American Frontier Liberty (eBook)

INTRODUCTION

A few things you need to know

Definition of Fillyosofy: the author’s opinion (bias)

Fillyosofy is my cowboy word for philosophy, only a fillyosofy is better because instead of coming from intellectual thinking it comes out of down to earth rock-hard experience in the Old Cowboy School of Hard-knocks. (a filly is a young female horse, thus fillyosofy alludes to horse-sense, which is also better than philosophy). Working on ranches either knocks all the sense out of you or knocks some into you. I’ll let you judge which you think I received.

Customary Law – Technically Called Consuetudinary Law

“In contrast with the statute, customary law may be said to exemplify implicit law. . . A custom is not declared or enacted, but grows or develops through time. . . Though we may be able to describe in general the class of persons among whom the custom has come to prevail as a standard of conduct, it has no definite author. . . There is no authoritative verbal declaration of the terms or the custom; it expresses itself not in a succession of words but in a course of conduct.” Lon L. Fuller, Anatomy of the law 71 (1968). Black’s Law Dictionary Tenth Edition, Bryan A. Garner, Editor in Chief. This shows evidence that the legal system recognizes customary law.

As stated in the definition, we had a general class of persons in the form of homesteaders, and we did have a standard of conduct in our customs and traditions. We had no written expression of our law. We never spoke of our customs and traditions as law. As is often the case, we were not aware customs and traditions are accepted as a form of law. Though it is a very different form of law. Government made law is externally enforced upon people. Customary law is internally enforced by each individual upon himself by his own choice. Customary law grows naturally out of the hearts of any group of people who desire to live together peacefully.

Customary law is also the foundation of self-governing. The more people self-govern by customary law, the less need they have for external laws, rules, regulations, police, lawyers and judges. It is important to recognize that customary law must be tailored to the needs of whatever community it serves. In my case it was a community of homestead livestock ranchers. It is amazing how well our customs and traditions worked for us. Complicating the application of our customary law is the fact that we were not a homogenous community. There were Irish, English, Germans, Scandinavians, Black Americans, Native Indians, and Basques (My father’s people). We had a hodgepodge of customs, traditions and principles from all over the world. We had no religious practice of any kind. We were a totally secular community. But I think we did a good job of integrating all these cultures, and races. During the entire history of the community there was only one murder committed. It was not a racial or cultural murder. It involved a love triangle.

As you read through the book you will be able to understand how it all comes together. The most important force for good was that we needed each other as neighbors for our very survival.

Unlike city life, where neighbors may be only inches or feet apart, we were miles apart. We were anywhere from one or two miles to forty or fifty miles apart. The nearest year-round inhabited home to the east of our ranch was 40 miles.

In this book, I am codifying or writing and organizing into categories the customs, traditions and principles that made up our customary law. For more about customary law see Chapter 5.

Fillyosofy: Customary law did more to keep the peace on the frontier than the Colt revolver and the Winchester repeating rifle. Sadly, however, history has completely overlooked this law which is far more effective than government made statutory laws. Customary law of the frontier is imbedded in the stories told by the pioneers but can only be seen if the reader understands that the peacekeeping customs and traditions depicted in the stories are the natural customary law of the people.

Grandma and Grandpa

The story of my paternal grandparents is a story of both pioneering and homesteading. They started their life together in the pioneer era of the Madeline Plains. They crossed the Plains (The Madeline Plains), in the year 1909 with a team of horses and an uncovered wagon. With them were their first two children, my father Thomas Jefferson, age four, and his younger sister Amelia Serina, age three.

Grandpa, Eugenio Garate came to America as a Basque immigrant in 1885 at the age of 17, full of the American dream to own a little land and live in the land of liberty. He had no illusions about it being easy. Typical of Basque immigrants, he started as a sheep herder and worked his way up to a successful life in America, running his own cattle and sheep ranch.

Grandma, Maria Landa, also immigrated to America as arranged by her mother in the old country, and an uncle in America, Baptiste Alsaga. Uncle Baptiste and Grandpa knew each other and out of that acquaintance came the union of Grampa and Gramma in 1905.

The Basque people have always held a deep reverence for liberty, and for America. They were instrumental in its discovery by Columbus, and in settling the new world under the King and Queen of Spain. The Basques had settled in the western Pyrenees mountains long before any other settlers entered what is now known as Europe. They had been sailing the seas out of the Bay of Biscay since ancient times. A Basque family owned the Santa Maria, Columbus’ flagship, and Basque sailors were part of the crew. After the U.S. Constitution was ratified, the Basques dubbed the United States The Promised Land. The Basque people have a customary law of liberty that has survived for hundreds of generations. It is similar to America’s common law.

My experience with Basque liberty and American frontier liberty has given me a powerful passion for liberty that is deep in my blood and in my bones and my DNA.

Liberty

In the early days of America, the word liberty was in everyone’s minds and on everyone’s lips. There are many definitions for liberty, and some are conflicting. As I write about liberty, I will to the best of my ability define precisely what liberty means in each context where I use it.

Here is one way to concisely define our frontier liberty: The right to be free from government and the right to do as you please with the obligation to be a good neighbor, be honest with your neighbors, do your share in the community, and teach your children to respect the rules.

Freedom from government is recognized as a form of liberty as stated in Black’s Law Dictionary. It certainly was a big part of our frontier liberty on the south end of the Madeline Plains. The other important part of our liberty may be stated this way. Liberty is the freedom to do as you please so long as you don’t infringe on your neighbor’s liberty. Your neighbor has the same condition of liberty. This might seem easy since neighbors lived miles apart. But cattle ranching involves large swaths of land, meaning that most of our land adjoined a neighbor’s property. We had real property in common, and we had mobile property in the form of livestock which did not understand or respect borders. Here is where our liberty got complicated.

I am not addressing most of the definitions of liberty here. Many will be covered in the two liberty books following this one. In this book we are addressing mostly American frontier liberty.

U.S. Constitutional Liberty

Simple definition: “Freedom from an all-encompassing central federal government by granting only a few certain powers to that government as enumerated in the U.S. Constitution and its amendments. Other powers are reserved for the States and the people.” Cited from Constitutional Liberty vs. Government Out of Bounds – American Liberty Book 3, Appendix IX, by Jon Garate.

U.S. Constitutional liberty is dependent on we-the-people self-governing from the bottom up. Customary law and the higher laws of Christianity are the keys to the successful operation of our liberty-protecting Constitution. Furthermore, I want to point out the importance of understanding customary law as essential to understanding portions of the U.S. Constitution. Tradition is a part of customary law, and tradition plays a very important role in the United States legal system under the Constitution. U.S. Constitutional liberty and the part that tradition plays will be fully covered in my Liberty Books 2 and 3.

See more about my books at https://americanlibertybooks.us/

Fillyosofy. No matter how you practice true liberty it takes a lot of hard work involving the nature of us humans, who can be quite quarrelsome. As you will see in the book, conflict resolution and problem solving were very important aspects of our customary law.

Warning! Liberty ain’t for sissies. Liberty is hard work. Some people would rather be ruled over by a controlling government and spend their lives complaining about it. If you are in this group, I hope reading this book will change your thinking and you will join with...