all four of Lehi’s original sons married daughters of Ishmael, and we know he has at least two sons because his sons are mentioned in the plural. It’s also not stated how many daughters Lehi has, although we know for similar reasons that he has at least two. The only servant explicitly mentioned is Zoram, but both households presumably have many more servants along for the trip, although again it’s also not stated how many.

The beginning of this book said it’s only been 55 years since they left Jerusalem, so they can’t have multiplied all that much in that time, and they’re already split into two groups between the Nephites and Lamanites. Even if we’re counting household servants and such, there can’t be more than a few hundred of each, but Jacob is writing as if the Nephites are a whole-ass nation already. They have kings, priests, and a temple, and they’ve already had wars (plural) with the Lamanites which presumably would have culled the population at least a little. It’s like Joseph Smith wants to make them like the Israelites at the time of the actual Exodus, but from the original household of the biblical Jacob, the Israelites had a 430-year sojourn in Egypt. Much more time to “be fruitful and multiply” as it were. I think maybe Smith didn’t think through the logistics of his worldbuilding very thoroughly. Maybe he could have taken some tips from .

How are we even discussing the polygamy issue with a population this small? Are they drawing that many more girls than boys with their childbirth ratios? Or maybe they’re getting busy with the Injun squaws.4

Anyway, we continue.

Chapter III

Jacob keeps preaching to the Nephites, explaining the question of how the Jews could ever gain salvation in the end after rejecting Christ as they will do when he comes. To explain this, he refers the prophet Zenos, who spoke to the Israelites sometime before Lehi left Jerusalem.

“Who is this Zenos?” you may ask. “I don’t remember him from the Bible.” That’s because he’s completely made up. Not mentioned in the Bible, or anywhere else outside the Book of Mormon. The story according to Joseph Smith goes that his writings were lost to the Jews during the Babylonian exile, but were preserved on the plates Nephi took from Jerusalem. What really happened was that Joseph Smith needed a prophet to speak a fairly tortured parable of the Mormon church, and couldn’t find an actual prophecy from the Bible that fit the bill.

This parable takes up most of the chapter, and it goes like the following.

There’s a lord who owns a vineyard, and has a nice tame olive tree in his vineyard. The tree starts to die, and the lord of the vineyard has his servants prune four of the young, healthy branches and transplant them to other parts of the vineyard so they’ll survive. He also finds a wild olive tree outside the vineyard, takes some branches from it, and grafts them into the tame olive tree. For a while, both the original tame tree and the transplanted branches bear good fruit.

The tame tree is pretty obviously the house of Israel, and the lord of the vineyard is Christ. One of the four transplanted branches is the Lehites, as we’ll see, but I have no idea who the other three are supposed to be. Maybe one of them is the Lost Tribes of Israel, but for the other two your guess is as good as mine. The grafting in of the wild branches is the grafting in of the Gentiles to the house of Israel.

Three of the four transplanted branches are planted in poor soil, but bear good fruit anyway. The fourth one is planted in good soil, but starts to bear half good and half bad fruit. This is the Lehites, who were planted in the good land of America but split into the good (white) Nephites and the bad (black) Lamanites.5

Eventually though, all four transplanted branches become corrupted and start to bear bad fruit instead. The original tree also gets taken over by the wild branches and bears a multitude of bad fruit. This is supposed to be the church falling away from Christ’s teachings after the deaths of the Apostles. The roots of the tree (representing God’s covenant with the original patriarchs Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob) are still good, but the tree is bearing bad fruit throughout.

The lord of the vineyard is grieved and wonders why all his trees are now bearing bad fruit despite all the efforts he and his servants (representing God’s prophets) have gone to in tending them. He grafts some branches from the four transplanted trees back into the original tame tree, as well as some more wild branches, and makes a final effort to nourish the tree so it will bear good fruit again, and it does. There is a final pruning promised, when all the good fruit will be gathered and after which the whole vineyard will be burned.

This kind of restorationist theology is not unique to Mormonism, but it’s certainly not Orthodox. I won’t comment on this too much, but of course our view is that the Church has maintained itself through tradition and apostolic succession, with the guidance of the Holy Spirit, from the time of Christ down to today, and will continue to do so until the end. There was no great apostasy like this parable, and Mormon theology in general, would have you believe.

Chapter IV

Jacob tells the people that what Zenos said will surely come to pass, and that the end times will come after the lord of the vineyard gathers the fruit for the second time. I’m pretty sure the second gathering he’s talking about is supposed to come in the time of Joseph Smith. Jacob admonishes the Nephites to repent.

Chapter V

A charismatic teacher named Sherem rises up among the Nephites, denying the coming of Christ and teaching a false gospel, and leads many of the people astray. Eventually he goes directly to Jacob and tries to lead him astray, but is rebuked and overcome by the Holy Ghost. Before he dies, he repents and denies his own former teachings in front of the people, worrying that he has committed the unpardonable sin. Apparently to Jacob it was unpardonable, because Jacob doesn’t seem to care that he repented and continues to call him a wicked man after his death. On the bright side though, the people are brought back to following God.

Efforts are made to win back the dirty, filthy, black Lamanites, but the efforts are in vain because of how dirty and filthy and hateful and black the Lamanites are. They just want to keep fighting, so the armies6 of the Nephites continue to hold them at bay.

Growing old and nearing his death, Jacob passes stewardship of the plates on to his son Enos.

Conclusion

Wild restorationist theology in this one. Again not much in the way of history. Jacob keeps telling us the history is mostly written on the “other plates,” but I’m not sure if he’s talking about a later part of the Book of Mormon or something else entirely. That could be something Joseph Smith never got around to translating.

Jacob has been the shortest book so far by both chapter count and page count, but the next four books are even shorter. They are only one chapter each, and all four combined are half the page count of Jacob. Even so, I have an algorithm to milk for views, so I’m still going to make each one its own article. The next article will cover the single chapter of the next book, Enos.

1. The First Book of Nephi: His Reign and Ministry

2. The Second Book of Nephi

3. The Book of Jacob, the Brother of Nephi

4. The Book of Enos

5. The Book of Jarom

6. The Book of Omni

7. The Words of Mormon

8. The Book of Mosiah

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As part of the research for my upcoming podcast series, I am reading the Book of Mormon in its entirety and summarizing it for the curious among you who don’t care enough to read the whole thing. This article will cover the 15 chapters of the second book, II Nephi.

The story slows down quite a bit in this second book. Lehi and his family have already arrived in the promised land, and there ends up being a lot of prophecy and not so much story action. But we’ll break it down chapter by chapter.

The Second Book of Nephi

Chapter I

Drawing near his death, Lehi calls his sons together and prophesies to them. He tells them of his vision of the destruction of Jerusalem, proving they were right to leave. He says the land they are now in is consecrated and set aside for those whom God will bring to it.1 Lehi commands Laman, Lemuel, and Sam to obey Nephi and says they will be blessed if they do and cursed if they don’t. He gives particular blessings to Zoram2 and Jacob, his firstborn in the wilderness.

Next we get Lehi teaching his sons an account of the Fall which is pretty blatantly heretical from the Christian perspective. He speaks of a necessary “opposition in all things,” a dualistic account that makes good and evil both necessary things. He thinks righteousness cannot exist without wickedness, joy cannot exist without misery, and good cannot exist without sin. In his account, the Fall was ultimately a good thing because it introduced sin into the world, which in turn introduced good human action, which wouldn’t have been possible without sin. Lehi says, “Adam fell, that men might be; and men are, that they might have joy.” The Fall is part of God’s plan, and not a result of Adam’s sinful choice.

He also speaks of the Messiah redeeming man from the Fall, but it is unclear to me why this would be needed on this account of the Fall. It seems he is saying that after being redeemed by the Messiah, man is now free to choose between good and evil for himself. But that just begs the question, was he not free to choose before the Messiah? Also, Lehi instructs his sons to choose eternal life and not eternal death, but they are living in a time 600 years before Christ’s incarnation and crucifixion. If redemption means gaining the ability to choose, and Christ hasn’t accomplished the redemption yet, how can they choose?

It’s all very contradictory, but I can’t say I’m surprised. I’m sure Mormons have their explanations for these things.

