It’s time to update the Western genre with Naturalist Westerns
The US film industry regularly puts out movies that take place in the 19th century. These include many versions of Huckleberry Finn, many stories about Abraham Lincoln, many stories about the Alamo and Texas, great flops like Heaven’s Gate, TV franchises like Bonanza. One compiler lists 2,696 Hollywood-made Westerns made between 1930 and 1954. Almost all took place in the 1800s.
None of them present the natural world accurately, at least none that are suppose to happen before the annhilation of buffalo and passenger pigeon, in the large regions they populated. It’s estimated there were about 5 billion passenger pigeons in North America through most of the 19th century. J.J. Audobon, traveling in 1813 noted 163 flocks, each with hundreds of birds, passed overhead in 21 minutes. “The light of noon-day was obscured as by an eclipse; the dung fell in spots, not unlike melting flakes of snow.” This one species’ population back then was about the same as the total population of all the birds that overwinter in the US today. A single flock was sighted in 1866 that was about a mile wide and 300 miles long.
A movie that takes place back then should show this. Current technology makes it feasible.
These weren’t the only birds of great number, blotting out the sun. Vast numbers of hawks covered the skies of the midwest. And of course there were the bison. There were 40 million in 1830, 35 million in 1840 … by 1870, 5 million and in 1880, 395,000. In 1873, a railway engineer said he could walk 100 miles along the Santa Fe railroad right-of-way by stepping from one bison carcass to another.
Why don’t movies show this?
In California today, fires rage. Would a movie about rural California, circa 2021, ignore the smoke-filled sky? Back in the 1870s the vast forests of the midwest were slashed. Bigger timber was removed, the rest left … to burn. In 1871 firestorms raged across Illinois, Michigan, Wisconsin, and Indiana, far greater than those in California today.
Maybe video games can do it. But I think it deserves a reboot of the Western genre, called naturalist Westerns. They can have story lines about killers and lovers, but overhead, underfoot, and out the window, the natural world thunders by. This is how people experienced reality.
The story of how that reality was eliminated is itself important. Texas has many stories, like the time, once bison had mostly disappeared, the state legislature tried to protect them. They were dissuaded by General Sheridan, who wanted the animals exterminated so Indians could be forced into farming.
By 1884 there were about 325 wild buffalo left in the US, 25 in Yellowstone. Congress had to send the army into Yellowstone to protect them. When the 1st Airborne went to Little Rock, it wasn’t the first time the army had been used.
