Although mainly exploring ecology as a peripheral issues, some Classic full-length Western mining films address environmental issues stylistically as well as through their narratives. In Anthony Mann’s The Far Country(1955), the landscape is both personified and vilified as an ominous opponent that deserves the destruction caused by miners in the Rockies during the Gold Rush. Jeff Webster (James Stewart) leads a cattle drive to Seattle where he is accused of murdering two of his men. He takes a boat to Skagway, Alaska, where he is arrested for breaking up a hanging and loses his cattle to the sheriff (John McIntire) but is hired by Ronda Castle (Ruth Roman) to serve as point man for her and others heading to Canada for gold and a new dance hall saloon.
Webster steals back his cattle and leaves Ronda and her followers until an avalanche hits them. His only friend, Ben (Walter Brennan), convinces Webster to help them, if only half-heartedly. But after Ben is killed, Webster seeks revenge and battles nature and the corrupt sheriff, who does what he can to steal the miners’ claims. According to Lucia Bozzola, “the film intersperses backdrops and rear projection with location shots, emphasizing the disjunction between Stewart and his surroundings, as he lives by his constant urge to move on rather than integrate himself.” Nature, then, is constructed as an antagonist, but also as Webster’s foil, since he blends in with his surroundings more than he does with a community, even one led by Ronda, his love interest.
The Badlanders (1958), a remake of The Asphalt Jungle (1950), replays the revenge plot in a Western setting, highlighting violence to both human and nonhuman nature. It is 1898 when Peter Van Hook (Alan Ladd) and John McBain (Ernest Borgnine) are released from the Arizona Territorial Prison at Yuma, where they had both been imprisoned because of Cyril Lounsberry’s (Kent Smith) falsified testimony. Although McBain wants a crime-free life as cattle rancher, Van Hook, the Dutchman, brings him and a dynamite expert, Vincente (Nehemiah Persoff) in on a gold heist with Lounsberry as victim. After a series of mishaps, McBain gets that vengeance, and Van Hook escapes with his girl and fellow conspirator, Anita (Katy Jurado). Within this typical revenge plot, however, is a fully timbered underground mine from which Van Hook and his gang plan their heist. With Vincente’s expertise, they plan to get the ore out of the mine by setting their dynamite to explode at the same time that Lounsberry’s miners blow up their tunnel. A deputy stops their plan, but shots of the inner tunnels and exploding dynamite bring home the ecological devastation necessary to bring out the gold.
On the other hand, Sam Peckinpah’s Ride the High Country (1961) establishes a bifurcation between nature and culture that laments the loss of both the wilderness and the values embodied by a wild west. The plot centers on two aging Westerners, Steve Judd (Joel McCrea), an ex-lawman and Gil Westrum (Randolph Scott), a wild west performer riding to escort a gold shipment from a mining town, the town of Coarse Gold, which looks as coarse as its name. Gil Westrum (Randolph Scott) comments ironically on its repulsively polluted appearance as soon as they enter the town: “Lovely place. A beauty spot of nature -- a garden of Eden for the sore in heart and short of cash,” he exclaims. Steve Judd (Joel McCrea), his partner, replies only that “We didn't come here to admire the scenery.”
The scenery in the lifeless gold camp contrasts dramatically with the aging but still virile and untamed high country landscape. Both Judd and Gil seem connected with this untamed West, and like the high country, they too are waning. Judd’s death at the end of the film parallels the death of the landscape, but Gil carries on the wild western values Judd embodies. The film seems to suggest that even though the wild west is dying, its ideals will live on, at least for a little while. The film, though, makes a powerful environmental statement about humans’ impact on the natural world with the contrasts it emphasizes between the mountains and the town that destroys them—visually and through the brief dialogue between Gil and Judd.
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