Chapter II

In this short but very interesting chapter, Lehi prophesies the future of his youngest son, Joseph. To explain what’s going on, I have to explain a couple things about the book in general. I’m going to get into commentary a little bit more than usual for this chapter.

I don’t know if every edition is like this, but the reproduction 1830 edition I’m reading from does not use quotation marks at all. In addition, Nephi (the purported author of these first two books) speaks in the first person a lot about things he is doing. “I, Nephi, did XYZ,” etc. There is also a lot of dialogue where other people are speaking, so if someone is speaking in the first person, because of the lack of quotation marks it sometimes takes context clues to know whether it’s Nephi speaking as the author of the book, or someone else speaking as part of the dialogue.

Usually this isn’t too hard, as it’s fairly obvious where the quotation marks would go if they were there. Sometimes it’s harder, as in the case of this particular chapter. This chapter starts off with the words:

And now I speak unto you, Joseph, my last born.

This tells us that the speaker is Lehi (Joseph’s father), not Nephi (Joseph’s brother). This chapter is a continuation of Lehi’s prophecies and teachings of the previous chapter, and for the entirety of the chapter he’s talking to Joseph. Keep this in mind and we’ll come back to it.

The next part of the ambiguity I’m about to talk about comes from names. Within the context of the story, Lehi’s youngest son Joseph is of course named after the biblical Joseph, son of Jacob/Israel and Lehi’s ancestor. Within the meta-context of the writing, Lehi’s son Joseph is named after the actual author of this book, Joseph Smith. There are three different Josephs involved. Keep this in mind too.

Lehi says that his ancestor Joseph obtained a promise from God that out of his line would arise a righteous branch which would be broken off from the house of Israel, but later would come to know the true Messiah. This is Lehi’s own branch. Then Lehi says this:

Yea, Joseph truly said, “thus saith the Lord unto me: ‘A choice seer will I raise up out of the fruit of thy loins; and he shall be esteemed highly among the fruit of thy loins. And unto him will I give commandment, that he shall be of great worth unto them, even to the bringing of them to the knowledge of the covenants which I have made with thy fathers. And I will give unto him a commandment, that he shall do none other work, save the work which I shall command him. And I will make him great in mine eyes: for he shall do my work. And he shall be great like unto Moses, whom I have said I would raise up unto you, to deliver my people, O house of Israel. And Moses will I raise up, to deliver thy people out of the land of Egypt. But a seer will I raise up out of the fruit of thy loins; and unto him will I give power to bring forth my word unto the seed of thy loins; and not to the bringing forth my word only,’ saith the Lord, ‘but to the convincing them of my word, which shall have already gone forth among them.’”3

Now, it seems to me that the seer he is talking about here is Nephi. But he could also be talking about Joseph the son of Lehi; I haven’t read ahead so I don’t yet know what happens with him in the future.

Or that’s what it seemed like to me on my first pass reading this. It becomes more ambiguous a little bit later, when we get this:

And thus prophesied Joseph, saying: “Behold, that seer will the Lord bless; and they that seek to destroy him, shall be confounded: for this promise, of which I have obtained of the Lord, of the fruit of thy loins, shall be fulfilled. Behold, I am sure of the fulfilling of this promise. And his name shall be called after me; and it shall be after the name of his father. And he shall be like unto me; for the thing which the Lord shall bring forth by his hand, by the power of the Lord shall bring my people unto salvation;” yea, thus prophesied Joseph.4

So in this prophecy, Joseph is saying that the seer he is talking about will be called after him, or in other words will be named Joseph as well. The seer will also be named after his own father. In case anyone didn’t know, Joseph Smith the founder of the LDS Church is actually Joseph Smith, Jr. His father’s name was also Joseph Smith. So Joseph Smith’s name is also “after the name of his father.” This is clearly a reference to some Joseph, not Nephi.

Depending on interpretation, this sentence could be read as Joseph son of Jacob prophesying either Joseph son of Lehi or Joseph Smith, Jr. It might be a bit of a stretch, but “after the name of his father” could be interpreted as “after the name of his forefather or ancestor,” meaning Joseph son of Lehi is called after the name of his forefather, Joseph son of Jacob. That interpretation would make the second half of that sentence redundant because Joseph already said “his name shall be called after me,” but then again there is redundancy and repetition all over the place in this book so I’m not sure that rules it out.

I’m sure the far more likely interpretation is the more obvious one, that this is supposed to be a prophecy of Joseph Smith, Jr. who is called after the name of Joseph son of Jacob as well as the name of his own father, Joseph Smith, Sr. The reason I bring up the other possible interpretation at all is to point out that there’s some plausible ambiguity in this.

Another question is, who is the speaker reporting this prophecy of Joseph to us? Is it still Lehi speaking, or is it Nephi the author of the book? The latter part of this chapter would seem to indicate that Lehi never stopped speaking, so it’s still Lehi. But on the other hand, the lack of quotation marks again makes it a little bit ambiguous. It could be that Lehi has stopped speaking and it’s now Nephi as the author of the book telling us directly about this prophecy of Joseph’s.

The ambiguity is only amplified directly after the previous quotation. This could be Lehi still speaking to his son Joseph, it could be Nephi speaking as the author of the book, or there’s now even a third option, since this could be continuing the prophecy of Joseph being reported by either Lehi or Nephi. Whoever the speaker is, he continues:

I am sure of this thing, even as I am sure of the promise of Moses: for the Lord hath said unto me, “I will preserve thy seed forever.” And the Lord hath said, “I will raise up a Moses; and I will give power unto him in a rod; and I will give judgment unto him in writing. Yet I will not loose his tongue, that he shall speak much: for I will not make him mighty in speaking.5 But I will write unto him my law, by the finger of mine own hand; and I will make a spokesman for him.”6

Who is the Moses he’s talking about? Well, if the speaker is meant to be Joseph son of Jacob, he could be prophesying the actual biblical Moses, who would lead the Israelites out of Egypt. If the speaker is meant to be Lehi or Nephi, then it seems they are talking about either Nephi himself, Joseph Smith, or possibly Joseph son of Lehi.

The chapter finishes up like this, where it’s finally clear again that Lehi is the speaker:

And now, behold, my son Joseph, after this manner did my father of old prophesy. Wherefore, because of this covenant, thou art blessed: for thy seed shall not be destroyed, for they shall hearken unto the words of the Book. And there shall raise up one, mighty among them, which shall do much good, both in word and in deed, being an instrument in the hands of God, with exceeding faith, to work mighty wonders, and do that thing which is great in the sight of God, unto the bringing to pass much restoration unto the House of Israel, and unto the seed of thy brethren. And now, blessed art thou, Joseph. Behold, thou art little; wherefore, hearken unto the words of thy brother Nephi, and it shall be done unto thee, even according to the words which I have spoken. Remember the words of thy dying father. Amen.

All this ambiguity seems to be serving a function. First, there is obviously a major Exodus theme running through the whole story up to this point. Second, Joseph Smith is tying himself to the lineage of the biblical Joseph, through Lehi and his son Joseph, using this kind of blurring of past, present, and future, while also making himself, along with his forefathers, a type of Moses. There is probably something more to be said about typology here, which is way too galaxy-brain IQ for me to tackle.

Anyway, I’m not sure I have anything definitive to say about it at this point. This is one of the shortest chapters in the whole book, but it’s turned into the longest chapter summary I’ve written so far. That’s because there’s really a lot going on in it, and because summary is interpretation, I felt I couldn’t just summarize it based on any given interpretation because there are multiple layers and possible interpretations. So I had to at least give an overview of what the ambiguity is and how it come through.

We continue.

Chapter III

In another short chapter, Lehi gives his final prophecies. To Laman, Lemuel, and their children, he says they will be blessed if they keep God’s commandments and cursed if they don’t, but that the curse will not last forever. He speaks to the children of Ishmael, but we’re not told what he says to them. Sam will be blessed like Nephi. Lehi dies an old man, and Nephi praises God and prays for help and guidance.

