What follows is a guest post by John Bullard.  Take it away, John.  And by the way, there are spoilers.  You have been warned.

In Part One, we began to examine the historical incidents and people from Texas history that Howard used in creating his story, “Beyond the Black River”, hereinafter abbreviated as BBR, grounding the tale as a story about the settling of Texas and not about the American Colonists fighting with the Eastern First Nations. We saw that Howard was particularly interested in the history of the settlement of Comanche lands in Central and North Central Texas by Anglo settlers, and started using the long years of conflict as the foundation for his creating his Conan story of “Beyond the Black River”. He used the general geography of the Texas lands bounded by the Trinity and Brazos rivers and transposed it into the woodland setting of the story bounded by the Thunder and Black rivers. Finally, it was shown that Howard used the actual incident of the destruction of Fort Parker by the Comanche and Kiowa in 1836 as the destruction of the fictional Fort Tuscelan in “Beyond the Black River”. Now, we will look at some of the peoples and stories of Texans fighting for survival against the Comanches who were waging their own war to keep their lands. Continue reading →

What follows is a guest post by John Bullard.  It is the first of three parts and contains spoilers for Robert E. Howard’s “Beyond the Black River”.

Weird Tales, May 1935, first installment of “Beyond the Black River”

Robert E. Howard’s Conan story, “Beyond the Black River” is considered to be one of his best stories by his fans. It tells of an attack by Howard’s favorite historical peoples, the Picts, against the encroaching colonization of the Aquilonians on the Picts’ deeply forested land between the Thunder River to the East, and the Black River to the west in his fictional Hyborian world setting. It is well-known that Robert E. Howard used historical events, people, places, and the stories of people he knew to help inspire his writing, giving his stories a grounding in realism that stories just made up from whole cloth may sometimes lack. In “Beyond the Black River”, Howard used his knowledge of Texas’s history and people, as well as his family’s history, to make the story as realistic as possible in a fantasy setting. Continue reading →