How The West Was Taken: A Historical Perspective

The 1962 Cinerama epic How the West Was Won depicts the westward journey of the fictional Prescott family as they participate in the settler expansion of the United States of America towards the California coast. In the film, this fifty year stretch of history is characterized as a victory of civilization and progress leading inevitably to the great shining beacon that the United States saw itself as in the middle of the 20th century. While the cost of this progress is addressed in the film, things like the changing of the land and betrayal of the Indigenous peoples, these costs are depicted as necessary casualties of a nation's growth. This is a romanticized view of history that was common at the time of the movie's production, before the national unrest and turmoil of the 1960s and 70s brought about a more skeptical and cynical view of American history and the Western film genre that depicted it. From a modern perspective, it would be irresponsible to present How the West Was Won without offering a more critical eye and alternative context to its view of history, which it must be remembered was designed primarily to provide the backdrop to a family friendly and broadly appealing piece of entertainment.

The story begins with the Erie Canal, which was completed in 1825. Spencer Tracy's narration simplifies the history of the Canal's four years of construction and landmark civil engineering achievement as “in the way Americans have of acting out their dreams, it came to be.” The canal required virgin forest to be cleared, soil to be excavated, swamps to be drained, and limestone deposits to be exploded as it cut through the State of New York from the Hudson River to Lake Erie. It was rumoured over 1,000 workers died in the effort, whether through malaria, accidents, or xenophobic violence against the Irish immigrants who made up a majority of the workforce. The construction of the canal was a massive economic boom to the city of New York as it connected the port to the rest of the west, and it opened up the west to settler immigration as depicted in the film – it also established key precedent for the government to appropriate private land for large scale construction.

1839 -Tthe route taken along the rivers by the Prescott family to their farm.

The Prescott family sets out from Albany in 1839, and after traveling by barge down the Erie Canal, they switch to traveling by raft down the Ohio River, which ran from Pennsylvania along the border of Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois with Virginia and Kentucky. This river was another important artery for westward immigration though it was known for being dangerous for exactly the reasons shown in the film: its rapids and its river pirates. Cave-in-Rock, Illinois was the primary base of these pirates, and How the West Was Won shot at the real site, showing a common ruse where pirates set up as a hotel or trading post to lure in travellers before attacking them. The Falls of the Ohio, as the rapids were called, were the most significant navigational hazard along the river, until a series of locks and dams were constructed in 1830 to bypass it. The Ohio River had another significance as well – marking the border between the northern “free states” and the southern “slave states.”

These waterways take the Prescott family through territory that at the time had already been incorporated as states – New York, Pennsylvania, and Ohio. This territory had once been home to the Haudenosaunee peoples, known to settlers as the Iroquois Confederacy, but by 1839 had already been lost in numerous wars and ceded in treaties to European settlers, or simply taken by theft and violence. The Confederacy had supported the British against the French and then split on the question of whether to support the American revolution against the British, and only the peoples who supported the Americans got much by the way of concessions as the new nation expanded around and through the lands they had traditionally lived in. The traditional rivals of the Haudenosaunee were the Algonquian-speaking peoples whose tribes in the area included the Lënapeyok, and the aggressive expansion of the Confederacy before the American revolution saw areas like Ohio largely devoid of Indigenous inhabitants by the time the new state joined the fledgeling American nation.

1851 -Tthe route taken along the Oregon Trail by Lilith Prescott to California.

The second section of the film picks up in 1851, as Spencer Tracy explains how the United States acquired even more westward land by way of military, annexing Texas in 1845 and setting off a war that would see Texas, New Mexico, Utah, and California enter the United States after tens of thousands of casualties. While the initial justification of the war may have been the incorporation of the disputed Republic of Texas into the United States, a major goal of U.S. President James Polk was the expansion of his nation's territory to the west coast by whatever means necessary, and so the war became an invasion of Mexico that almost saw the southern nation entirely conquered – a conquest declined by the United States largely on the grounds that incorporating Mexico would degrade the Union's character as the government of “the free white race.” Nevertheless these conquests saw many Mexicans and Indigenous peoples suddenly annexed by the United States, leading to armed conflicts and racial discrimination the effects of which have lasted to our present day. Political concerns saw non-whites disenfranchised in these annexed areas, with formerly Mexican citizens finding themselves non-citizens unable to vote in their new country. California in particular was considered so valuable for settlement by whites that massacres against Mexican civilians and the genocide of the Indigenous people of California were commonplace over the next several years.