Chapter IV

To the surprise of no one, Laman and Lemuel start murmuring against Nephi again as soon as Lehi dies. They plot to kill Nephi, but God warns him of the danger and commands him to do another Exodus, fleeing into the wilderness to escape his brothers. Nephi takes with him Sam, Jacob, Joseph, Zoram, and their families. The children of Ishmael stay with Laman and Lemuel. The family now splits permanently into two camps: the Nephites and the Lamanites. The plates and Lehi’s brass ball go with the Nephites. It is confirmed that the “compass” from I Nephi that I wasn’t sure about was in fact the same thing as the brass ball.

The Nephites become prosperous metalworkers and construct a temple after the manner of Solomon’s temple in Jerusalem. The Lamanites are cursed and become black people.7

That’s not a joke though. Here’s a funny passage about that:

For behold, they had hardened their hearts against [God], that they had become like unto a flint; wherefore, as they were white, and exceeding fair and delightsome, that they might not be enticing unto my people, therefore the Lord God did cause a skin of blackness to come upon them. And thus saith the Lord God, I will cause that they shall be loathsome unto thy people, save they shall repent of their iniquities. And cursed shall be the seed of him that mixeth with their seed: for they shall be cursed even with the same cursing. And the Lord spake it, and it was done. And because of their cursing which was upon them, they did become an idle people, full of mischief and subtlety, and did seek in the wilderness for beasts of prey. And the Lord God said unto me, they shall be a scourge unto thy seed, to stir them up in remembrance of me; and inasmuch as they will not remember me, and hearken unto my words, they shall scourge them even unto destruction.8

40 years pass since the time of the Lehites’ exodus from Jerusalem. The Nephites want to make Nephi their king, but he doesn’t want them to have a king. Jacob and Joseph are made priests of the Nephites. Nephi continues to keep records of his people on his brass plates, including their wars and contentions with the Lamanites, which are not detailed in this book.

Chapter V

Jacob, the brother of Nephi, prophesies to the Nephites. He starts by reading from Isaiah, then confirms that Jerusalem has been destroyed and its people scattered, but that they will return and rebuild one day. He prophesies blessings for the Gentiles, as long as they ally themselves with the house of Israel and do not unite themselves to the abominable church. He prophesies an eventual final restoration of the house of Israel.

Chapter VI

Jacob continues prophesying to the Nephites. There’s a lot about the bodily resurrection, and a bunch of theological stuff that I won’t go into here because this isn’t a commentary on Mormon theology. Except I want to highlight this one sentence:

Remember, to be carnally minded, is death, and to be spiritually minded, is life eternal.

I think this is the gnostic influence on Mormonism coming out. The material world is bad, evil, and death, and the spiritual world is good and full of life. This isn’t the only place this is hinted at, but it is probably the most concise statement of the idea I’ve seen so far.

At the end of the chapter, Jacob says he’s going to take a break from prophesying for the night and come back to it tomorrow.

Chapter VII

It’s tomorrow, and guess what, Jacob keeps prophesying. He prophesies Christ’s crucifixion, and has this to say:

Wherefore, as I said unto you, it must needs be expedient that Christ, (for in the last night the Angel spake unto me that this should be his name,)9 should come among the Jews, among they which are the more wicked part of the world; and they shall crucify him: For thus it behooveth our God; and there is none other nation on earth that would crucify their God. For should the mighty miracles be wrought among other nations, they would repent, and know that he be their God; but because of priest-crafts and iniquities, they at Jerusalem will stiffen their necks against him, that he be crucified. Wherefore, because of their iniquities, destructions, famines, pestilences, and bloodsheds, shall come upon them; and they which shall not be destroyed, shall be scattered among all nations.

We get more prophecies about the future of the Nephites. This is getting pretty repetitive at this point. The one thing he throws in that’s a little unique in this chapter is that the land they now inhabit will be a “land of liberty unto the Gentiles; and there shall be no kings upon the land,” which is pretty obviously tying the “prophecy” to the status of America as an Enlightenment Republic.

Jacob finally ends his prophecies.

Chapter VIII

Now we get more prophecies, this time from Nephi, but this chapter is pretty lame. Nephi first explains that he is about to quote from the prophet Isaiah, whose writings he has on the plates taken from Jerusalem, because his words apply to the Nephites. The rest of the chapter is an almost word-for-word copy of Isaiah chapters 2-5, with the pretty thin justification that Isaiah’s prophecies apply to the Nephites.

It’s not even plagiarism, because it’s not like he’s pretending these are his own words. He just tells you it’s from Isaiah and copies four whole chapters. I was pretty impressed with Joseph Smith’s creativity up to this point, but this is just low effort. I get quoting someone else from time to time for commentary purposes, but now you’re just padding out the length of your book with somebody else’s work. Lame.

While I’m on the subject, I’ll tell you now about a couple things I’ve learned, and I’m putting this here because I only discovered these things after reading Chapter VIII, so you get to experience what I experienced. I had to do a little internet research to find out exactly which parts of Isaiah Nephi is quoting from in this chapter, and while researching that, I found out a couple things by accident.

The first thing I learned is that modern editions of the Book of Mormon have different chapter divisions. The 1830 reproduction edition I’m reading from has 15 chapters in II Nephi, but modern editions have 33 chapters. Nothing has changed about the text itself; it’s just been broken up into more chapters and now has verses too, to be more like the Bible I guess. What that means is that if I want to look up references from any LDS web sites, I have to first figure out which modern chapters correspond to the 1830 chapter I’m currently reading, because everyone today uses the modern chapter divisions.

The second thing I learned is that Chapter VIII isn’t the first time extensive quotations from Isaiah have been used. It turns out that back in Chapter V, Jacob also pretty much just read out to the Nephites Isaiah chapters 49-51, plus 52:1-2. If I was more of a Bible scholar I probably would have noticed this when I read Chapter V, but I’m just some internet retard so I had to figure it out by accident. Back then I said that Jacob “starts by reading from Isaiah,” but it turns out that whole chapter was quoting from Isaiah. It’s not as extensive as what we’re about to see, but still.

Joseph Smith must not have had the creative juices flowing for II Nephi. Copying this much from the Bible is just lame.

I’m going to continue using the 1830 chapter divisions because that’s the edition I have, but just know from now on that the chapter numbers won’t line up with modern editions, or anything you’ll see about the Book of Mormon online.

Look at that, you get to learn along with me. We’ve both learned something today, and it might turn out that the real Mormons were the friends we made along the way.

Chapter IX

This entire chapter is continuing to quote from Isaiah. Now we get chapters 6-12. I’m not kidding, that’s all this chapter is.

Chapter X

Guess what, another full chapter of Isaiah quotation. This time it’s Isaiah chapters 13-14.

That’s right, chapters VIII-X of II Nephi are almost entirely taken up with a word-for-word reproduction of Isaiah 2-14. I’m not mad; I’m just disappointed. I expected more from the spiritual predecessor of Terry A. Davis.

Chapter XI

Now we’re finally done with reading a copy of Isaiah and we can get back to Nephi.

Now I, Nephi, do speak somewhat concerning the words which I have written, which have been spoken by the mouth of Isaiah.

Now Nephi has to explain the words of Isaiah to the people, because they’re not filled with the spirit of prophecy like he and Jacob are. The Messiah will come 600 years from the time of Lehi’s departure from Jerusalem, which was 40-some-odd years ago at this point in the story. While on earth, Christ will appear to the Nephites Himself. But about three generations later, the Nephites will fall away from the faith and be destroyed because they were unfaithful.

Many generations after this, in the latter days, a book will be delivered to a man who will use it to restore the faith. I’m pretty sure that’s supposed to be Joseph Smith.

Chapter XII

Nephi prophesies that in the future, the abominable church will fracture and fight amongst itself, with many priests and ministers preaching various false doctrines and leading people astray. Of course, this is really Joseph Smith commenting on the current state of American Protestantism in his own day, and as we’ll see in the podcast, he’s not wrong.

Smith also gives another preemptive response to a criticism he knows people will make by having Nephi say that God doesn’t limit His revelation to the Bible only, and He will keep speaking to His people. As any Orthodox Christian, or even Roman Catholic, could tell you, this shows a gross misunderstanding of what the Bible is, what it’s for, and how God speaks to people, but I won’t go into that here.

