Range War Movies: The Case of Tumbleweeds

Range War Movies: The Case of Tumbleweeds

Many films tackling the evolution of free-range ranching seem to neglect the negative impact ranching had on the land, instead focusing not only on the changes homesteaders brought to the western economy and, as Osage Indian writer John Joseph Matthews describes it in Wah’ Kou-Tah: The Osage and the White Man’s Road, the changes brought by a colonizing Amer-European culture, but also suggesting that homestead farmers would destroy the land and the life it provided, all in the name of civilization. The cowboy way was held up as an ideal in these films, as wild and free as the land that was depicted as untouched before farmers plowed it.

Tumbleweeds, for example, valorizes the cowboy myth, even as it illustrates the Westward movement caused by the Land Rush of 1893. The film begins with a shot of a cowboy in a wild landscape and a title card that reads, “Man and beast, both blissfully unaware that their reign is over” and then demonstrates the interconnected relationship cowboys share with the natural environment through Carver’s (William S. Hart) actions. Carver—a cowboy and hence a tumbleweed—first spares a snake’s life. Then after a card that reads “the most fertile spot in a fertile land—their ranch,” he adopts wolf pups, willing to raise them after poisoning their mother—“it’s our turn to take care of them.”

These images of nature appear between verses of a song idealizing the cowboy life as a “rollin’ rambler, a tumblin’ tumbleweed” and set off the revelation that “the Strip’s been opened to homesteaders…. this here Cherokee Strip we’re standin’ on right now.” Although Molly, a love interest, interferes (Barbara Bedford) with the cowboy’s desire for freedom, the film highlights the sacrifices he and others must make to accommodate these new settlers. A title card explains a scene in which cowboys herd hundreds of cattle off the land: “Clearing all the cattle from the rich grazing land by government order.” The title cards even illustrate the cowboy roles during the herding: “The Pointer.” “The Wheeler.” As the cowboys watch, Carver exclaims, “Boys that’s the last of the West.”

A dichotomy between wild cowboy ways that tie them to the land and its creatures and homesteaders bent on destroying both the cowboy and the land has been established here, but the film takes an ambivalent stance on the opposition, advocating homestead farming but only in the context of the fertile ranch Carver seems to have left behind: “It’s called the Box K Ranch and controls the waterways. There’s a million in it, and I’m going to get it,” Carver declares. This control of waterways sets up a conflict between Carver and Molly’s brother, Noll (J. Gordon Russell), but the real conflict here is between ranching and homesteading. Although Carver’s sidekick, Bill (Richard R. Neill), argues that it’s “no disgrace to be a homesteader when a woman like her is one,” the film also shows ominous images of wagon trains on the horizon, bringing in hordes of homesteaders. The film seems to rest on its claim, “Ain’t nothin’ like ownin’ land, no sir.” It also promotes ideals like honor and family that the film suggests the homesteaders might bring to the country and combats corruption from land grabbers. But it also highlights consequences of empire building in this rush for the land. A title card clarifies the purpose behind this rush for land on the Cherokee Strip and beyond: “100,000 empire builders racing across the great barriers of the last frontier,” building an empire that rests on land ownership and linear views of progress.

The film ends, however, with a more moderate view of land ownership, one that disqualifies the corruption embodied by Noll, a corruption that would lead to riches only by exploiting natural resources (water) for economic gain. Noll is defeated, then, and Carver gets Molly and the Box K Ranch. Carver reclaims the ranch he had left behind but merges ranching with homestead farming in both staking a claim and embracing Molly.The last scene of the film is said to illustrate this marriage between two ways of life in the West: We see barbed wire with tumbleweed rolling into it as Carver and Molly embrace, seemingly signifying a union not only between a man and a woman but between two ways of life—ranching and homestead farming. But the ending is bittersweet. Carver and Molly watch the tumbleweed together, but Carver still holds the reins of his horse. When Molly rejected him in an earlier scene, Carver declared, “Women ain’t reliable. Cows are—that’s why I’m headin’ for South America where there’s millions of them.” Juxtaposing Carver’s words with the final tumbleweed scene reinforces the film’s ambivalent stance toward the end of the cowboy life. In spite of Carver’s turn to homesteading, it is his life as a cowboy that is valorized by the film. Although Tumbleweeds mourns the demise of the cowboy and the West he represents, implications for the environment are addressed primarily with references to water rights that make clear that this is dry land, not fit for farming.