The fact that a gold rush erupted in California as the war was concluding hastened the race to get out west, as well as the race to empty the land ahead of the arrival of white settlers. By 1851 California was already a state, fast tracked as its white population swelled. It is as part of this gold rush that Lilith Prescott sets out on the famous Oregon Trail from Independance, Missouri. This western migration was largely male, with men outnumbering about 14 to 1 among the settlers. This led to the opportunity for women heading west at this time to do many things considered abnormal out east, such as own property and run businesses.

The trail took settlers out of the United States proper and into what was then known as the Nebraska Territory. At the time, this large stretch of prairie was deemed “unfit for habitation” due to the lack of lumber and surface water, and so it was made illegal for settling until after 1846. Instead, it was this area that was “set aide” by the U.S. Government for use by Indigenous peoples. Those groups which traditionally lived across the Great Plains were joined by eastern groups forced out west by settler expansion. While they had been promised white settlers would not homestead in these lands, the U.S. Government saw California and Oregon further west as being free for the taking, and so the Oregon Trail crossed through the Plains, which was seen as trespassing and a betrayal by some of the tribes. In the movie, the wagon train gets attacked by a band of Cheyenne, who call themselves the Tsétsêhéstâhese.

The Tsétsêhéstâhese originally lived near the Great Lakes but were driven south and west in conflicts with other Indigenous peoples, uniting with other tribes for greater strength against their enemies. The emigrant trails of the 1840s which led white settlers westward divided the Tsétsêhéstâhese people into northern and southern groups, the Notameohmésêhese and the Heévâhetaneo'o. Resources for these groups became ever more depleted from competition with other Plains tribes, eastern tribes driven westward, and the settlers themselves. The gold rush brought a cholera epidemic that killed at least half of the Tsétsêhéstâhese population, and in 1851 they signed a treaty with the U.S. Government that defined their territory and that of their fellow Plains tribes. The attack on the wagon train seen in the movie is a Western film cliché, but in historical fact attacks on wagon trains by Indigenous groups were exceedingly rare. Large wagon trains were almost never attacked, but instead it was smaller stragglers who were in danger most often. One historical example would be the Kelly-Larimer party – 11 emigrants in give wagons but exceptionally well provisioned with thousands of pounds of food, goods, and livestock, found themselves under attack by 80-100 Oglala warriors. From 1840-60, 362 emigrants were killed in attacks by Indigenous people, but 426 Indigenous people were killed in turn by emigrants.

After leaving Nebraska, the California trail passed into the Utah Territory and the trading hub of Salt Lake City, which the movie elides over. Utah had already been settled by Mormons by the 1840s, though it was part of Mexico until the US took it in the war. The Indigenous peoples of this area, consisting of the Núuchi-u, Diné, and several Shoshoni speaking groups, had co-existed with minimal friction with settlers up to this time, though the increased westward expansion of the United States through the area led to increasing tensions that would result in a series of wars in Utah between the settlers and Indigenous peoples lasting through the 1850s-70s.

The California trail ends in the community of El Dorado in the Sierra Nevada mountain range, and Lilith Prescott makes her home in Sacramento, a city which grew up practically overnight due to the California Gold Rush and became the capital of the new state of California in 1854. The Indigenous people of California had lived under Spanish and Mexican rule for nearly a century by 1848, during which time a program of missions to convert them to Catholicism had seen the population drop to two-thirds of its former number due to the introduction of diseases, as well as overwork and malnourishment. These conditions did not improve under U.S. administration, which adopted a policy of “extermination” against the remaining Indigenous people, deemed necessary to protect the property of white settlers. In 1851, the state of California paid approximately $1 million to a bounty for the elimination of the native population, resulting in a death toll of 100,000 in a period of two years. Indentured servitude of Indigenous children was legalized for the purpose of forced labour to work the gold mines, and the official policy of genocide continued until the early 20th century when it was shifted to a policy of cultural rather than overt genocide with the introduction of the boarding school system. It is estimated that the Indigenous population of California dropped by 90% during the 19th century thanks to these policies.

When we rejoin the story after the film's Intermission, it is for a relatively brief detour into the American Civil War. The war was a reckoning a century in the making, and had its roots in the use of slave labour by the British as the backbone of many of their colonial economies. Roughly twelve million enslaved Africans were transported across the Atlantic ocean over the course of three centuries, and while the death toll among these slaves numbered in the millions, conditions in the southern colonies of British North America were far better for slaves than in the Caribbean and other areas, resulting in a growth of the slave population. When thirteen colonies of British North America decided to rebel against the Crown, the values of equality and independence they espoused seemed at odds with the institution of slavery, and by the end of the Revolutionary War six states had abolished slavery. By 1804 the nation was split with eight “free states” and eight “slave states”, divided along north-south lines. The slave-owning southern states depended on this dehumanizing practice for their economic wealth and refused to abandon it, resulting in a century of “compromises” and political maneuvering, such as the policy that any new states added to the Union must join in free/slave pairs so that neither side would outnumber the other.