Also there will be a future restoration of the remnants of the Nephites, who will still have surviving, identifiable descendants even after being destroyed I guess.

Chapter XIII

Nephi tells the people about the importance of water baptism as the way to salvation. Because of what God has shown him,10 he knows Christ will be baptized in water, so the people should be as well. Christ is the only Savior.

There’s a lot about the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost in this chapter. If you know anything about Mormonism, you’ll know that they don’t believe in the Trinity, or at best they believe in some jacked-up false version of the Trinity. I don’t know how they interpret this stuff today, but it’s pretty obvious to me that it’s just an indication of Joseph Smith not having his theology all figured out at the beginning. He doesn’t know what he’s saying; he’s just throwing these terms out there because it’s what his religious climate has given him.

Chapter XIV

Nephi is frustrated at the people’s stubbornness and lack of understanding. He tells them all that is needed for understanding of what to do is to follow the path and receive the Holy Ghost.

Chapter XV

Nephi hopes for the salvation of his people. He says the only way people can be angry about his words in this book is if they are led by the Devil, and that his words will condemn those who fall away from the teachings of Christ.

Conclusion

I won’t lie, this book was way more of a slog than the previous one. It’s actually not that much longer even though it has twice as many chapters, because the chapters are a lot shorter on average than they were in I Nephi. But still, there’s a lot of prophecy and not that much story.

The extensive not-plagiarism of Isaiah doesn’t help. In the context of the story, Jacob and Nephi are reading to the Nephites from the prophecies of Isaiah, which are written on the plates they took from Jerusalem. For the purposes of this book though, Joseph Smith could have easily just told us they read these particular parts of Isaiah out loud to the people, and told us to go read them if we want to get caught up. It’s not like people in his time didn’t have access to the King James Bible anyway. Maybe he was getting paid by the word and figured he could slip this past the editor.11

Even in the context of the story itself this doesn’t make sense. Joseph Smith’s story is that these books were originally written by Nephi and his successors, and he is now translating this from the plates he found. The extensive quotations from Isaiah are in the context of sermons given to the Nephites by Jacob and Nephi; ostensibly they are reading the words of Isaiah to the people. But remember they already have plates taken from Jerusalem that have the writings of Isaiah on them. Why would they need to write down this much duplication on their own plates? It just seems wasteful. Presumably they don’t have infinite material to write on. Why not just write something like this?

Then it came to pass that I, Nephi, did read aloud to the assembly of the people thirteen chapters of the prophecies of Isaiah. I reproduceth not these writings here on these plates; I wasteth not the limited material I haveth for such duplications. If thou wilt readeth for thyself the words of Isaiah, refereth thou to the other plates.12

The best part was the part where we find out black people are evil and cursed.13 I sure hope they don’t redact that part later for political reasons. Chapter IV gets 5 brass balls out of 5 from me, but the Isaiah chapters get 0/5 for low effort. It probably averages out to a 2/5.

The prophecy doesn’t interest me as much as the story, because I’m not too concerned with digging into Mormon theology right now. I hope it picks up again in the next book, Jacob. We’ll cover that one in the next article.

1. The First Book of Nephi: His Reign and Ministry

2. The Second Book of Nephi

3. The Book of Jacob, the Brother of Nephi

4. The Book of Enos

5. The Book of Jarom

6. The Book of Omni

7. The Words of Mormon

8. The Book of Mosiah

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As some of you may know, I am now researching a new podcast series on the history of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, told from my own perspective as an Orthodox Christian. As part of this research, I am of course reading the Book of Mormon in full.

It occurred to me that for as long as I’ve known about Mormons and the LDS Church, I really had absolutely no idea what’s actually in the Book of Mormon except in the most general terms. I figure there are probably many people in the same boat as me, who might be curious but don’t care enough to actually read the thing. And after getting started, I can easily see why it’s not very appealing; it is quite a ponderous tome. As an example, here’s a quick excerpt from the First Book of Nephi:

And now I, Nephi, do not make a full account of the things which my father hath written, for he hath written many things which he saw in visions and in dreams; and he also hath written many things which he prophesied and spake unto his children, of which I shall not make a full account; but I shall make an account of my proceedings in my days—Behold I make an abridgment of the record of my father, upon plates which I have made with mine own hands; wherefore, after that I have abridged the record of my father, then will I make an account of mine own life.

That gigantic paragraph of a sentence could have easily been a third of that length without losing any meaning. This is my improved version:

I, Nephi, will tell you an abridged summary of my father’s many visions and prophecies, followed by a full account of my own life.

Parse out the meaning of the actual version, and you’ll find that it pretty much just repeats what I wrote there about four times. The whole book is like this. I understand why people wouldn’t want to read it.

That being said, it is surprisingly not the worst story I’ve ever read, if you can get past the wordiness and pseudo-King James language. So I’ve decided to write down a summary of what’s in this thing for anyone who might be curious but doesn’t want to sit through all that.

This is just summary, not commentary, so I won’t be giving you much of my own opinion about this thing except some obvious stuff that you might expect. Just know that I’m an Orthodox Christian, so I think Mormon theology is silly and wrong and that none of this is true. I won’t keep reminding you of that all the time.

The Book of Mormon has a lot of elements cribbed straight from the Bible, which kind of makes sense both from within the Mormon worldview and from outside it. The first is its structure; like the Bible, it is a book of books, although while the Bible contains 76 books (or 73 if you’re Roman Catholic or 66 if you’re Protestant), the Book of Mormon is shorter and contains only 15 books, plus a short Preface. Each book is divided into chapters, the number of which varies from book to book for a total of 114 chapters.

I’ll be giving summaries of each individual chapter in a series of articles. I was originally going to do this in a single article, but the book is pretty long at 588 pages, so that would have been a super long article and I decided to break it up. I will likely give a shorter version of this when I get to an appropriate point in the story during the podcast series, but this will be the fuller version. This first article will cover the Preface, and the 7 chapters of the first book, I Nephi. Let’s get started.

Preface

Joseph Smith tells us directly that he had previously translated 116 pages of the Book of Lehi, but that his finished translation has been stolen and he hasn’t been able to get it back. God has commanded him not to try to reproduce the stolen translation again, but to keep going on with translating the rest of what he has on his plates. So that’s what the rest of the book is.

The First Book of Nephi: His Reign and Ministry

Chapter I

The time is the reign of the biblical King Zedekiah of Judah, the last king to reign before the destruction of Jerusalem and the Babylonian exile. The prophet Lehi is commanded by God to prophesy the destruction of the city, and to get out with his family before then and go to a new promised land. His family consists of his wife Sariah and his sons Laman, Lemuel, Sam, and the youngest, Nephi, the author of this book. They are all descendants of the biblical Joseph, son of Jacob, although it’s not stated whether they’re from the half-tribe of Manasseh or the half-tribe of Ephraim.

They journey three days into the wilderness, but have to go back to Jerusalem for something called the “record of the Jews” which is engraved on brass plates in the possession of a guy named Laban. On the first attempt, Laman and Lemuel just go and ask him, but he calls them thieves and threatens to kill them. They try again with the same result. Nephi and the next youngest brother Sam insist that they need to go back again and get the plates, Laman and Lemuel disagree, and there’s a heated argument which ends up with Laman and Lemuel beating Nephi and Sam with rods.

The fight is interrupted by the appearance of an angel, who commands the brothers to stop fighting and go get the plates from Laban. He also tells the older brothers that Nephi has been chosen to rule over them, because of their iniquities. The older brothers continue to argue, but agree to go back to Jerusalem a third time and get the plates, taking the angel’s word that the Lord will deliver Laban into their hands.

Back at Jerusalem, Nephi goes into the city alone at night, and happens across Laban, passed-out drunk on wine. He feels what he believes to be the Holy Spirit commanding him to kill Laban right there, and although he’s reluctant to do it, he beheads Laban with his own sword, takes the plates, and gets out of town. Kind of a wild inversion of the biblical story where David is on the run from King Saul and has an opportunity to kill him, but doesn’t.

