The Burned Men
The children of California, like children anywhere, can be naughty from time to time. Californian parents, like all parents, tell stories to keep them in line, and if nothing else California is a land of rich stories. There are the Scientologist standards, of course, tales of fiery death in volcanoes. There are the old Hollywood tales that have passed into the cultural consciousness, of killers and the woods and monsters from beyond the stars. Perhaps the most feared spooktales are those of the Burned Men.
Though most would like to think that the Burned men are nothing but legends, they were once very real. During the California Warring period (the so-called ‘Time of Four Governors’), these raiders were among the many that managed to penetrate the Republic’s western frontier and wreak havoc. It was the Burned Men that first struck fear of the Nevadan into the Californian heart when they razed Redding to the ground and its ruling family with it.
It was not just the Californians that learned to fear the Burned Men; all across northern Nevada and into the High Desert, they were reviled and despised. Indeed, savage and civilised alike feared the strange customs of the Burned Men.
The Burned Men originated in the north-eastern corner of Nevada, clinging to edges of the Black Rock Desert. These were offshoots of the New Age movement that emerged in the vortexes of New Mexico and Arizona. They did not heed the calls from the better established communities, instead flocking to an ancient site of pilgrimage. Of course, like many of the forgotten vortexes of the southwest, it quickly became clear that the site chosen was not viable for society. The celebrants instead dispersed to the surrounding canyons and deserts, keeping ties with one another's but for the most part living simple hunter-gatherer lives based around principles of radical inclusion, radical self reliance, and radical self expression.
Then, slowly, tribals throughout northeastern Nevada began disappearing out of nowhere. For the most part after grieving, tribesmen threw up their hands and attributed it to the supernatural. There was some talk of queer sights seen from the edge of the Black Rock Desert, but these were largely dismissed as a fantasy.
How exactly the Burned Men rose is mysterious: New Age clerics wrote of the “Last Burning Man” ceremony after the declaration of the Age of Aquarius, but those same scribes claimed that the people there quickly starved, the survivors mostly melding into the surrounding tribes and imparting little of their (heretical) new age knowledge. Possibly this was just rhetorical, as the scribes also tend to attribute their decline to the gods and spirits. This leaves open the possibility that the beliefs they passed on at least some of their beliefs to the tribes they lived in.
An obscure Oregonian tradition claims that the revival was launched by a New Mexican medicine man called Sunshine Osiris, though no medicine men by that name are recorded in the New Mexican registry. Regardless, it would seem that the tribes around the Black Rock Desert united in a confederacy. they oppossed slavery, sexism, and hierarchies more generally. They attacked neighboring tribes, killing the chiefs, the priests, and the warriors, while offering a choice to the more lowly members of society: to join the radical freedom of the Burned Men, or to be given in offering to their libertine gods in great burning effigies.
Many chose the former, and so the tribe grew and grew, conflicting with the Beelemites at their maximum extent. They stormed the California itself, burning the governor in Redding alive. The tribe was ultimately brought down by a confederation of Nevadan tribes and their own overextension, but few will forget the legend of the Burned Men.