America Is Great: From Frontier to the Future
Branding irons still hang in barns across Arizona. Still warm from last week's summer heat, hanging next to ropes and chaps. Always present.
That continuity is the thing I keep coming back to when people tell me it's old-fashioned to say America is great. Maybe it is old-fashioned. I'm fine with that.
The Frontier That Built It
Cattle didn't even belong here originally. Spanish missionaries brought the first herds north into what's now Arizona in the late 1600s, and by the time the United States took over the territory after the Mexican-American War, ranching was already a way of life. The Homestead Act of 1862 threw the doors wide open. A hundred and sixty acres, free, to anyone willing to build something on it.
People came from all walks of life. Families showed up with wagons, a few head of cattle, and not much else. They turned scrubland into ranches that are still running cattle one hundred and fifty years later. The Sierra Bonita Ranch near Willcox has been operating since 1872. The family still does the same work their great-great-grandparents did, on the same dirt.
Open range, barbed wire, brand registries, livestock inspectors riding circuit to keep honest ranchers from getting robbed blind. Every piece of that system got built by people solving the problem in front of them, usually with little help and rarely complaining about it.
The Heritage That Shaped Justice Itself
This is the soil my Harper's Justice series grows out of. Six siblings, an outlaw father, and a hard choice about what to do with the name they inherited. The same frontier that built ranches out of nothing built lawmen out of broken families. Marshals, Rangers, livestock detectives walking into hostile territory to chase down men who thought the law stopped at the county line.
Justice on the frontier was a man riding toward danger because somebody had to, and nobody else was coming.
The Future Still Being Built
Drive through ranch country today, and you'll see solar panels beside hundred-year-old barns. Pickup trucks parked where wagons used to stand. The work looks different. The grit required to do it hasn't changed at all.
That's the real story of this great country, if you ask me. Not a finished thing sitting on a shelf somewhere, but something people keep building, generation after generation, usually with sweat equity. From a Spanish mission herd to a modern cattle operation with a satellite tracking the weather. From an outlaw's children to four lawmen who decided the family name would mean something better.
I'm not interested in pretending this country has no scars. It does. But the freedom to take a hard inheritance and build something worth passing on? That's rare in this world. It's worth saying out loud, even when saying so isn't fashionable.
If that kind of story is your kind of story, the Harper's Justice series follows six siblings doing exactly that in 1890s Arizona Territory. Start with their origin story Ashes and Oaths and ride along as a family built from outlaw blood chooses justice instead.