The “record of the Jews” turns out to be the five books of Moses, chronicles down to King Zedekiah, and a genealogy of the line of Joseph. Lehi and his family now have access to this for purposes of passing down to their descendants, and are ready to start their journey to the new promised land.

Chapter II

Before they can go to the promised land, it occurs to Lehi that his sons need wives so they can keep their line going. So he sends them back to Jerusalem again to bring the family of a guy named Ishmael along with them because he has daughters.1 Ishmael and his family come along, but on the way back, Laman and Lemuel decide to rebel against Nephi and Sam again. They get half of Ishmael’s family on board and say they want to go back to Jerusalem to stay.

The argument again escalates to the point where Laman and Lemuel tie Nephi up and contemplate killing him, but an angel shows up again and frees him from his bonds. He persuades his brothers to give up their rebellion, and they go back to the camp where Lehi and Sariah are staying.

It turns out Lehi has had a vision while they were gone, and he relates it to his sons. Lehi finds himself in a beautiful land partaking of delicious fruit from a tree. He beckons to his family to come join him. Sariah, Nephi, and Sam come and partake, but Laman and Lemuel do not. He sees multitudes of people trying to follow a straight and narrow path, guided by an iron rod, to come to him in the beautiful land and partake of the fruit, but many are put off the path by various things and lost. Lehi says the vision has made him worried for Laman and Lemuel.

Chapter III

Lehi further prophesies the coming of Jesus Christ and John the Baptist. Nephi is granted interpretation of Lehi’s vision from the previous chapter by the Holy Ghost: the tree is the Tree of Life, the rod of iron is the Word of God, and the multitudes falling away from the path are pretty obvious.

Nephi is then granted his own prophetic vision. He sees Christ, John the Baptist, and Mary the Mother of God, as well as Christ’s birth and crucifixion, and the Twelve Apostles. He sees the writing and compilation of the Bible, and that after the deaths of the Apostles, a false church led by the Devil will arise to remove or obscure the Bible’s teachings. This false church will chase after the pleasures of the world and lead the people astray, but a future revelation will restore the Bible’s teachings and defeat the false church. John the Apostle is also mentioned as writing about the end of the world.

This chapter pretty clearly serves as Joseph Smith’s way of justifying his own church. He and his church are of course the promised restoration of the true teachings of the Bible in this vision of Nephi’s.

Chapter IV

Nephi’s brothers argue amongst themselves as to the meaning of Lehi’s visions. Nephi chastises them for not trusting God, and explains the visions. He compares their family to an olive branch which has been cut off from Israel, but will be grafted back into the true vine after many generations. The brothers are pacified for the moment. Nephi expounds on what Lehi’s vision means about heaven and hell, namely that both are real and that those who are clean go to heaven and those who are filthy go to hell.

Chapter V

Lehi’s sons take the daughters of Ishmael as wives, and the whole family moves out of their camp. They are guided by a fine brass ball with two spindles, which mysteriously appears at the door of Lehi’s tent on the day they are set to leave. The ball seems to guide them better or worse depending on their current level of faithfulness to God.

Nephi breaks his steel bow2 while hunting, and the brothers’ bows lose their springs,3 which means everyone is now going hungry and the brothers start to murmur against Nephi again. They want to kill him, but are quickly brought to repentance and get back on board with the plan.

The journey in the wilderness lasts eight years. The only thing we’re told about the route they take is that they first go south-southeast for a time from their original camp, which was three days from Jerusalem, then turn east. That should put them somewhere in the Arabian peninsula, where going east would march them directly into the Arabian Sea well before eight years had passed, but I guess they navigate around it or something. They end up at a land they call Bountiful, which is next to a great Sea so it must be somewhere on the coast of China.4 During the trip, Ishmael dies, Lehi’s sons have children with their wives, and Lehi himself has two more sons of his own: Jacob and Joseph.5

Next, God commands Nephi to build a ship to cross the Sea to the promised land. The brothers very reasonably point out that Nephi has never built a ship before, but this is just them murmuring against him again. To bring them back on board, Nephi gives a speech where he compares their situation directly to the biblical Exodus, and makes the point that the Israelites back then murmured against God and Moses too, just like the brothers are doing now with Nephi. Of course, they soon see the error of their ways and help build the ship. The ship is built not “after the manner of men,” but in a special way that God shows Nephi.

When the ship is built, the family sets out across the sea. During the voyage, Laman and Lemuel murmur against Nephi again (shocking, I know), even tying him up and threatening to throw him into the sea. A storm lasting three days helps change their mind, and they let Nephi go. After a voyage of many days, they arrive in the promised land. This is America of course, and my assumption is that they have crossed the Pacific Ocean and ended up somewhere on the west coast. They plant seeds and enjoy the bounty of the land. Nephi makes brass plates on which to write the story and teachings of his people for posterity, which presumably end up being the plates Joseph Smith “translates” this story from.

Chapter VI

Nephi teaches his brothers, making more comparisons to the biblical Exodus and the prophecies of Isaiah, and prophesying the great future of their people in the new land.

Chapter VII

More prophecies from Nephi. The tribes of Israel will be scattered. I think he refers to the Babylonian exile and eventual return to Jerusalem before eventually being permanently scattered. There will be a final re-gathering of Israel and defeat of the “abominable church.” The “abominable church” will fight amongst itself, which could be interpreted as talking about the wars of the Reformation. It will ultimately fall and the true people of God will triumph.

Conclusion

Like I said at the beginning, so far it’s not the worst story I’ve ever read. It is very wordy and repetitive.

Several weird oddities and anachronisms show up, like Nephi’s steel bow. During the crossing of the Sea, it is said that the family has a compass on board their ship, which stops working while Nephi’s brothers are in rebellion. I’m not sure if this is supposed to be the brass ball from earlier, but I am fairly certain that the very first proto-compasses didn’t exist until at least the 2nd century BC in China. Nephi (or Joseph Smith) explains this away by saying their compass was “prepared of the Lord.” The brass ball is also completely unexplained.

I probably don’t need to tell anyone how absurd the story is, and how it can’t possibly be true. What’s kind of funny is that you can see Smith preemptively responding to certain criticisms he anticipates people will make about the historicity of this. For example, there’s the compass being “prepared of the Lord,” and the ship being built in a special way shown by God. For the narrative, Smith needs Nephi to cross the whole Pacific Ocean. For that he needs ship technology that was not available in the 6th century BC, so he simply has God inspire Nephi with the necessary knowledge.

Given the absurdity of the story, it is astonishing to me how people in 19th century America apparently believed in it. It’s astonishing how Joseph Smith could have just made it all up. Part of the forthcoming podcast series will dig deep into how people could come to accept this stuff. Hint: I don’t think it’s just because they were stupid, or because Smith was such an effective conman. That’s too dismissive for a sect which has now endured for almost 200 years. I am also aware that this stuff seems absurd to me because I am outside the Mormon faith, and that Christian mythological stories seem equally absurd to people outside my own faith. Stay tuned for much more discussion of this in the podcast series.

For now, the next article in this series will cover the second book in the Book of Mormon, II Nephi.

Wolliver on Substack and his publication, Writings by Wolliver

American Guerrillas: The Complete Series

Border War timeline

Show email: unsung.substack@gmail.com

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Frank Kidd and his publication Pulp West

The Frank and Brady Show and my appearance on it, Episode 10 (w/ guest Jason McGinty): Forrest Carter's Heavy Metal Westerns, Gone to Texas and The Vengeance Trail of Josey Wales

Q&A Livestream

American Guerrillas Bibliography and Acknowledgements

Sam Colt, the Man Who Won the West (referenced at 40:20)

Border War timeline

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Bibliography

The following is the complete list of books and other sources I read or referred to for the series, with a quick sentence or two on each. No MLA formatting or any of that gay shit. These are listed alphabetically by author’s last name, with relevant links. For those interested, I hope you find something that catches your eye for further reading.

I have read most but not all of these in full. I’ll only give brief summaries of what each book is about for the most part, but I’ll make note of the ones that particularly stand out to me as being most worth a read for anyone.

Blackmar, Frank Wilson: The Life of Charles Robinson, the First State Governor of Kansas
Biography of Charles Robinson by a clear free state partisan or maybe just a man of his time.

