Into The West

My name is Greg, and I’m a Westernaholic. My recreational fixes include The Western Encyclodpedia and Ramon Adams’ dictionary, Western Words.

As long as I can remember, I’ve been addicted to Westerns. While raised on TV oaters and movies, my first obsession was the Lewis and Clark expedition, and I read Clark’s journals when I was 8 or 9. I reproduced, by hand, a wall-sized map of the expedition, “aged” the paper and decoupaged it onto an enormous piece of blow-torched plywood.

The first real literary rush I got was from Zane Grey’s Rogue River Feud, and when I later read A. B. Guthrie's The Big Sky, I didn’t see how Western literature could get any better.

“Raindrops Keep Fallin’ on My Head” aside, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid fueled my cinematic imagination until Jeremiah Johnson came along; and then the Real Deal came to TV: James Michener’s Centennial. I would later be consumed with the Spaghetti Westerns of Sergio Leone, thrill to the opening sequence, humor and characterizations of Silverado, and cheer when Eastwood’s masterpiece Unforgiven won Best Picture; but time and again I have returned to the first seven episodes of Centennial to relive the fictional tale of Pasquinel and McKeag.

Now, I know I’ve got this addiction, and although I’ve got it mostly under control, I know I’ll always be an addict. I don’t need temptations like Into the West. And I swore I’d resist the temptation this time around. It would have been easy, too, if TNT hadn’t made the series inescapable, running each new episode on multiple nights, and airing the new ones back-to-back with the previous ones. So I have to confess. I’ve indulged again, against my best intentions. I know this isn’t good for me.

The real problem with addictions, of course, is that the addict is never a connoisseur. We’ll watch The Quick and the Dead or read Riders of the Purple Sage as soon as anything else. You all know what I mean, don’t you? So I have to also confess that, once I uncorked Into the West, I’d have kept watching it whether it were a masterpiece or a dog. I’m happy to report, I guess, that it’s somewhere in between.

What made Centennial at least a partial classic was its firm rooting in one story and one locale, more or less. Michener’s fictive setting and characters were able to capture the broad scope of the American West without the interference of an addict’s distracting knowledge of every Western variety and vintage. “Facts” can often get in the way of enjoyment.

Unfortunately, Into the West wants it both ways. Like Centennial, it wants to follow the various members of two loosely-knit families, one white and one Indian; but it also insists on placing these fictional characters at every single major event in the history of the West. This creates five problems.

First, it stretches credibility. How likely is it, for instance, that Jacob Wheeler would ride with Jedediah Smith, later own property on the American River when the gold rush of ‘49 breaks out, and still live to visit the battlefield at the Little Bighorn, where he believes his son has died? As a Viet Nam vet once commented to me about Apocalypse Now, “Sure, everything in there happened at some time. But would one person have seen all that? No.”

Second, the characters aren’t allowed to behave realistically. There isn’t time to allow them that. A perfect example would be the aforementioned visit of Jacob Wheeler to the Dakotas after Custer’s defeat. There he just “happens” to meet two more of the series’ extended white family, Clara and Robert Wheeler, who both have direct connections to Jacob’s family. Yet the three Wheelers never discuss the family, which strikes me as incredibly odd. After all, this series is about family, isn’t it? But the characters themselves aren’t allowed to care much about the issue. Instead, Jacob waxes philosophical about mythologizing and legend-making—which, of course, the series is also about.

Third, the series doesn’t fictionalize events in the way that Centennial did; instead, it attempts to replicate them, and it either can’t or won’t, because it also wants to mythologize. The most glaring example in the series so far is the battle at the Little Bighorn itself. While any recreation of a historic event is bound to have its problems, this battle has been staged so well in other films, including Little Big Man, that Into the West’s version is bound to suffer by comparison. But didn’t the writers, producers and director ever bother to visit or at least study the original site of the battle? It galls to see the climactic fight occur in a bowl on the plains. The voiceover tells us it was a ridge, but the visuals say otherwise.

Fourth, the series tends to lecture and “educate” more than it tells a story. For instance, it’s terribly interesting to see how wheelwrights worked, and to see how a rocker-box was constructed. When a bear nearly removes Jed Smith's scalp and Jacob Wheeler is commanded to stitch it back on, we can say, “Yup, that’s how it was.” It’s even fascinating to contemplate glass-plate photographs being destroyed during an assault on a peaceful Indian village. But such historical lessons, knit loosely together, do not necessarily make good narrative.

Fifth, the series never manages to provide enough focus to the plethora of historical events it covers to make any one of them very satisfying. By contrast, Centenntial made the shrewd move of picking a handful of fictionalized events to portray, such as a cattle drive, and fashioned a self-contained story around each event. Into the West’s approach is more scattershot. An excellent narrative, for instance, could certainly be crafted around the Pony Express or the building of the first cross-continental railroad. But these events are covered piecemeal, merely as part of the over-arching metanarrative, and no real sub-story for either emerges. (The one exception comes in the series’ final episode, which gives almost the entire two hours to the massacre at Wounded Knee. But the exception only proves that series doesn’t know how to do drama right, either.)

Curiously, despite its faults, the series manages to serve up some pretty brave choices. It’s refreshing, for instance, to see the term “Manifest Destiny” surface as an episode title, and the subject of the well-meaning but misguided Indian schools typically gets short shrift in Western portrayals. If only one or more of these subjects had been really well-developed, the series might have risen above the Western equivalent of Boone’s Farm Strawberry Wine.

Many of the performances do rise above the material, however. Irene Bedard as Jacob Wheeler’s half-breed daughter Margaret Light Shines is particularly good, and Rachael Leigh Cook and Warren Kole manage some real chemistry as Clara and Robert. It’s also good to see the underutilized Russell Means, Wes Studi and Graham Greene in the series (though they are again underutilized). The production values of the series are quite high also, and the series mostly gets its chronology right, if these Lakota roam quite a bit bigger territory than they historically did.

When all is said and done, though, the series manages mostly to be merely a so-so meditation on how, a century or more after the events portrayed, our nation has learned to lose or disregard the faith that drove Western expansion while finally learning to respect, even admire, the faith of our native peoples. But is that really progress? I mean, if the faith of the Lakota deserves respect—and yes, it does—why shouldn’t the faith of Jacob Wheeler’s father deserve just as much? Is it only the faith of the unfortunate victims that matters? Why can Loved By the Buffalo miraculously take on the pain of others while white Christians only inflict misery? Mysticism is most appealing, apparently, when it’s someone else’s.

Such an approach may be entertaining; but it is not only bad history, it’s bad sociology. It’s reverse cultural myopia. The mistakes of the past are not best assuaged with new ones. We should be able to have our triple-malt Scotch and drink it too, so to speak.

The really good news for Westernaholics, of course, is that Into the West delivers the fix it needs to. Is it as good as Centennial at Centennial’s best? No. Is it better than Centennial at Centennial’s worst? Oh, yes. Much better.

And will Into the West be the first real Western rush for some future addict? I bet it will. I just bet.