The Vanishing American (1925) and The Miracle Rider (1935): Pre-World War II Narratives of Environmental Adaptation

Unlike Western literature, Western films tend to focus on Plains Indian tribes, the nomadic tribes in the plains settlers crossed to reach the West, with little distinction between tribes. The films also respond to film history, a history that coincides with political and cultural history of both Hollywood and the United States as a whole. According to Scott Simmon, American Indians were at the center of many early silent westerns, from The Red Girl (1908) to Hiawatha(1913). According to Simmon, “Indians may well have entered American film for the reason they came into the European tradition as a whole: Searching for stories to set in the landscape, pioneer filmmakers stumbled upon ‘Indians,’ the presumed men of nature” (4). Set in Eastern lush forests instead of desert plains, the narratives of these early silent westerns “are set entirely within tribal communities or feature a ‘noble redskin’ as guide or savior to the white hero” (4).

By 1914, however, Simmon asserts, American Indian actors and sympathetic narratives were no longer prominent in westerns at least partly because the “U. S. Army began planning, with some innocence, for America’s entry into World War I by requisitioning horses” (80). According to Simmon, “The subsequent history of Indian images in silent-era Hollywood becomes a story with two paths—one about war, the other about love—neither leading anywhere except Indian death” (81). 

In spite of Simmon’s contention, at least a few westerns highlighting American Indian characters and narratives present a more sympathetic view of a possible comic evolutionary narrative, a narrative of environmental adaptation that reveals the ineffectiveness of a tragic evolutionary path and the intruder pioneers who seek destruction rather than adaptation. Although racially flawed, The Vanishing American (1925) and The Miracle Rider (1935) serve as two western films prior to World War II, which draw on this more sympathetic perspective.

The Vanishing American traces a history of domination of American Indians by pioneering intruders, including that of Booker (Noah Beery) a white Indian agent overseeing a Navajo reservation where he mistreats the Navajo and steals their horses. Nophaie (Richard Dix), an educated Navajo who fought in World War I, is torn between his people and his white teacher, Marion Warner (Lois Wilson), when he returns from the war, and ultimately is sacrificed as he fights against Booker to regain his people’s dignity. Miscegenation is avoided because of Nophaie’s death, but the film’s prologue, especially, foregrounds a history of conquest, one that is lamented even if painted as inevitable in the film.

The Miracle Rider, a Tom Mix serial, opens with a chapter that is also dedicated to the “Vanishing Indian.” The episode provides historical background that bifurcates American Indians willing to adapt to their environment from their white opponents, demonstrating how a tragic evolutionary narrative destroys both American Indians and their hunting grounds. They both valorize a comic evolutionary narrative, one from a silent big budget western perspective, the other from a small budget western serial point of view, but they both also demonstrate the futility of such a valorization.

Dances With Wolves and the Evolutionary Narrative

Hailed as groundbreaking because of its sympathetic portrayal of American Indians, Dances with Wolves (1991) follows a pattern similar to that found in Jeremiah Johnson (1972), where a white American goes native, embracing and in the process co-opting American Indian culture and attitudes toward environmental adaptation. Sherman Alexie calls this “cultural appropriation” a threat to American Indian sovereignty. In the context of Dances with Wolves, such cultural appropriation serves as a threat to the Sioux Indians’ very survival. John Dunbar (Kevin Costner) penetrates the Siouxs’ homes, families, and culture as a brother, but he represents the military that will soon force the tribe’s banishment to the West. Before the film’s end, however, the narrative of environmental adaptation follows an evolutionary pattern: rebellion against and rejection of U.S. culture and movement west, discovering American Indians on the plains, gaining sympathy for Sioux culture and internalizing their ideology, and clashing with the dominant culture they left behind.

For us, the narrative in Dances with Wolves harkens back to Run of the Arrow (1957) in which Pvt. O’Meara (Rod Steiger) leaves the defeated Confederacy, joins the Sioux as an ex-soldier and takes an American Indian wife. Both films reverse the narrative of environmental adaptation by inserting a sympathetic white soldier as protagonist. In both movies, however, this evolutionary narrative fails because white intruders either banish or exterminate the Sioux. In spite of the two soldiers’ initial sympathy for the American Indians that adopt them, intruding pioneers dominate the narrative. As Meeker argues: “No human has ever known what it means to live in a climax ecosystem [in which human and nonhuman nature thrive], at least not since the emergence of consciousness which has made us human. We have generally acted the role of the pioneer species, dedicating ourselves to survival through the destruction of all our competitors and to achieving effective dominance over other forms of life” (162). In Run of the Arrow and Dances with Wolves, on the other hand, the Sioux and the white men they adopt are constructed as thriving members of a climax ecosystem that dissolves only when the pioneers, the cavalry, intervene.