Brown, John:

Interview in the Charles Town Prison
Transcript of interview between Senator James Mason and John Brown after Brown’s capture following Harpers Ferry.

Letter to Henry Stearns
Autobiographical account of and commentary on Brown’s childhood and early adult life.

Brownlee, Richard S.: Gray Ghosts of the Confederacy: Guerrilla Warfare in the West 1861-1865
Overview of guerrilla warfare on the Kansas-Missouri border.

Carter, Forrest: Josey Wales: Two Westerns
A two-in-one set containing the novels Gone to Texas and The Vengeance Trail of Josey Wales, both of which feature the fictional Missouri bushwhacker Josey Wales. The Clint Eastwood film The Outlaw Josey Wales was based on the first book. These are novels, and are of course fictional, but I referred to the preface in part 11 so I figured I’d put them in here. Both are solid, entertaining western novels, but the second one very much earns an NC-17 rating for a couple of very graphic rape scenes, so be prepared for that if you decide to read it.

Castel, Albert:

Castel is one of my two biggest go-to authors for this period. Anything by him I particularly recommend.

Civil War Kansas: Reaping the Whirlwind (aka A Frontier State at War: Kansas, 1861-1865—these are two editions of the same book under different titles; Civil War Kansas is the more recent edition)
In-depth account of Kansas during the Civil War proper.

General Sterling Price and the Civil War in the West
Biography of Confederate general Sterling Price and his actions in the war.

William Clarke Quantrill: His Life and Times
Biography of Bill Quantrill and account of his guerrilla activities.

with Thomas Goodrich: Bloody Bill Anderson: The Short, Savage Life of a Civil War Guerrilla
Biography of Bloody Bill Anderson and account of his guerrilla activities.

Collins, Robert: Jim Lane: Scoundrel, Statesman, Kansan
Sympathetic biography of Kansas Senator and jayhawker James Henry Lane.

Crowe, Clint: Caught in the Maelstrom: The Indian Nations in the Civil War, 1861-1865
Overview of the involvement of the Indian Nations in the war, especially the Cherokee and Creek.

Dyer, Robert L.: Jesse James and the Civil War in Missouri
Brief overview of the Civil War in Missouri, with emphasis on Jesse James and his postwar gang members, moving on into their postwar outlaw careers. This book is only 75 pages long and stylistically reads kind of like it was written for children, but it has decent information on the James gang. However the stuff about Bleeding Kansas, the leadup to it, and the leadup to the war itself is oversimplified to the point of being wrong.

Fellman, Michael: Inside War: The Guerrilla Conflict in Missouri during the American Civil War
Overview of guerrilla warfare in Missouri. This is another book that I cannot recommend enough. It is indispensable for its detailed account of the on-the-ground perspective of average Missourians trying to make their way in the middle of total societal collapse—a SHTF scenario if you will. Not the easiest book to read because it’s not a narrative history, but packed with good information.

Fleming, Thomas: A Disease in the Public Mind: A New Understanding of Why We Fought the Civil War
Tracing of the history of the North-South divide, the slavery issue, and the abolitionist movement from before the founding through the Civil War. Highly recommended for understanding why the slavery issue couldn’t be solved peacefully in America.

Foote, Shelby: The Civil War: A Narrative
Three-volume reference, overview, and narrative of the entire Civil War consisting of:

• Volume 1: Fort Sumter to Perryville

• Volume 2: Fredericksburg to Meridian

• Volume 3: Red River to Appomattox

This post isn’t a review of all these books, but I can’t let this opportunity pass without highly recommending that everyone read Shelby Foote’s trilogy. It is truly one of the great works of American literature. Some have called it the American Iliad, and I have to agree with them. It is one-of-a-kind. If you don’t read anything else on this list, read this. Get the boxed set.1

Gardner, Mark Lee: Shot All to Hell: Jesse James, the Northfield Raid, and the Wild West's Greatest Escape
Detailed account of the James-Younger Gang’s 1876 raid on Northfield, Minnesota and its fallout.

Goodrich, Thomas

Goodrich is my other biggest go-to author for this period and I wholeheartedly recommend all of his books listed here as well. Bloody Dawn is probably his best, followed by War to the Knife. Black Flag and War to the Knife can both feel a little bit choppy and disconnected, but their greatest strengths are the wealth of quotes from firsthand sources.

Black Flag: Guerrilla Warfare on the Western Border, 1861-1865
In-depth account of Transmississippi guerrilla warfare, with lots of firsthand accounts.

Bloody Dawn: The Story of the Lawrence Massacre
In-depth account of Quantrill’s August 1863 raid on Lawrence, Kansas.

War to the Knife: Bleeding Kansas, 1854-1861
In-depth account of the territorial period, with lots of firsthand accounts.

with Debra Goodrich: The Day Dixie Died: Southern Occupation, 1865-1866
Overview of the cultural, economic, and military state of the occupied South immediately after the war.

Gray, Thomas R.: The Confessions of Nat Turner
Recording of Turner’s firsthand account of his rebellion while awaiting trial and execution.

Gregg, William with Beilein, Joseph M.: William Gregg’s Civil War: The Battle to Shape the History of Guerrilla Warfare
War memoir of William Gregg, lieutenant of Quantrill, with commentary from Beilein.

Horwitz, Tony: Midnight Rising: John Brown and the Raid that Sparked the Civil War
Biography of John Brown, in-depth narrative of the Harpers Ferry raid.

Hulbert, Matthew Christopher: The Ghosts of Guerrilla Memory: How Civil War Bushwhackers Became Gunslingers in the American West
Overview of the connection between Confederate/Missouri guerrillas and postwar outlaws and gunslingers, with emphasis on historiography and public perception of bushwhackers over the years since the war.

McCorkle, John with Barton, O.S.: Three Years with Quantrill: A True Story Told by his Scout
War memoir of John McCorkle, lieutenant of Quantrill, with commentary from Barton.

Melville, Herman: The Portent (1859)
Poem about John Brown’s execution.

Mildfelt, Todd: The Secret Danites: Kansas’ First Jayhawkers
Chronicle of militant abolitionist secret society, reconstructed from the writings of Danite Charles Leonhardt.

Monaghan, Jay: Civil War on the Western Border, 1854-1865
Single-volume reference/overview of Bleeding Kansas and the Transmississippi theater, and a classic for this part of the war. A bit light on details, but very entertaining and well worth a read for a high-level overview of everything that happened in Kansas, Missouri, Arkansas, and the Indian Territory before and during the war.

Noll, Mark A.: The Civil War as a Theological Crisis
Overview of religious and theological opinions on scripture and Divine Providence, how they contributed to the war, and how they reflected deeper issues with the particular American brand of Protestantism.

Oates, Stephen B.: The Fires of Jubilee: Nat Turner’s Fierce Rebellion
Detailed account of Nat Turner’s Rebellion in 1831, how it was influenced by the institution of slavery, and how it shaped the state of Virginia in the decades before John Brown’s raid.

Phillips, William Addison: The Conquest of Kansas by Missouri and Her Allies: A History of the Troubles in Kansas, From the Passage of the Organic Act Until the Close of July, 1856
Contemporary history of initial Kansas settlement, by a free state partisan.

Redpath, James: The Public Life of Capt. John Brown
Hagiography of John Brown by contemporary abolitionist partisan correspondent.

Renehan, Edward J.: The Secret Six: The True Tale of the Men Who Conspired with John Brown
Account of John Brown and his exploits, with emphasis on the Secret Six: Gerrit Smith, Franklin Sanborn, Theodore Parker, Samuel Gridley Howe, George Luther Stearns, and Thomas Wentworth Higginson.

Sedgwick, John: Blood Moon: An American Epic of War and Splendor in the Cherokee Nation
Deep history of the Cherokee from pre-Revolution to post-Civil War, revolving around John Ross, Major Ridge, and the conflict between their parties over removal and beyond.

Settle, William A.: Jesse James Was his Name: Or, Fact and Fiction Concerning the Careers of the Notorious James Brothers of Missouri
Biography of the James brothers, mainly their postwar outlaw activities and the legends surrounding them.

