In one of his latest essays (in Italian translation Una nazione bagnata di sangue, 2024), published to stigmatize the spread of firearms in contemporary American society, the multifaceted American writer Paul Auster explains the current fascination of his fellow citizens for guns e rifles based on the consideration that the United States have historically been based on violence, particularly that committed by white settlers and pioneers against Native Americans to take over indigenous lands between the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The television miniseries American Primeval, six episodes available on Netflix since last January 9th, offers an exemplification of Auster's denunciation, further complicating the picture of victims and executioners, through the staging of a succession of episodes of explicit and brutal violence in what once would have been defined as the American Wild West.
Between fiction and reality
The main story told is pure fiction. The adventures of the protagonist are completely invented, Sarah Holloway, alias Rowell, on the run with the son Devin through Utah to Crooks Pushes to escape from bounty hunters who are looking for her for a murder she committed in Philadelphia. The context in which the characters move is, however, real: the so-called Utah War, which took place between May 1857 and June 1858, that is, the intermittent clashes between theUS Federal Army, the native clan of the Big jokes, Nauvoo Legion – the territorial militia of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, whose members are generally known as Mormons – and their allies Paiute, another indigenous tribe.
The historical background
Conceived by Joseph Smith in 1830 and spread to Illinois, Missouri and Ohio, the cult of Church of Jesus Christ of Saints of the latter days was the object of persecution because of the acceptance of polygamy and a proto-communist conception of society. After the lynching of Smith, which took place in Carthage, Illinois in 1844, the new leader of the Mormons, Brigham young, sought refuge with his followers in Mexico, in the area of the Great Salt Lake, where the distance from other settlements should have guaranteed the Mormons the possibility of practicing their faith in complete freedom. The region, however, was conquered by the United States, at the end of the war fought against Mexico between 1846 and 1848, and was administratively organized as the territory of Utah in 1850. Mormons They thus found themselves under the sovereignty of the same country from which they had felt forced to flee in 1844. They did not recognize the authority of the U.S. government and even proposed to transform Utah into an autonomous theocratic state which they called Desserts. The president of the United States James Buchanan, who took office in 1857, sent 2.500 troops to Utah to depose the Mormon-appointed governor, Young, and restore federal control of the territory. The result was what we would now call a low-intensity conflict, without any pitched battles, which ended with a compromise: the Presidential pardon for rebels, the Mormons' acceptance of federal jurisdiction over Utah and the handover of power from Young to a governor appointed by Buchanan, Alfred cumming, although Young remained president of the Church and continued to influence the politics of the territory.
The Mountain Meadows Massacre
One of the bloodiest episodes of the Utah War was theMountain Meadows Massacre. Here a unit of the Nauvoo Legion, together with a group of Paiutes, massacred at least 120 pioneers, including women and children, on their way from Arkansas to California, probably because they interpreted their presence as the premise of the arrival of federal troops determined to wipe out the Mormon Church. American Primeval reconstructs this event, although it takes some liberties for narrative needs. pioneers they put up a strenuous fight resistance and defended themselves for five days, from September 7 to 11, 1857, before being overwhelmed. In the fiction, however, they are taken by surprise and everything happens in the space of a few minutes. The militia spared seventeen children under the age of six who were then adopted by Mormon families. On the other hand, in American Primeval, in addition to Sara Holloway and her son, some women are temporarily saved, given as payment to the Paiutes and then killed except one by a group of Scioscioni. In particular, the television miniseries presents Governor Young as the deus ex machina of the massacre, uncritically embracing the hypothesis of his direct involvement in the massacre. This is a historiographically controversial thesis. Some studies, in fact, attribute the responsibility for the massacre to an autonomous decision of the Nauvoo Legion local commanders and they maintain that Young instead ordered his men to let the pioneers pass without causing them any harm, but the text of his directive – although never found in the original – reached its recipients too late because it was carried by a messenger on horseback due to the absence of telegraph lines in Utah.
