Meek's Cutoff (2010) and Drought

Meek’s Cutoff (2010) presents water as a character, a goal, and a source of conflict. When water is abundant, the three pioneer families treat water as a necessary resource, a character in their journey across Oregon where they ford a river, gather and store water in communal barrels, wash clothes and dishes, and provide sustenance for a caged canary. When it is scarce, water transforms into an off-screen antagonist and yearned for Deus ex Machina.

The “lost” scratched into a dead tree forebodes the dry land beyond the river. It’s also a real detail drawn from women’s diaries and records of Oregon Trail journeys screenwriter Jon Raymond and Reichardt researched for the film. In the journals, the carved “Lost” message signifies “the discovery of what might have been gold at a time when the imperative was water.” And the super-distant shot of the group reinforces their connection to the landscape they traverse, with the horizon line framing them as they nearly disappear into the scrub grass. 

The three covered wagons cross in and out of on-screen space to heighten these connections, amplified by a hat blowing across the dry plain. When their wheels whine like the windmill at the opening of Once Upon a Time in the West, the cry heightens the settlers’ painful thirst. As A.O. Scott declares, the “small covered wagons look like coffins on wheels.” With this emphasis on the desert landscape as character, the film places the action off-center, showing the men talking at a distance, so we overhear only a few words or revealing a late-night conversation between Emily and Solomon only through the light of a decorative lantern.

The film reveals the consequences of drought in small ways. When women’s faces are shown in close-up, they look hot, dry, and dusty like the parched land they cross. They sip water from a communal cup while their men sit in the shade of a rocky hill. One woman quietly states, “We should have taken more at the river” and wonders how the oxen will survive, dumping extra weight out of wagons to help them. And they gaze into barrels, showing their despair as they seem to see the whorls and knots of wood at the bottom. 

Reichardt’s on-location filming amplifies these responses. As she explains in a Guardian interview, “The desert is beautiful. But it’s 110 degrees. Everything’s so unfriendly and prickly, and the fine dust gets in the vehicle wheels…. There was a struggle to get to set every day with all the animals, but it put everyone in the frame of mind to think about what conditions were actually like on the Oregon Trail.” The film is also a good way to explore the continuing conflicts over water and the land.

Meek's Cutoff (2010) and Native American Views of Home

Although it draws on covered wagon Western history, Meek’s Cutoff (2010) also points to an alternative view of home and ecology represented by the Native American in the film. Called the Indian in the film, Rod Rondeaux’s view builds on a history (and filmic history) of environmental adaptation. It also aligns the film with Westerns in which American Indian characters adapt horrific environments into homes. We call these films narratives of environmental adaptation. Although many westerns with American Indians at the center or on their edges do construct American Indians as either savage or noble “others,” the films also (and most importantly for us) demonstrate how effectively American Indians have adapted, and adapted to, what white settlers see as an environmental “hell” or something worse. As the Fort Lowell Commander Major Cartwright (Douglass Watson) puts it in Ulzana’s Raid (1972), “You know what General Sheridan said of this country, lieutenant? ... If he owned hell and Arizona, he’d live in hell and rent out Arizona.” When the lieutenant responds that Sheridan said “Texas,” the major retorts, “Well, he meant Arizona.”

In a move toward a more sustainable view of prairie and desert ecosystems, American Indians in a variety of western films adapt a seemingly lifeless environment into a place they can call home. Pardon Chato’s (Charles Bronson) perspective in Chato’s Land (1972) helps illustrate the parameters and repercussions of such environmental adaptation. The film highlights the Apache worldview from a white perspective but provides insight into how Chato, a half Apache mestizo, survives in what seems like uninhabitable land. According to Captain Quincey Whitmore (Jack Palance), when Chato runs from the captain because he killed a U.S. marshal in self-defense, he “picks his ground” carefully. Unlike white soldiers, Chato has adapted to this inhospitable land and can use it to his advantage in a fight. The captain explains the wisdom of Chato’s choice to run through Indian Territory: 

To you this is so much bad land—rock, scrub, desert and then more rock, a hard land that the sun has sucked all the good out of. You can’t farm it, and you can’t carve it out and call it your own… so you damn it to hell. And it all looks the same. That is our way. To the breed now, it’s his land. He don’t expect it to give him much, and he don’t force it none. And to him it’s almost human—a livin’ active thing. And it will make him a good place to make his fight against us.

This narrative of environmental adaptation evolves in U.S. western films with American Indians at their center, from the early valorization of American Indian worldviews in films like The Red Girl (1908) and Hiawatha (1913), through the vilification of the savage Indian in the 1940s and ’50s, back to a more revisionist, look at American Indian perspectives from the 1950s and 60s through the 1990s.

