[“Yellowstone” is superbly written, filmed and acted
television, great entertainment for those who have never heard of it
since, alas, they are too busy binge-watching “White Lotus” (also
great television) and it celebrates some true non-Trumpy conservative
values like hard-work and patriotism. But it’s not Montana.]
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PORTSIDE CULTURE

“YELLOWSTONE” IS A CONSERVATIVE TEXAS REWRITING OF THE AMERICAN
WEST – AND ALSO GREAT TELEVISION  
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Steve Chapple
January 4, 2023
Stansbury Forum
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_ “Yellowstone” is superbly written, filmed and acted television,
great entertainment for those who have never heard of it since, alas,
they are too busy binge-watching “White Lotus” (also great
television) and it celebrates some true non-Trumpy conservative values
like hard-work and patriotism. But it’s not Montana. _

,

 

I wrote a political opinion piece on the hit TV series
“Yellowstone” for the newspapers, (see below,) and then
“1923,” the sequel to “Yellowstone” debuted, and so here we
go, HOT GLOBE™ [[link removed]] high-tails it into
the tremulous world of movie criticism. 

OK, first episode of “1923.”  Wow. Age 77, Helen Mirren as Cara
Dutton slaughters some immigrant sheep herder with a double-barreled
shotgun.  Cut to Kenya.  A Dutton progenitor fires what I guess is
an elephant gun at a charging lion which in death falls upon him. 
Things do not slow down.  Back to the Yellowstone. The stalwart
cattlemen heroes led by Harrison Ford tell the immigrant sheepherders
to get their stinking, close-cropping sheep off the cattlemen’s
leased and drought-stricken land.

It’s “The Sheep Wars,”
[[link removed]] which I’d never heard
of, so I did a little digging, since I was born in Billings, Montana,
along the Yellowstone River,
[[link removed]] myself,
as was my father, in 1893, and my grandfather was the mayor in 1882,
with Liver-Eating Johnson (recall the Redford movie?) his sheriff, and
Calamity Jane helping out during outbreaks of tuberculosis.  (When
you read about Montana in the East Coast or LA press, you are
following someone who wouldn’t know a quarter-horse from a wombat.
See my Harper Collins NYT Notable, Kayaking the Full Moon
[[link removed]].)

First, there were no sheep wars along the Yellowstone, to speak of.

In Montana, the real money was in copper and gold mining.  It still
is, along with software.  However, I discovered “The Sheep Wars,”
were very much real, just more of a Texas, Wyoming, Arizona thing, and
they happened long before 1923, more like the 1870’s to about
1909.  Native herders were beheaded, ISIS-style.  Tens of thousands
of sheep were driven over cliffs.  Lots of people got shot, mostly by
the Harrison Ford side.  Interestingly, the sheep owners were often
not small-potatoes immigrants, at all.  Sheep ranchers lost tens of
thousands of dollars, worth millions now, in these depredations by
masked cattlemen killers.  The fights came to an end in Big Horn
County, Wyoming, where to the surprise of all, sheriffs arrested a
group of murderers, and they were sent to jail.  Resource wars.  Now
we just invade other countries for their oil.

Up in Montana, along the Yellowstone River, it was homesteaders vs.
the ranchers. The early ranchers made their money grazing on the open
range left after 30 million bison had been slaughtered in order to
starve out the plains Indians and force them onto reservations.
Homesteaders under federal law were allotted some 160 acres, which
they fenced in.  In their war upon immigrant farmers, not sheep
ranchers, the members of the Cheyenne Cattleman’s Club
[[link removed]] in
Wyoming proceeded one drunken night to hang a woman sodbuster
[[link removed]] and
started out to gun down families.  But in Montana, the farmers and
miners stopped Ford’s killer crew, who simply did a My Lai on any
small farmer they could find.  That’s why until recently—that is
until Donald Trump and “Yellowstone” came along, Montana was as
different from Wyoming as Vermont is from New Hampshire.