Speer, John: The Liberator of Kansas: Life of James H. Lane
Favorable contemporary biography of Jim Lane by his friend and political ally.

Steele, Phillip W.: Jesse and Frank James: The Family History
History of the extended James family.

Stiles, T. J.: Jesse James: Last Rebel of the Civil War
This book is a liberal social and political commentary on Civil War and Reconstruction Missouri, lying about being a Jesse James biography. It is by far the worst book on this list, and it actually made me angry. The further in I got, the worse it got. It’s dripping with retarded liberal/feminist/antiracist/presentist assumptions about the South, slavery, Missouri, and women’s rights. Stiles even shoehorns in anti-gun rhetoric somehow. There were sections where I had to call him a retard in marginalia every page or two just to keep my blood pressure at an acceptable level. This book also suffers from an overabundance of cOnTeXt. I picked it up because I wanted to read about Jesse James, as the title told me I’d be able to. I didn’t need a detailed history of his father, mother, their household slaves, and the inciting events of Bleeding Kansas and the Civil War. There’s like 50 other books that I can and have read if I want to know about that stuff, and they’re all way less retarded than this one. If you’re going to give me that history though, at least mention the important events. To Stiles, the manner in which Zerelda James brined her fucking pork was apparently important enough to put in this book, but the burning of Osceola by the Lane Brigade was not. Seriously, he doesn’t mention that even once, not even when talking about the bushwhackers’ motivations for sacking Lawrence in 1863. Of this almost 400-page book, maybe 50 pages are devoted to Jesse James or his gang directly; the rest is exhaustive commentary on every political and military thing going on at the time. The snide shots at Thomas Goodrich in the endnotes don’t help either. Just tell me about Frank and Jesse. You retard.

Sorry, I got a little mad.

Sutherland, Daniel E.: A Savage Conflict: The Decisive Role of Guerrillas in the American Civil War
Overview of guerrilla warfare across all theaters of the Civil War.

Thoreau, Henry David: A Plea for Captain John Brown
Essay based on a speech by Thoreau at Concord, Massachusetts, October 30, 1859.

Warde, Mary Jane: When the Wolf Came: The Civil War and the Indian Territory
History of the Five Civilized Tribes (Cherokee, Choctaw, Chickasaw, Muscogee/Creek, Seminole) from around the Indian Removal Act through their involvement in the Civil War.

Whittier, John Greenleaf: Burial of Barber
Poem about the death of Thomas Barber, killed in a brief gunfight during the Wakarusa War.

Younger, Cole: The Story of Cole Younger, by Himself
War memoir of Cole Younger, lieutenant of Quantrill and member of the postwar James-Younger gang. Very much a collection of tall tales.

Acknowledgements

I have a few people to thank for their help with this project:

• Fr Nikolai Meyers: Parish priest of Ss Peter and Paul Orthodox Church in Topeka, Kansas, and my spiritual father. Provided valuable insight and guidance on any questions I had pertaining to the religious aspects of the story, and more importantly on life in general. I referred to his History of Christianity lecture series in part 1.

• : Friend of several years, longtime member of my military history nerd book club, and my favorite Yankee. Knows more about the Civil War than anyone else I’ve ever met, and has visited every battlefield in America (that’s only a slight exaggeration). Provided valuable book recommendations. Lives in my head and lets me know when I’m getting too gung-ho about the Confederacy or bushwhackers.

• : Fellow Substacker who has given the most detailed feedback on the series I’ve heard. Will be co-hosting the live Q&A. Has his own ongoing epic project.

• , , , , , and , and Thomas Millary for having me on their shows and helping spread the word. Frank also sent me down the rabbit hole of reading bushwhacker memoirs, and got me to read Forrest Carter’s Gone to Texas again.

• My wife for listening to my stories all the time.

• : Retired police detective friend who loves talking about outlaws, Indians, and the Old West generally. Has a collection of historical firearms, and gives reports on his practical experiments with all the firearm-related stuff I talk about on the show. Also makes handmade tobacco pipes.

• All of my paid subscribers and donors: I won’t name you all, but it’s awesome to get paid to do this, even if it’s just a few bucks a month. Helps offset the cost of books.

And forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive those who trespass against us.

— The Lord’s Prayer

I am not a smart man. I am a bit of a dummy sometimes, and the way you can tell I’m a dummy is that I sometimes look at YouTube comment sections.

My whole shtick here on Substack since I started has been talking about Kansas and Missouri in the Civil War, and John Brown is one of the central figures in Kansas prior to the war. I’ve read a whole lot about the period at this point, and I don’t mean to brag but I probably know more about John Brown and Bleeding Kansas than any person who has ever commented on a YouTube video.

Every once in a while, the algorithm graces my feed with a normie history slop video about John Brown. When this happens, I almost can’t help myself, and I look at the comments. It’s like the proverbial slow-motion train wreck that you can’t look away from. Like a moth to a flame, I am drawn to the worst, dumbest people on the internet.

The first problem is that every video on YouTube about John Brown is normie slop that might as well have been churned out by an LLM, and I’d probably accuse them of that if they weren’t old enough to have been uploaded in the pre-LLM before-times. Here are a few examples:

• Extra History - This is the first one in a multi-part series, but I haven’t bothered watching any beyond the first.

• Mr. Beat - Not to be confused with Mr. Beast.

• Biographics - This is that Simon guy who is the spokesman for like 50 different channels and they all upload every single day.

• Atun-Shei Films - This guy is the absolute worst libtard Civil War commentator on YouTube. I actually haven’t watched this video because I can’t stand looking at his stupid face or listening to his stupid voice, so what I’ll say about these videos in general may or may not apply to this one; I can’t say for sure. I had to put it on the list to give myself an excuse to call him retarded.

None of them have put any thought at all into the events of Brown’s life, and they all tell the standard story about Brown’s career, which goes something like this:

1. He was born in 1800 and became an active abolitionist sometime in the 1830s or 1840s.

2. He fought for the free-state cause in Kansas against the dastardly Missouri Border Ruffians in the late 1850s.

   1. He might have gone a little too far at the Pottawatomie Massacre in 1856. This may or may not be mentioned, depending on the video.

   2. He freed slaves from Missouri during this time.

3. He raided the Federal arsenal at Harpers Ferry in 1859 in a failed attempt to start a slave revolt.

4. His execution turned him into a symbol for the abolitionist cause in America, and became one of the inciting events of the Civil War.

5. He fought for a good cause but maybe he went too far. Was he a hero or a terrorist? When is political violence justified? You decide!

The purpose of this article is not to dissect this story; I’ve already done that in my podcast (episodes 2, 3, and 4 focus on him, particularly 2 and 4). What I want to do here is dissect one comment that always shows up infinity times in the comment sections of every one of these videos:

John Brown only killed slave owners!

— Retarded YouTube commenters everywhere

I admit the title of this article is a bit of a bait. If you’re a John Brown fan who clicked on it because you thought I was going to sing his praises, surprise! Welcome to far-right Chudstack. Take your coat off and stay awhile. I’m sorry I tricked you, but it’s for your own good. You might learn something.

There are two main problems with this comment, which we’ll tackle in order:

1. It’s not even true.

2. Even if it was true, it would still be monstrous to think it justifies Brown’s crimes.

Let’s get started.

It’s Not Even True

This is the easier one to show, so we’ll start with it. No, John Brown did not “only kill slave owners”.

In my opinion, his most heinous and inexcusable crime isn’t even the one people like to talk about the most (the Harpers Ferry raid). It’s the Pottawatomie Massacre. The Pottawatomie Massacre sometimes isn’t even mentioned in these slop videos about John Brown, which is insane, but not actually very surprising if I think about it.

On the night of May 24-25, 1856, John Brown and seven followers pulled five men out of their cabins along Pottawatomie Creek in Kansas Territory and brutally hacked them to death with swords. The followers were Brown’s sons Owen, Frederick, Salmon, and Oliver; his son-in-law Henry Thompson; and two other members of the Pottawatomie Rifles, James Townsley and Polish Jew Theodore Weiner.

