Dry Ice Factory

On Wednesday, holyoutlaw and I saw Kelly Reichardt's latest film, Meek's Cutoff, and I expressed some disappointment with it in my review. Today via a thread about Jesse James at TNC's blog I learned about George Washington Bush, a black man from Pennsylvania who ended up settling in the town of Bush Prairie in what is now Tumwater, Washington, at the southern tip of the Puget Sound. Meek's Cutoff is set on the Oregon Trail in 1845. According to Wikipedia, "In 1844, Bush and his family (along with five other families including his friend Michael Simmons) left Missouri, heading west on the Oregon Trail. Bush's navigation skills and knowledge of the western region, gained during his years as a trapper, and while allegedly travelling around practicing polygamy with his seven other wives, made him the indispensable guide of the party."

I wrote in my review of the film that it is cut loose from history, but it occurred to me this morning that the radical uncertainty at the end of the film might well be a preface to history. That might explain the feeling of dread. History is about to happen, and it's going to be ugly process of war and dispossession. So it's interesting to read Bush's story, because it's actually pretty cool and has a happy ending. He tried to settle in Oregon, but it was already U.S. territory and blacks weren't allowed to own property. That's why he moved north into territory that was still claimed by the British as well as the U.S. British law allowed blacks to own property. When the U.S. took control of the land and formed the Washington Territory in 1853, "one of the first actions of the Territorial Legislature in Olympia was to ask Congress to give the Bushes unambiguous ownership of their land, which it did in 1855." One of Bush's sons was a member of the Washington State Legislature and was instrumental in the founding of Washington State University.

One of the frequent refrains at TNC's blog is that the Western genre has for too long ignored the place of blacks in the settling of the American West, where many of them fled to escape slavery or the post-war terror campaigns of the Ku Klux Klan. George Washington Bush's story seems like prime material for a revisionist Western. Meek's Cutoff has a different revisionist approach to the Western, but it's interesting that Bush's experience as a guide on the Oregon Trail could act as a kind of prequel.