Pale Rider and Sustainability

Instead of focusing only on the classic western conflicts of earlier Westerns—the battle between cattlemen and farmers, or between free range and fenced ranchers—Clint Eastwood’s remake of Shane (1953), Pale Rider (1985), highlights and critiques the consequences of 1850s-1880s’ corporate mining and its continued repercussions into the 1980s, hydraulic mining that must be destroyed through eco-terrorist means, according to the film’s blatant rhetoric. Unlike any other Eastwood Western, Pale Rider provides its audience with a clear vision of the environmental horrors hydraulic mining causes, even including detailed descriptions of the technique, while showing the devastating results of this great engineering feat.

As a way to foreground the horrors of this technique, deep into the film, Josh LaHood, the corporate miner’s son (Christopher Penn), explains how he and his men are able to thrust two hundred pounds of pressure per square inch of water at the side of a mountain, a process called hydraulic mining that was engineered around 1850 to extract as much gold as possible from mountain crevices. Josh describes the process to fourteen-year-old Megan Wheeler (Sydney Penny), a prospector’s daughter, and his detailed description is juxtaposed with images of falling trees and soil devastated by pressurized water shooting out of monitors, the water cannons used to strip the hills of topsoil and growth to make the gold beneath easier to find, all more powerfully presented through Bruce Surtees’ camerawork. 

According to Josh LaHood: 

About three quarters of a mile upstream we diverted half of Cobalt Creek. See, it flows through a ditch along the contours of the slope and ends up about a hundred yards up yonder….It flows into … a three foot pipe and then flows down slope real steep. And then that narrows to a two-foot pipe. And then a one foot pipe. You see all the time that water’s flowing downstream, it picks up speed. And it picks up force by going into the thinner pipes….By the time the water reaches the monitor, I’ve got about 200 pounds of pressure per square inch. I can blast that gravel out of that cliff and then it washes into the bed and then it travels right through the sluice.

While looking at the land around her, Megan tells Josh, “It looks like hell.”  But Josh is only interested in the product of the degradation: “You know I can get 20 tons of gravel a day in this river,” he says. Seconds later, while the audience watches hydraulic monitors shooting water at the cliffs above the Yuba River, Josh attempts to rape Megan, in an obvious parallel to what is happening to the landscape. Josh fails only because Preacher (Clint Eastwood) saves her.

This scene from Pale Rider introduces one of its most important themes: the violent exploitation of the environment and of those most connected to it. Although this theme is prevalent in mining films like North Country (2006) and Silver City (2004), it is missing in any other Eastwood Western. In fact, Pale Rider is the only film directed by Eastwood that focuses blatantly on such an environmentally-packed issue. Pale Rider not only examines how the environment can be exploited, it also takes the time to demonstrate a better way, an alternative to the absolute destruction of large scale corporate mining centered around the fact of hydraulic mining. Just as Preacher saves Megan, the individual miners the LaHoods oppose (“tin pans”) can save the land from the mining baron, LaHood, and halt his environmentally devastating methods using violent eco-terrorist means.

But Pale Rider not only problematizes corporate mining techniques, suggesting that the corporation should be obliterated; it also provides a viable alternative to the consequences of hydraulic mining—individual tin panning in a cooperative community seeking to plant roots and raise families, an alternative that is attainable with the help of eco-terrorism. In contrast to LaHood and his greed for gold, for individual miners like Hull Barret (Michael Moriarty) and Spider Conway (Doug McGrath), “gold ain’t what [they’re] about.” Pale Rider, then, offers a politically charged solution to the environmental destruction threatened by hydraulic mining interests.

This solution in Pale Rider has not received any detailed examination. Extreme eco-terrorist violence drives the ultimate solution offered in Pale Rider, and while it is couched in mythological terms similar to High Plains Drifter (1973), the inclusion of Hull Barret in the mayhem and killing keeps the environmental argument grounded in the here and now and provides for an alternative to the individualist “progressive” model of the Western, as defined by Richard Slotkin in Gunfighter Nation and Regeneration Through Violence. Since Preacher and Hull take a collaborative approach to eco-terrorism; they promote communal sustainable development rather than individual progress like that Slotkin describes.

Instead, the resolution of Pale Rider harks back to The Outlaw Josie Wales (1976) where, according to Slotkin, Josie forgives his enemy with the statement, “All of us died a little in that damn war” (633). It also prefigures the anti-revenge themes in Eastwood’s critically acclaimed Unforgiven (1992) and Mystic River (2003). Although violence does provide “regeneration” (Slotkin’s word) in Pale Rider, it ultimately serves both a working class community and the natural world that sustains it.