The American West wasn't the only frontier, just the most famous. In reality the breadth and scope of frontiers throughout history are infinitely more expansive and yet all contain that same flavor of chaos that we all recognize in the Old West.
And recently a new one which had heretofore escaped my attention has been brought to light. And what's more, it is new for almost everyone! Released just this March a gentleman by the name of Victor Zatsepine, we are granted a spectacular glimpse of a heretofore little known frontier region known as the Amur River and its many tributaries which flowed between Eastern Russia and Northern China. It was a wild and sparsely populated area with radical geography and rapidly shifting waterways which defied the expansion of two empires for centuries.
To those familiar with such frontier areas, it has many familiar traits: Bandits on the run from the law, hunters and trappers eking out a living off of the furs of local animals, tiny settlements struggling to survive brutal conditions, native peoples intermingling with strange interlopers and new cultures emerging from the fantastic circumstances of the territory.
This stuff is frontiersman cocaine. In this book I found another entire plane opened to me in the Wild East! Russian Cossacks competing with Chinese migrants, two empires struggling to secure territory amidst icy winters and barbaric terrain. What more could one wish for? Any student of history, territorial expansion, evolution of culture and the frontier will find this book most rewarding.
http://amzn.to/2iqwjuR
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