Western Films and Water in the Desert

Western Films and Water in the Desert

 The majority of Westerns take place in an arid landscape of the Southwest where irrigation and water rights provide life to cattle, farmer’s crops, and to settlers. The Ballad of Cable Hogue (1970), especially, illustrates the impact land and water rights issues had on the environment of the American Southwest. Earlier films, however, demonstrate the variety of approaches Westerns take when illustrating how settlers overcome drought in the desert.

A battle over water fuels a feud in The Painted Desert (1931), but it also is discussed as a necessary resource in a dry landscape—one that is more precious than grub. Because of its value, it allows Jeff and Cash’s feud to continue for twenty years, until something even more precious—their son and his discovery of tungsten—stops the feud and, presumably, allows Cash, Jeff, and their children to share both water and wealth as a family.

In Under Western Skies(1938), a Roy Rogers film, the big water and power company is thwarted by the federal government, and Sageville gets its water and power. With water, cattle survive, and ranchers make a living off the land. Water turns the dusty desert into a riparian oasis. But the argument in Under Western Skies is over the price of water, not whether or not it serves the environment best to use dams and canals to bring water to a dust bowl, and drought conditions are blamed not on overuse of land but on nature. The environmental bent of the film, then, is focused only on water as a necessary (and inherently free) resource. 

In The Angel and the Badman (1947), water serves as only one element in a romantic plot. Quirt (John Wayne) provides a Quaker family and other farmers with needed water now “owned” by a large farmer with dams and a reservoir, Frederick Carson (Paul Hurst). The film’s arguments about water rights also parallel those in Wayne’s earlier film, Riders of Destiny(1933), even nearly recreating the scenes between Wayne’s Singin’ Sandy and James Kincaid in the earlier film with that between Quirt and Carson. Ownership of water in The Angel and the Badmanhas been shifted from an individual, Carson, to a collective that includes Quaker families with a more communal view of nature. So this brief scene, juxtaposed with others that foreground community as a better goal than conflict and violent tyranny, demonstrates the power of water rights. When water rights become more equally distributed rather than an individually driven economic concern, farmers and their land are better served. Nature and humans here are shown as holding a reciprocal or even symbiotic relationship—the land and its people depend on water to sustain them. More water, more widely distributed, means more fertile land for farming and farmers. 

Gene Autry’s Mule Train (1950) highlights water rights in relation to both private ownership and government lands. Sheriff Gene Autry tells “Keg” Rollins (Gregg Barton) that he’s “all through making [anyone] pay for water,” an assertion Rollins argues against. But Autry explains, “It’s still government land and government water, and no one’s going to charge for it. Water’s free” and the conflict is established, all based on the question, can private companies own and control government lands and resources? But the opening scenes with Autry arguing for preservation of free water on government lands serve as the only clear reference to the positive consequences of discovering natural cement: better dams to store and distribute free water.

The Roy Rogers film, In Old Amarillo (1951), provides a different answer to questions related to turning a desert into a garden—cloud seeding. In In Old Amarillo technology from a period concurrent with the film’s production date ends up saving land from drought, but the conflict over water rights remains the same. As in Angel and the Badman and Mule Train, water is constructed as a right, as a resource that should be available to all rather than a commodity to be either horded or withheld for profit. In Old Amarillo simply offers lack of water as a way to acquire lands for profit and for bringing in another source of riches—a cannery.

The Big Country(1958) presents an epic battle over water rights that is masked by a feud between two ranchers, Major Henry Terrill (Charles Bickford) and Rufus Hannassey (Burl Ives). When James McCay, a ship captain, comes to the West to marry the Major’s daughter, Pat (Carol Baker), he brings with him a worldview like that of Singin’ Sandy and the Quakers in Angel and the Badman and seeks to resolve conflict through negotiation rather than violence. More importantly, McCay buys the land that Terrill and Hannassey are fighting for, so he purchases the water rights for the region. Unlike the Terrills and Hannasseys, however, McCay offers the water freely to both families and, after a series of battles, the two family patriarchs kill one another and the feud, as well as the struggle over water, has been resolved. Only McCay’s purchase of the land owned by Julie Maragon (Jean Simmons), the woman McCay learns to love, halts the blood feud and provides cooperative water rights for both ranches. Terrill’s and Hannassey’s deaths symbolize a changing West, but they also reinforce the end of the feud and the return of free water. These films reveal multiple ways water is exploited and preserved.