The victims were James Doyle and his two oldest sons William and Drury, Allen Wilkinson, and William Sherman. Not one of these men owned slaves, had ever owned slaves, or ever planned to own slaves. As far as anyone knows, there was not even any personal beef between Brown, his followers, and any of the victims. These men were killed because they were Southerners, and supported the proslavery party in Kansas. The Doyles may have even been more sympathetic to the free state party; it’s hard to know for sure.

This massacre came at a time when Kansas Territory was a powder keg waiting to explode into violence between free state and proslavery settlers, but there hadn’t been much open political violence yet. The first “political” killing in the territory was the murder of free stater Charles Dow by proslavery settler Franklin Coleman, but in reality it was much more likely a personal beef than a political killing. It was spun into a political killing by the free state press, and touched off the Wakarusa War in November-December of 1855. That ended in an armed standoff between Missouri militia and free state militia outside Lawrence, without an actual battle.

The most proximal cause of the Pottawatomie Massacre was the “sack” of Lawrence by Missouri and proslavery Kansas militia on May 22, 1856, two days prior to the massacre. I put “sack” in scare quotes because it was pretty tame as sacks of cities go; the Free State Hotel and the home of free state leader Charles Robinson were burned, a couple newspaper offices were ransacked, and some stores were looted. The only human casualty was a proslavery militiaman accidentally killed by debris falling from the burning hotel.

Brown had heard that Missouri militia were marching on Lawrence and was on his way with the Pottawatomie Rifles to help defend the town. While en route he heard he was already too late and the town had been sacked, and his rage over this is what precipitated the massacre. None of the victims had anything to do with the sack. They couldn’t possibly; they were too far away. Brown targeted them because they were on the wrong political team.

One of Brown’s own sons (John Jr., who was asked to go along on the massacre trip but declined) later wrote that the killings were meant to “cause a restraining fear” in the proslavery party within Kansas Territory. In other words, it was explicit political terrorism by the most basic definition.

What the massacre actually did was to touch off the Kansas powder keg. It doubled the political body count in the territory up to that point, and led to the summer of 1856 being the most violent period in Kansas up until the Civil War proper.

He “only killed slave owners” though.

Let’s move on to Harpers Ferry.

I’ve argued on my podcast that the 1859 raid was not actually meant to succeed in starting a slave insurrection, but was meant to make Brown himself a martyr for abolitionism. But whether you accept that interpretation or not, anyone want to guess who the first casualty of the raid was?

At the railroad bridge over the Potomac River, Brown’s men took the night watchman hostage. A train pulled into the station in the wee hours of the morning on October 17, 1859. It would need to cross the bridge to continue its trip, but someone had already reported unknown armed men on the bridge.

Heyward Shepherd, a free black man who worked as a baggage master at the train station, was in the party that went to investigate. Brown’s men told them to halt, but the Harpers Ferry men saw rifles and ran away instead of halting. As they ran, one of Brown’s men fired, and killed Shepherd with a single shot in the back.

As Tony Horwitz writes in his book Midnight Rising:

John Brown’s campaign to liberate slaves had claimed as its first casualty a free black man, shot down while defying the orders of armed whites.

I could go on, but I think this demonstrates the point. It is definitely not true to say Brown “only killed slave owners”. It’s not even true to say he only killed people who were proslavery politically.

And look, I can forgive Retarded YouTube Commenter #4129 for not knowing this. We have to manage our expectations, and when dealing with the retarded, we can’t expect them to know things, especially not things that are deliberately obscured by mainstream history eDuCaToRs.

Joking aside, I do think many people just genuinely don’t know this. Because of how John Brown is portrayed, normies think he was just a righteous man ahead of his time who might have gone a little too far with the violence, but what defines “too far” is debatable.

The second problem with the comment is the more important one.

Even if it Was True, it Would Still Be Monstrous to Think it Justifies Brown’s Crimes

Let us play make-believe for a moment. We will imagine that the libtard fantasy is real, and that every single person for whose death John Brown was responsible was a slave owner. We will further imagine that the current mainstream view of slavery as the worst moral evil ever perpetrated by the United States is correct. To be clear, I don’t believe this, but I’m granting as much as possible to the libtard.

Even if all of this were true, the Pottawatomie Massacre was still a monstrous act of evil. Let me explain.

We know slavery is wrong today because our culture has informed us that it’s wrong. Most of us (or at least the ones who grew up in Union states) grew up believing the Union was right and the Civil War was ultimately just because it ended slavery, no matter how muddled the motives for fighting it may have been at the time.

People in John Brown’s time did not have the same understanding of slavery. As we know, the issue was hotly debated at that time and for decades prior and contributed to a whole-ass Civil War. In the Southern states that slave owners hailed from, their cultures informed them (mistakenly) that slavery was a neutral fact of life, or possibly even a positive moral good.

This means that the slave owners Brown killed did not believe they were committing evil by owning slaves. He considered them worthy of death anyway, and if you hold the stance described by the titular comment, that’s what you’re saying as well.

But Jason, you may respond, this is moral relativism! You’re saying slavery was okay back then!

No I’m not. Remember I’m granting all the libtard assumptions about the evils of slavery. It is objectively wrong and always has been, it’s just that we know that now, and people back then didn’t.

The question is, how do we deal with people who are committing unconscious evil? How do we deal with people who commit evil unknowingly?

John Brown’s answer was simple: Kill their asses. Kill them by the millions if need be, and also sacrifice himself, his own children, and millions of the righteous people’s lives to do it too. I am not exaggerating. This is what Brown himself said on the stand during his 1859 trial for treason:

Now, if it is deemed necessary that I should forfeit my life for the furtherance of the ends of justice, and mingle my blood further with the blood of my children, and with the blood of millions in this slave country whose rights are disregarded by wicked, cruel, and unjust enactments, I say, let it be done.

Emphasis added by me.

Now, I think that’s monstrous. There are about a million options on the spectrum between “just let them be” and “kill their asses” for things you could do to address people committing unconscious evil. Brown wasn’t the least bit interested in entertaining any of those.

But maybe you disagree. Maybe you’re just as ideologically committed as Brown was, or maybe you just haven’t thought this through. Okay, let’s follow the implications of this.

In the Lord’s Prayer, when we ask God to “forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive those who trespass against us,” we are asking God to judge our sins the same way we judge other people’s. So I ask, do you think you ever do wrong without knowing it? If not, then I am impressed, and may we mortals all aspire to be as holy as you. If so, do you want to be judged worthy of death and damnation?

Maybe you’re not a Christian and you don’t care about the Lord’s Prayer or God’s judgment. Fine. Think about it from a secular angle.

Do you think that the moral system our current society has given you is the perfect, correct one? Or are there some things our culture has taught you are right, which you wholeheartedly believe are right, which actually aren’t? Could there be things we accept now—as Southerners of the early 1800s accepted slavery—which future generations will discover are actually monstrous, as we discovered slavery was monstrous?

If you answer yes to this—and I don’t see how you could answer no, unless you believe current societal standards are perfect, which is crazy—then by your own standard you are judging yourself worthy of being slaughtered by some moral crusader ahead of his time, like John Brown was ahead of his. You are worthy of this because you commit some act of evil that you don’t even know is evil, because your society has taught you that it’s good.

Take one of today’s hot-button issues for example, abortion. Let us assume for the sake of argument that it is objectively a monstrous evil, and that future generations will discover this, even though certain segments of society today accept it as permissible, or even a positive moral good. Let’s say a woman gets an abortion because her circles have taught her it’s okay.

By the same standard that says John Brown was justified in killing slave owners, it would then be perfectly permissible for some radical right-wing crusader to kill such a woman for having an abortion. If you don’t like the abortion example, think of any other thing accepted as good and right by you and your current society, and imagine some future generation discovers the objective truth that it is actually horrifically evil.

If you say John Brown was justified in killing slave owners because they were doing evil, be consistent and accept the entailments too. And then repent.

Do I expect this to convince Retarded YouTube Commenter #4129? No, not really.

At the very least I hope to arm you, dear Chud, with the ammo to deny the truth of this claim entirely in your future engagements with libtards.

The simplest answer to “John Brown only killed slave owners” is “No he didn’t”. But if you have the time and inclination for a longer conversation with the person claiming this, I think the more important discussion is about why he’d still be a monster if he did.