"Comanche Territory"

Tonight I watched another Western from my 10-Pack dvd set. It was called "Comanche Territory" (1950), and by happenstance the storyline coincided with with the subject matter of last night's blog, namely - the removal of Indians from their land.

This was an excellent movie, however, and though there was a lot of the "Hollywood Formula" at work - including a comic relief character and a romantic subplot - there was overall an attempt to tell some of the real truth, though some of the historical scenarios may have been condensed or altered.

The film stars Macdonald Carey of "Days Of Our Lives" fame. Now, before we continue I need you to do something for me. I need you to go to this Youtube address :
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gwOi-wgkWLg

You will have to copy and paste it because Blogger doesn't show links. But once you have watched the video at that address, you will be permitted to continue reading this motion picture review.

Thank you for your cooperation.

Okay then, assuming you have returned from Youtube (no doubt uplifted by the experience), I will resume. I was saying that "Comanche Territory" gets some things right, and one very important thing has to do with the identity of the culprits who were behind much of the terror attacks on American Indians. In the movie, Macdonald Carey plays legendary frontiersman Jim Bowie, for whom one David Jones of England would one day rename himself in the 1960s.

Early in the film, Jim Bowie is trying to meet up with Comanche leaders in Arizona to secure a peace treaty that will allow the Federal Government to mine silver on their land, for which the Comanches will be handsomely paid. En route to the Comanche camp, he encounters an ex-congressman played by folksy but badass Will Geer, who warns Bowie that the treaty is being sabotaged, by......

Now this is important, because it concurs with what Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz says in her explicit book.

In the movie, made in 1950, the peace treaty is all set to go through. The Comanches and the US Government have both agreed to it, under honorable conditions. But then Will Geer blames the subversion on the "danged Scots" who are intent on settling upon Indian land, regardless of Federal regulations.

Dunbar-Ortiz has laid the blame for much of the violence against Indians at the doorstep of the Scots-Irish, a people originally of British origin who came mainly from Scotland and northern England, and who drove the indigenous Irish populace out of Ireland by violent means, so that they could occupy that land.

The author Dunbar-Ortiz says that the Scots-Irish learned how to displace a population first in Ireland, before they ever came to North America. She says that these hardened people used the same techniques of unrelenting violence against the indigenous Irish, who were finally driven from part of their land. These newcomers settled in Ulster, practiced Protestant Presbyterianism and about a century later they headed to North America.

As horrible as the violence against Indians was, and is, I was heartened to see in the movie that there were good guys among the Americans even at that time. Jim Bowie is portrayed as a good guy, and the Scots-Irish settlers are specifically portrayed as racist bad guys, and this movie was made in 1950. So that tells you something.

I am trying to find a balance between the total horror story I am reading by Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, and what I see in movies like "Comanche Territory".

Were there good White Men? I haven't found a single one in Dunbar-Ortiz' narrative. What she writes of strikes one as true, but has she left anything out? Any possibility of cooperation between the Indians and the Whites?

I have seen in movies, many times, depictions of cooperation. And though the movies are Hollywoodized, there seems to be some level of truth in them.

The depletion of the Indian civilisation cannot be denied, nor can the crimes committed against them by white men. But as these movies show, it may not be fair to include all white men in the equation as vicious murderers bent on extermination of the Indian people.

Just as it is not fair to say that all Germans are evil, it is also not correct to identify all white people who came to North America in the 17th and 18th centuries as killers or complicit in killing. The movie identifies a specific group of people, the Scots-Irish settlers, who defied the Federal Government and continued their attacks on Indian people in the west, before that area became part of the United States.

It's a very complex subject, but I was glad to see the movie tonight because I believe it presented an honest portrayal of at least one aspect of the subject. That not all of the new Americans were against the Indians, and not all of the Indians were against all of the Americans. As the Will Geer character says at one point, referring to the Scots-Irish settlers, "It's folks like them who give the White Man a bad name".

And it is folks like them - not all, of course, and not just Scots-Irish, but anyone of that mindset - who later founded the Ku Klux Klan and who today support a throwback racist like Donald Trump.

I believe that many early Americans and many Indians sought to live as brothers, and that not all on either side saw the other as an enemy.

Two Thumbs Up for "Comanche Territory".

See you in the morning.  xoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxo  :):)