The Ohio River, where the Rawlings family farm is located in the movie, formed part of the border between the northern free states and their southern slave-owning equivalents. Each acquisition of new territory by the nation as it expanded westward brought renewed controversy over the issue, and the morality of creating more territory where the buying, owning, and selling of other human beings was legal just to ensure a political balance in Congress was becoming more and more fraught, until it was clear the nation was headed towards an inevitable conflict. By 1861 free states outnumbered slave states 19 to 15, and admission of new territories into the Union became delayed over debates on the right of a territory to decide for itself whether it could allow slavery or not. Slaveholders argued the federal government should be able to declare slavery legal in new territories, while the Republican Party of Abraham Lincoln argued the federal government could ban slavery in new state but had no right to impose it. The election of Lincoln to the presidency provoked eleven slaveholding states to secede from the Union, citing the movement to abolish slavery in the United States as an attack on their “constitutional right” to own slaves. They formed their own government, the Confederate States of America, which the Lincoln government did not acknowledge as legitimate, as the U.S. Constitution had no legal provisions for any state to leave the Union once it had joined.

The war began on April 12, 1861 when Confederate forces attacked Union-held Fort Sumter. The bloody conflict would see over a million people killed over the course of four years, including soldiers, civilians, and slaves. It left a scar upon the American nation that has arguably never healed over, and its aftermath and consequences rippled over American history for more than a century afterwards. Ultimately the Union prevailed and Lincoln abolished slavery in 1863 before being assassinated in 1865.

1862 - The Rawlings farm and the Battle of Shiloh, and the Union and Confederate army movements leading up to the battle.

In the film, we are back at the Rawlings family farm on the Ohio River in 1862, right on the border between the north and the “neutral” slave state of Kentucky. Kentucky never seceded from the Union, though a Confederate “shadow government” was formed and Kentucky was admitted to the Confederate States as well. Officially Kentucky was neutral, and remained such through the war. From there we follow Zeb Rawlings as he joins the Union army and finds himself at the Battle of Shiloh on April 6, 1862, a battle that saw over three thousand dead. The film showcases two legendary figures of the Union army – General Ulysses S. Grant, who led the Union army to ultimate victory and became President of the United States during Reconstruction, and General William Tecumseh Sherman, whose “scorched earth” policies crippled the Confederate ability to fight but earned him criticism for his perceived harshness and cruelty.

In the history of the United States of America, the Civil War is one of the most significant events. Its seeds were sown from the nation's beginning, and the crop it reaped has fed its politics ever since. But in the story of the nation's westward expansion, it is largely a side story, as the western states and territories largely stayed out of the conflict and the Union army's detachments in California were instead largely employed in wars against the Indigenous people.

The film's fourth section dramatizes the building of the transcontinental railroads which united the western and eastern states and saw vast amounts of territory become open to a huge influx of new settlers. It was the final nail in the coffin for any semblance of independence for the Indigenous peoples, and the film depicts them as fiercely opposed to the railroad's construction. The first transcontinental railroad was built by three private companies using vast land grants provided by the United States government. The land taken by the government and given to the railroads covered an area larger than Texas, land that the railroad could sell at a profit once construction was over, construction that was largely financed by the U.S. Federal government. The movie focuses on the Union Pacific Railroad, which primarily hired Irish labourers, though the Central Pacific Railroad became known for its Chinese workforce. The primary invester in the Union Pacific was Thomas Clark Durant, who made his money smuggling slave-picked cotton from the Confederate States into the Union during the Civil War, and who manipulated and frauded state and federal governments to ensure he would make money on the Union Pacific whether it succeeded or failed.

The railroad violated the United States' treaties with the Indigenous peoples of the Great Plains, and war parties began raiding the construction camps. As seen in the film, in response the railroad hired marksmen to hunt down and exterminate the bison upon whom the Plains people depended. This escalation resulted in war parties killing labourers until the U.S. Army was placed in charge of defending the railroad's construction, and General Sherman's scorched earth policies from the Civil War were again put to use, this time against the Indigenous peoples of the Plains.