[[link removed]]

Wyoming Cattle Barons Hang Their First Woman Homesteader

CAVEAT: the sequences in “1923” in the “Indian Schools,”
[[link removed]] from
my knowledge, are harrowing and all too true. Director Taylor
Sheridan’s earlier feature “Wind River” is one of the strongest
movies ever made about racism and rape.

_“_YELLOWSTONE_”_ is superbly written,  filmed and acted
television, great entertainment for those who have never heard of it
since, alas, they are too busy binge-watching “White Lotus”
[[link removed]] (also great television) and it
celebrates some true non-Trumpy conservative values like hard-work and
patriotism. The Ankler.
[[link removed]]

But it’s not Montana.

There’s some brilliant borrowing, “The Ghost and the Darkness”,
“Heaven’s Gate”; “Legends of the Fall”, “Dances with
Wolves”, “Leopard George”, a whiff of the “Snows of
Kilimanjaro”—the best stuff ever, even “Heaven’s Gate” which
is worth a rewatch of the director’s cut–and some others I’m not
filmic enough to whiff out.

But face it HOT GLOBE™
[[link removed]] historians, who’s going to watch a
series about the real “Yellowstone” of 1883-2023? Unarmed copper
miners
[[link removed]] fighting
Pinkerton goons and Boston banks?  I mean, where’s the fantasy in
that?  That’s real life.  Some complain about all the gun violence
in the series but, hey, Manhattan and Santa Monica, it’s fun to wear
a pistol on your hip and pling away with a Glock at the target range
even if—

and _THIS IS EXTREMELY DIFFICULT FOR AMERICAN VIEWERS TO WRAP THEIR
HEADS AROUND, BUT NOBODY EVER CARRIED GUNS IN THE OLD WEST EXCEPT
MAYBE WAY DOWN IN TEXAS, AND IS TEXAS THE WEST?  REALLY?  BANG-BANG
IS ALL DIME-NOVELS, ‘50’S WESTERN REELS, JOHN WAYNE,
THE __“__HATEFUL EIGHT__”__, AD NAUSEAM._

My father had an original 1911 model Colt .45 from his days in WWI and
we had a Sharp’s rifle from earlier buffalo massacres hanging in the
library, so one time I asked my dad if people wore pistols on their
hips like in all the tv shows and movies. 

“No, of course not. Once in a while if someone was riding across
open prairie he might take a long gun for snakes, but pistols in those
days were too inaccurate.”  My father never saw anybody wearing a
pistol, he said.  He was born in 1893, which would have made him 30
years old when the pistol-packing Duttons, Harrison and Helen came
along.

The day Hollywood makes Westerns without guns will be the same day
they shoot the movie about miners fighting for better wages. 
Where’s the romance in that? Ain’t gonna happen.

[[link removed]]

_WHY WOULD ANYONE CARE WHAT VERSION OF THE PAST GETS TOLD WHEN IT’S
TOLD THIS BRILLIANTLY? BECAUSE IT DETERMINES HOW PEOPLE, IN THIS CASE
THE VIEWERS, SEE THE FUTURE._

It is a conservative phenomenon I call “Texification.”  It’s
the Marlboro Man version of the West, and in the case of the real
Montana, it’s turning my home state Red from Purple.  Is it
possible that if Democrats don’t turn off “White Lotus” and
check out what most of America is watching on Sunday nights, they may
get Trumped once again as they were with The Apprentice?

HERE’S THE OP-ED:

Montana now has two Republican members of Congress with Ryan Zinke and
Matt Rosendale winning last month, doubling its representation (while
Rhode Island will drop to one.) The state used to vote Purple, with
two Democratic governors and a Democratic Senator for eight years,
until 2020.  Then along came “Yellowstone,” the television
series. The Ankler.
[[link removed]]

A tremendous Red Wave swept Montana in 2020, with 100,000 new voters,
a lot in a state with a little over a million residents. This was the
Trump Bump.  The only Montana candidate that Red Wave didn’t drown
was the ever-foxy-four-fingered-farmer-of-the-people, Sen. John
Tester, of Big Sandy, who actually cleaned Donald Trump’s clock.
(How and why is another story.)