In Run of the Arrow, O’Meara refuses to return home after the Civil War and pledge his allegiance to the Union with whom he had been fighting as a Southerner. He rejects the Union and flees to the West, meeting a tribe of Sioux who adopt him. He marries Yellow Moccasin (Sara Montiel) and lives peacefully with the Sioux until the cavalry begins building a fort on their land. This invasion into the Sioux paradise disturbs the evolutionary narrative O’Meara had been following. In the end, the cavalry defeat the Sioux in battle. O’Meara rejoins the white military and helps defeat his adopted “family.”

          

John Dunbar of Dances with Wolves rejects the civilization of the eastern United States when he asks to be reassigned to a western fort. His major (Maury Chaykin) asks him, “You wish to see the frontier?” And Dunbar answers, “Yes, sir, before it’s gone,” a subtle critique of the destruction in the West and of its resources by white settlers. He then encounters Sioux near his abandoned fort and records his observations in a journal, all reported in his voiceover narration. With each meeting, Dunbar gains more sympathy for the tribe. In one early entry, Dunbar notes, “Nothing I have been told about these people is correct. They are not thieves or beggars. They are not the bogeyman they are made out to be. On the contrary, they are polite guests and I enjoy their humor.”

Before the end of Dunbar’s evolutionary narrative, he has adopted an American Indian worldview. As Kicking Bird (Graham Greene) asserts of Dunbar’s transformation, “I was just thinking of all the trails in this life, there are some that matter most. It is the trail of a true human being. I think you are on this trail, and it is a good one.” Ten Bears (Floyd “Red Crow” Westerman) even tells Dunbar, when Dunbar expresses concern about the cavalry’s hunt for him, “The white man the soldiers are looking for no longer exists. Now there is only a Sioux named Dances with Wolves.”

Ultimately, however, the narrative breaks down because whites, like intruding pioneers, threaten to wipe out the Sioux and their land. The cavalry does find Dunbar and arrest him for desertion, but he escapes and, like the Sioux, vanishes into the wilderness, taking Stands With a Fist (Mary McDonnell) with him. Unlike the Sioux, however, Dunbar and Stands With a Fist are white and can integrate easily into white culture. The Sioux, however, must contend with white men whose numbers are, as Dunbar explains, “like the stars.”

The Greatest Game Ever Played (2005) and the Aesthetics of Grass

The Greatest Game Ever Played (2005) reflects the precise attention to detail expected from Disney. With intricate care, the film recreates a turn-of-the twentieth century context, bringing to life a Massachusetts working class world that features Francis Ouimet’s unlikely 1913 win at the U.S. Open. The film foregrounds Shia LaBeouf as Francis Ouimet first as a boy living across from a golf course in Brookline, Massachusetts where he works as a caddy, and then as a young man working in a retail shop in 1913 but eventually choosing to play for a spot in the U.S. Open. Like earlier golf films, The Legend of Bagger Vance (2005) and Bobby Jones: Stroke of Genius (2004) The Greatest Game Ever Played (2005) precisely reconstructs almost every aspect of the period in which the film is set. The Greatest Game Ever Played (2005) shows us the costumes, cars, houses, and even golf clubs of the period from the 1890s to 1913, but it fails to maintain historical accuracy on two counts: lawns and golf course greens. The Greatest Game Ever Played maintains historical accuracy except when it comes to the grass aesthetic. Such a view of grass is so deeply engrained that we now consider a perfect lawn and golf green natural. 