In Westerns from Drums Along the Mohawk (1939) through Cheyenne Autumn (1964), for example, John Ford defines the idea of the West in relation to populist views of progress that seek to dominate human and nonhuman nature and civilize the wilderness. Within this ideology, American Indians must either be exterminated or removed to make way for pioneers ready to turn the forest wilderness into a garden home.

Revisionist western films sometimes address the American Indian perspective in more positive ways. The Scalphunters (1968), for example, complicates received beliefs regarding both American Indians and Comancheros when a group of American Indians exchanges Trapper Joe’s (Burt Lancaster) animal hides for an escaped slave named Joseph (Ossie Davis). When the American Indians are raided by Comancheros led by Jim Howie (Telly Savalas), racial binaries begin to disintegrate, making room for accommodation and a collective view of human and nonhuman nature. And The Outlaw Josey Wales (1976) examines American Indian worldviews both peripherally and from a first-person point of view—through the eyes of Lone Watie (Chief Dan George) who becomes part of a family of castoffs, including Josey Wales (Clint Eastwood). In earlier Westerns, though, “When it comes to American Indians, Hollywood either trades in Injun stereotypes or dances with Disney” (Rolling Stone “Smoke Signals” Review).

These narratives of environmental adaptation become most convincing, however, in the 1990s and 2000s when American Indians begin telling their own stories both as filmmakers and actors. We’ve written at length about how Chris Eyre and Sherman Alexie transform this narrative in Smoke Signals. Meek’s Cutoff builds on similar authentic visions of environmental adaptation.

Meek's Cutoff (2010), the Wagon Train Western, and Differing Views of Home

As the Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife battles Nestle over approval for a water bottling plant near the city of Cascade Locks, we turn to the history of resource exploitation found in some Westerns, especially when Native Americans are added to the mix. As Comanche Chief Quanah Parker asserted on July 4, 1898, "We fear your success. This was a pretty country you took away from us--but you see how dry it is now. It is only good for red ants, coyotes, and cattlemen." This is the country we see in Kelly Reichardt’s most ambitious Western, Meek’s Cutoff, a step beyond her earlier road-trip contemporary Westerns, Old Joy (2006) and Wendy and Lucy (2008). But the goal in each of these is a search for home.

Meek’s Cutoff explores the search for fertile land in the west, perhaps with a nod toward lessons of xenophobia and imperial folly continued during the height of the Iraq War when the film was written and released. But it also highlights alternative perspectives on the environment, that of women and Native Americans. In this ecology the pioneer families are cut off in their covered wagon habitats. But at least one of the women realizes that only the lone Native American they capture (played by Rod Rondeaux) can adapt the hellish desert they traverse into a home. The exploration of the desperation endured by three pioneer families lost and without water in Oregon’s high plains desert showcases differing views of this environment: the lone American Indian embraces the desert, while the settlers seek to escape it. 

As an illustration of the pioneers’ perspective on ecology, Meek’s Cutoff aligns closely with a filmic history of wagon train movies that draw on the covered wagon as home. James Cruz’s silent film The Covered Wagon from 1923 begins exploring the themes found in many of these covered wagon films. As pioneers push Westward along the Oregon Trail in a caravan of covered wagons, they face desert heat, mountain snow, hunger, and an Indian attack. These themes continue in Raoul Walsh’s epic The Big Trail from 1930, with a guide played by John Wayne in his first leading role piloting settlers Westward. Here the murder of a trapper adds even more conflict to the battles settlers face against the environment and the local Plains Indian tribes. Wayne also leads the train in The Oregon Trail in 1936.

John Ford’s Wagon Master from 1950 also highlights the struggles faced by a covered wagon train on the trail to San Juan Valley. But this time the message regarding Native Americans changes because the settlers are Mormon. Navajos they encounter claim the Mormons are their brothers—not big thieves like most white men, “just little thieves.”  Still Wagon Master continues some of the same covered wagon film themes, adding powerful religious vigor to the mix of rogue gamblers and highwaymen, Ford’s famous use of both Monument Valley, and the challenges of nature. William Wellman’s Westward the Women from 1951 includes similar themes but with a primarily woman-centered train. 

Many other Westerns from the 1950s and 60s highlight the wagon train and the covered wagon as shelter against the land and its “savage” inhabitants. See for example The Last Wagon (1956), The Oregon Trail (1959), How the West Was Won (1962), and The Way West (1967). Although a few covered wagon Westerns question attitudes toward Native Americans, as does The Indian Fighter (1955) Buck and the Preacher (1972), and Wagons East (1994), most separate pioneering settlers from both the savage environment they traverse and the Native Americans they confront.

Meek's Cutoff Images