In the movie, it is the Arapaho who attack the railroad labour camp. The Arapaho's name for themselves is Hinono'eino, and while they orginated as an agricultural people in the Red River Valley, they were pushed west into the Plains by the Anishinaabe and following the acquisition of horses and guns they became a nomadic buffalo-hunting people like the other Indigenous groups of that area. By the 1860s, the westward expansion of white settlers had brought the Hinono'eino into conflict with the U.S. Army. In 1864 the Sand Creek Massacre saw hundreds of peaceful Hinono'eino and Tsétsêhéstâhese brutally slaughtered by the U.S. Army after they had been instructed to move to that location or be killed. This had the affect of eliminating most of the chiefs who were in favour of peace with the settlers, as they were the ones who had complied with the order to move to Sand Creek, and thereby strengthening the position of pro-war chiefs among the Plains peoples, which in turn served as justification for stronger Army efforts against them. Three decades of war between the Hinono'eino and the United States followed, with various treaties signed that pushed the Hinono'eino into various reservations and territories that would be slowly overtaken by settlers brought by the railroad. An 1868 treaty signed at Fort Laramie was largely favourable to the Plains tribes that had won a major victory against the United States, but the treaty would be broken and war reignited by 1876.

1868 - The section of the Union Pacific Railroad that passed through Hinono'eino (Arapaho) territory.

The devastation of the buffalo population weakened the ability of the Plains tribes to resist the United States as their way of life was destroyed, just as intended. By the end of the 19th century only 300 bison were estimated to exist in the wild, and they were placed into National Parks and nature preserves and the hunting of them was made illegal – including hunting by Indigenous people. The buffalo herd that stampedes through one of How the West Was Won's most memorable sequences was provided by the South Dakota's Custer State Park, home to 1,500 bison and named ironically for the U.S. Army officer best remembered for his defeat by the Lakota and their allies, including the Hinono'eino, in 1876.

The final section of the film begins in 1889, following rthe rise of cattle ranchers, cowboys, and outlaws in what is now remembered as the Wild West and dramatizing what director Henry Hathaway called “how the west was really won” - the coming of the law. San Francisco, established in 1776 as one of the Spanish missions, was by 1889 the 8th-largest city in the United States, its growth spurred by the gold rush and the railroad. It was known for its Victorian architecture and large mansions, a jewel of the west coast. As the Rawlings family travels by wagon to meet their aunt, they pass through Monument Valley the iconic region in northeastern Arizona made an icon of the Western movie genre by director John Ford. It is located entirely within the Navajo Nation, the largest land area held by an Indigenous tribe within the United States, formed by treaty in 1868 between the U.S. Government and the Diné people, also known as the Navajo. That treaty represented the return of the Diné to their ancestral lands after an unsuccessful forced relocation elsewhere, one of the few examples of a successful return, though the reservation was still smaller than their original lands as the best grazing ground had been taken by white settlers during the relocation.

1889 - A train route from San Francisco into the interior of Arizona territory.

The location of Gold City, Arizona is fictional, strange for a movie purporting to be an historical overview, but from this point on the movie engages in every Old West stereotype it has left in the showdown between marshal and outlaw. The location used for Gold City was Perkinsville, Arizona, which came to be after a cattle ranch and a copper mine required a train station be built on the site in 1912, around which a small town sprung up. The copper smelter closed in the 1950s, rendering the hamlet a ghost town by the time it was used as a shooting location for How the West Was Won. In 1889 Arizona was not yet a state, having been made a territory by the Confederate States in 1861 and the United States in 1863. Before that it had been a part of New Mexico, part of the land won by conquest for the United States in their war with Mexico. A boom and bust economy of copper mines defined Arizona through the 1880s up through its admission to statehood in 1907. Between the lawlessness in the mining towns, and the cattle rustlers attacking the large ranches established in the territory by Texans after the Civil War, Arizona's Wild West reputation was well earned. Tombstone, Arizona was the site of the Gunfight at the O.K. Corral in 1881, one of the most mythologized gunfights of the period.

The train line featured in the final train robbery sequence is the Magma Arizona Railroad, and like the Verde Canyon Railroad running through Perkinsville, it also did not exist in 1889, having been constructed in 1915 to haul copper and cattle between Superior and Magma, Arizona. However, the line did not switch to diesel until 1968, making it the last industrial rail line in Arizona using steam power at the time of filming and thus attractive to the producers.

How the West Was Won is a collection of Western clichés: river pirates, attacks on wagon trains, conflicts with the Indigenous peoples of the Plains, train robberies, and shootouts between lawmen and outlaws. Some of these clichés have a basis in historical fact, others are more the product of America's tendency to mythologize its own history, a tendency of which the movie itself is a part. While its depiction of westward settler expansion is rooted in history, its focus is on family friendly entertainment, and thus it keeps the primary methods used by the United States to expand west on the sidelines: war, conquest, double dealing, betrayal, capitalism, and genocide. That is not to say that the west was not won by the adventurous pioneer spirit of settlers who risked everything to move their families across a vast and often unforgiving country; but rather to say that the west was taken from those who were already there by violence and treachery in order to make room for those settlers to win it.

Written by Ben Rowe.