But in Montana and less-reported parts of the West, the 2020 Red Wave
is accelerating, the 2022 midterms notwithstanding. Democrats best
take notice. I refer coastal elites to the offering most snubbed by
Emmy voters this year, the most popular show, in fact, on American
television today, “Yellowstone.”

“Yellowstone” has rocked the vote in the Treasure state and far
beyond, not unlike “The Apprentice,” that bit of slick reality TV
which made Donald Trump possible in the first place.

“Yellowstone,” of course, plays like “Succession” meets
“Dallas,” all about billionaires and governors (Kevin Costner) in
cowboy hats and angry women (Caroline Warner) in low-cut buckskin
dresses who throw glasses of Bourbon at log mansion windows, which is
not to denigrate its creator, the immensely talented Texan, Taylor
Sheridan, who also wrote “Hell or High Water” with Jeff Bridges
and “Wind River.” Still, old Montanans like me scratch our
heads.  The series’ prequels, such as “1883” have nothing to do
with Montana and everything to do with Ft. Worth, Comanche warriors
and endless gunfights.  Which may be true, for Texas.  I don’t
know much about primitive cultures.  But by 1883, the railroad
already stretched across Montana, all the way to Seattle. Why would
anyone travel by wagon train as in “1883”? 

 “Yellowstone” owes its political success to its re-writing of
Western history in a romantically conservative fashion. You won’t
see union copper miners striking in Butte or Montana farmers battling
ranchers with rifles until the cattlemen, who supported open grazing
against homesteaders’ fences, were put down and stopped by the
Montana legislature. That was “Heaven’s Gate”, Michael
Cimino’s long (way, way long) yet basically accurate magnum opus
treatment of Wyoming’s Johnson County cattle wars. No,
“Yellowstone” is the Marlboro Man West, not the forgotten
labor/farmer West, and certainly not the new Sierra Club West. 

IT’S A NEW MEDIA PHENOMENON I CALL “TEXIFICATION.”

Montana was always a more civil place.  For example, back when Mike
Mansfield, a former copper miner, was Senator, (and the longest
serving Senate Majority leader,) everybody talked to everybody pretty
much.  I remember my parents writing Mansfield about Vietnam, “Dear
Mike: We don’t think this war is good for our boys,” and a week
later Mansfield wrote back, “Dear Dorothy and Harry, I agree,” and
then my father would lunch with Rep. Jim Batten, who nominated Barry
Goldwater for President.  Those days are long gone.

Folks are moving to Montana in the belief, or hope, that it is the
conservative refuge of mostly white freedom portrayed by
“Yellowstone.”  Forget about real Montana Indians, by the way,
who comprise about 7% of the population.  The new Republican
legislature recently tried to make it harder for them to vote, only to
be brushed back by a judge who laughed at the unconstitutionality of
the move which, in addition, would have limited the votes of college
students.  College towns and Indian reservations tend to vote
Democratic across America.  Maybe on the res they’re watching
Sterlin Harjo’s critically acclaimed “Reservation Dogs,” not
“Yellowstone?”

Ironically, even Montana has become a symbol of the nation’s culture
wars.  Democrats everywhere best take notice, though. To ignore
popular television is to be Tex-ified. It’s happened before.

.

HOT GLOBE™ [[link removed]] the column on Politics
and Climate Change by Steve Chapple on Substack

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Steve Chapple

Visiting Scholar, Climate, Atmospheric Science and Physical
Oceanography Scripps Institution of Oceanography Exec, Director San
Diego Unified STEAM Leadership Series. Read more of his work at:
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* yellowstone
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* conservatism
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* revisionist history
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