Director Bill Paxton sees The Greatest Game Ever Played (2005) as a film unlike other golf films, especially The Legend of Bagger Vance and Bobby Jones, Stroke of Genius. Shia LaBeouf, the film’s star (who played Francis Ouimet) claims Paxton told him to “Go watch The Legend of Bagger Vance because that’s exactly what we’re not going to make” (quoted in Murray). According to LaBeouf, “That’s slow and drawn out. That’s somebody filming golf. It’s not somebody in the mind of a golfer filming that” (quoted in Murray). Paxton argues that he was “not doing [our movie] that way. We’re not shooting this as a golf movie. It’s a cowboy [movie], a shootout. It’s not a ball; it’s your life. That’s not a club; it’s your weapon” (quoted in Murray). 

The Greatest Game Ever Played (2005) seeks to set itself apart from earlier films by replicating golfing sequences through hard work and training. Unlike the earlier films in which stars Matt Damon and Jim Caviezel trained only for two or three weeks, Shia LaBeouf (with Paxton’s inspiration) wanted to “really golf,” so he trained for six months, working with the UCLA golf team and golfing with avid golfers of various ages. In The Greatest Game Ever Played, historical accuracy includes the game itself—all except the lawns and golf greens throughout the film. In fact, Roger Ebert even admits, “I have no idea if the movie is based, stroke for stroke, on the actual competition at the 1913 U.S. Open. I guess I could find out, but I don’t want to know. I like it that way.”   

Bill Paxton and Mark Frost worked together on the sets of The Greatest Game Ever Played so that it “didn’t have that nostalgic, sepia-toned glow of so many period movies—the kind that make it look as though the film was shot through a jar of honey. We wanted to take a different, grittier approach, they explain. To get this effect, they drew from a “book of old depression-era WPA photographs called Bound for Glory” that Bill Paxton perused. According to Paxton, “the photos were taken on early color Kodachrome film and they had a very stark, very realistic, feel to them. And this was the same look we decided we wanted for the film.”

Paxton applied this strategy to the golfing scenes, as well, setting the film apart from other golf movies. He not only ensured that the golfers in the film could play the game, but that the camera angles highlighted their competition rather than getting “caught up” in what Paxton calls “the pastoral nature of the sport.” In the production notes, Paxton describes in detail how he and the director of cinematography, Shane Hurlbut attempted “to capture the same kind of high-contrast resolution they’d admired in the [kodachrome] photographs” and how they used the camera work to recreate the various golfer’s differing psychological game. The goal for scenes on the golf course was to translate a Western-style gunfight into a golf shootout. According to Paxton, “the timing and the sense of framing really echo that style. And then we go in with a tight Sergio Leone-type close-up to enhance the feeling.” 

What they don’t do, however, is attempt to provide an historically accurate view of the course grasses.  Before World War II, turf technology could not provide the grasses on display in The Greatest Game Ever Played. Tom Fazio provides an overview of golf course design history in his Golf Course Designsthat makes it clear that golf course architects have “learned to make experience, education, and technology work for us in ways [Alister] Mackenzie [golf architect from the 1920s and1930s] and his generation could scarcely have imagined” (64). During this classic period, Fazio asserts that “nature made [classic architects’] decision for them” (77). For example, during this period “storm drainage was not a part of course design. Everything surface drained. Floods came and were tolerated. People waited for the water to run off” (Fazio 77). The rain sequence in The Greatest Game Ever Played (2004), on the other hand, suggests that play can continue no matter how wet the courses become.

Not only does the film fail to recreate the grasses available before 1946 (and the technology for maintaining it). It also fails to accurately depict courses of the period, a period in which nature was emphasized above artificial surfaces that aided play. Settings for The Greatest Game Ever Played can serve as an effective example of how what was depicted in the film fails to line up with what golf courses of the period looked like. Although the film is shot in Quebec, Canada (primarily to save money), it recreates the streets of Brookline, Massachusetts and passes off golf courses in the Montreal area as The Country Club at Brookline. The golf course at Brookline hosted Francis Ouimet’s U.S. Open win in 1913, but its architectural history looks like a hodge podge rather than a plan. According to Thomas MacWood, the course evolved over a period from 1893, when the first six holes were laid out, until 1913, when Francis Ouimet won the U.S. Open. 

Both technology and aesthetics, then, contributed to golf course appearance before World War II, an appearance historical golf films such as The Greatest Game Ever Played fail to replicate, all because grass lawns and golf courses have become so naturalized that they are seen as an essential given rather than a literal and social construction.