I often like to think that there are two broad kinds of films that take the historical American West as their setting. The first, by far the most common, is what is usually meant to when we refer to “Westerns:” movies filled with cowboys, lawmen, ten-gallon hats, revolvers, and jangling spurs, where the Civil War and the railroad provide a backdrop for the final phase of American imperialism and the coming of industrial capitalism to all corners of the continent. The other, much rarer, variety is exemplified by such films as The Revenant or, after a fashion, Prey. Set during the 18th or early 19th century, what I might call “frontier” films live in an earlier world of much more equal power dynamics between Europeans and Native Americans, when the fur trade dominated the backcountry, flintlocks were the pinnacle of weapons technology, and early efforts at exploration were just embarking from the cities originally considered to be the West, Pittsburgh and St. Louis. Imagine my (pleasant) surprise, then, when I discovered that Netflix’s new limited series would actually prove to be a mix of the two.
American Primeval takes place entirely within the year 1857. American sovereignty has nominally been extended across all of what will become the continental forty-eight states and other powers like Britain, France, and Mexico have been expelled, yet the railroad has not extended much further than the western bank of the Mississippi river, and effective force on the ground is limited to thinly-spread numbers of US cavalry garrisoned in scattered, rudimentary forts and trading posts. The Civil War is still four years away, and while Kansas continues to bleed at the hands of pro-slavery and abolitionist militias, the real conflict in the Great Basin is between the newly resettled Mormons under the leadership of Brigham Young, the old guard of fur traders and frontiersmen being pushed out, and the Shoshone people who are steadily losing their ancestral lands to both. Into this maelstrom comes Sarah and Devin Holloway, a mother and son pair who are desperate to make it out to Devon’s father in the fictional town of Crook Springs. After making it to Fort Bridger in the Wyoming Territory, Sarah and Devin find themselves without a guide, and though they’re able to join a party of Mormons, traders, and other settlers, that group is soon massacred by mask-wearing brigands that the Holloways barely escape with the help of Shoshone-raised frontiersman Isaac (Taylor Kitsch). While the small group attempts to evade bounty hunters that have picked up Sarah’s trail from a murder on the East Coast, a Mormon husband separated from his wife during the massacre searches for her while she in turn is taken as a captive of a militant band of Shoshone and eventually adopts their ways after learning that the brigands that attacked their caravan were actually Mormon militia intent on defending what they see as their God-given promised land from all comers—including the United States government.
By and large, the sweeping yet personal narratives of American Primeval do a good job of faithfully reproducing this transitional era of the Western frontier in perhaps the last decade when there were real possibilities for anything other than the domination of white, Protestant American settlers over the plains. I was particularly pleased to see a show cast the 19th century Mormon leadership in the sinister light they so rightly deserve, and the parallels with certain contemporary religious movements that spew reprehensible rhetoric in blissful self-righteousness are, I’m sure, intentional. The inciting massacre is even based on an historical event, the Mountain Meadows Massacre. That is not to say, however, that the show is otherwise all that creative or unorthodox. Most character arcs, from relationships formed to sacrifices made to noble or ignoble ends, are rather predictable, if still enjoyable.
My biggest disappointment with American Primeval, as it turns out, was that it felt more like a prologue or opening act than a self-contained story, and a somewhat disconnected one at that. The narrative thread of Sarah, Devin, and Isaac never re-crossed with that of the Mormon militia and Shoshone after the first episode, though it did serve to establish the main band of Shoshone as those who raised Isaac. What’s more, while they do suffer some setbacks and casualties, the forces of Brigham Young emerge in the finale unquestionably victorious; not only have they bought Fort Bridger from its proprietor and burned it to the ground, they have wiped out the Shoshone, including the last witnesses to the settler massacre that could identify the Mormons as culprits and even eliminated an entire US Cavalry unit to the last man, all without any repercussions. While it somewhat captures the spirit of 1850s Utah—the Mormon War of 1857-8, which this show appears to loosely adapt, was largely bungled by President Buchanan and featured no actual conflicts between opposing military forces despite the role of Mormon militias in killing an estimated 150 non-Mormon settlers—it leaves out the negotiations that brought Brigham Young’s followers back under official United States sovereignty, reestablished the US Army’s (peaceful) access to the Utah Territory, and perhaps most importantly replaced Young as governor with a non-Mormon. This is not exactly the caliber of retribution such a renegade sect deserved, but it is at least something that could have drawn the show to a proper historical close, rather than leaving less-knowledgeable viewers to do a double take and Google whether the Mormons were actually once an independent country.
As recent Westerns go, however, American Primeval certainly proved enjoyably enough for me, with an admirably fresh historical take on setting and, in some respects, narrative. The performances are solid, the action is riveting, and of course the scenery and establishing shots are hauntingly beautiful. You could do much worse if you’re looking for a good 19th-century period piece to sink your teeth into.