I watched a few episodes of this new series which starts out at Fort Bridger and quickly moves to what could only be a reference to the Mountain Meadow Massacre, which meant crossing the Colorado Plateau and dropping down onto the Mojave Desert at the Virgin River, where Brigham Young had his snowbird residence.
Juanita Brooks wrote the Mormon-approved version of this notorious ambush and I am not scholar enough to contradict the author. But I was a kid in the town where they shot the scapegoat off the back of a buckboard wagon and into his coffin. We kids would read his epitaph, “Know the truth and the truth will set you free,” and wink and nod sagely at each other…
But years ago my tribe rented a ranch in Montana from the guy who was doing costumes for the Grizzly Adams TV series, and I became steeped in mountain-man lore, discovering Vardis Fisher’s book Children of God, which was a huge bestseller when it was published back in 1939 (along with The Grapes of Wrath and sold as many copies).
I received an old copy of this book for Christmas last year and from the way this Netflix series looks, I suspect the producers read it, too. But the director Sam Peckinpah’ed the whole show all the way to a hugely exaggerated Hell. I mean, those myth busters showed how a cap-&-ball pistol cannot blow a grown man onto his back and back down the trail. And — Christ on a crutch — the arrows were whizzing around the pious pioneers’ ears like a hornets’ nest — actually, it reminded me of the 106 Recoilless Rifle we were trained on for riot control: a cannon mounted on a little wagon with a motor (called an army mule), which any private can load, yank the lanyard and fire these flachettes — wicked little darts — like grapeshot into a crowd of protesters.
Even though modern manufactured arrows were readily available in fabulous abundance, the industrious Mormons would rather dig their ditches to irrigate their desert or even starve rather than sit around making arrows — a tedious and time-consuming frustration without a lathe. So the plot lost considerable credibility for me with all the ultra violence.
It occurs to me that the producers are trying to show us how we committed crimes with callous and unbridled ambition, leaving a landscape that looked like Gaza, perhaps to either relieve or revive the White Man’s guilt over funding these atrocities (with our tax dollars) all these years later.
Be First to Comment