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.