The figure of Young
More generally, American Primeval depicts Young in the guise of a charismatic religious leader, but also fanatical, uncompromising and Machiavellian, who delivers incendiary sermons and reveals an absolute lack of scruples in carrying out the providential mission that God would have assigned to his Church. On the one hand, he orders kill the witnesses non-Mormons of the massacre, because he intends to place the blame on the Scioscionis. He also orders the annihilation of a group of federal troops whose commander has come to the conclusion that the massacre was the work of members of the Nauvoo Legion. This second massacre, however, is another product of the screenplay's imagination, like the destruction of the Scioscioni camp, both events that never happened. On the other hand, Young pays a significant sum for buy and then give to the flames an outpost, strong Bridger, in Wyoming, which the U.S. Army could have used as a bridgehead to penetrate Mormon territory. Here again, historical distortions abound, although they are not particularly relevant: Fort Bridger, for example, was purchased by the Mormons in 1855 and not after the Mountain Meadows Massacre; it was paid in gold dollars and not with the two saddlebags overflowing with banknotes that the television Young arrives with; the attempt to indict Jim Bridger, the owner of the outpost, for having sold guns and alcohol to Native Americans, part of Young's strategy to seize Fort Bridger, dated back to 1853, not 1857.
The voice of the marginalized along the border
To be a TV series television not particularly empathetic towards The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, American Primeval omits curiously any reference to the fact that theSlavery was still legal in Utah on the eve of the Civil War (1861-65). The miniseries seeks to provide a more nuanced perspective on the complexity of the American frontier, giving prominence to experiences generally left on the margins of stories set in the West: the female one, enhancing the proud resilience of the women that contrast with male brutality (to limit ourselves to the most emblematic figure, Sara Holloway escapes to the West after killing a violent man and, once in Utah, does not hesitate to massacre another man who raped her and his accomplices), and that of the indigenous nations, highlighting that the natives would like to live in peace but see their survival put at risk by the mere fact of being settled in a land that Mormons and pioneers have set their sights on. The character of the young native Two Moons, who leaves her original tribe to join Holloway and Devin after escaping an attempted rape and reinforces her desire for freedom by killing one of the bounty hunters, constitutes the synthesis of the intent of the miniseries of giving voice to the resistance of women and indigenous people, a goal of the screenplay enhanced by the very successful narrative device whereby the girl is mute because her tongue has been cut out. Instead, there is no none representation of African-Americans held in slavery by the Mormons although, while the Utah War was being fought, a little further east, in the Kansas Territory, a much bloodier armed conflict was underway between abolitionists and slaveholders which was a precursor to the Civil War.
Beyond the Western Genre
Like any self-respecting Western fiction, American Primeval is a celebration of individualism which, as the historian observed Frederick Jackson Turner already at the end of the nineteenth century, was a main feature of life along the frontier, an environment where everyone had to fend for themselves. The miniseries, however, also stimulates reflections that transcend those deriving from the usual contents of the western genre. Nauvoo Legion that presides over Utah is one of several examples of vigilantism that dot the history of the United States, a phenomenon that has re-emerged in more recent years with the formation of militias of private citizens, such as the Arizona Minutemen and California, intent on guarding the southern border to prevent the arrival of illegal immigrants from Mexico. Governor Young, who does everything to have the Scioscionis considered the perpetrators of the Mountain Meadows massacre, is a nineteenth-century forerunner of today's fake news spreaders. The Mormons' armed opposition to the federal government recalls the hostility that minorities eager to pursue their own version of the "American dream" manifest toward the authority of Washington, believed to be ready to plot conspiracies to suffocate in blood forms of dissent, especially when nonconformism is an expression of religious principles. Even in this case it is not a phenomenon limited to the nineteenth century. This is attested, for example, by the story of the Davidians, a group of Adventists who, in 1993, holed up for fifty-one days on a ranch a few miles from Waco, in Texas, to safeguard their right to pile up weaponry for personal defense, until the siege placed by the Federal Bureau of Investigation degenerated into one clash in a fire that killed four officers and over eighty cult followers.
The West Revisited
American Primeval deconstructs the romantic interpretation of the West as a place of opportunity for anyone with a modicum of resourcefulness and determination, replacing this reading with the representation of a brutal reality which leaves no room for any form of idealism and transforms even the apparently noble Mormon Values in a sectarianism intolerant e omicide. In particular, the miniseries criticizes the concept of “manifest destiny.” Indeed, the dialectic between the contrasting ways of living this principle by the factions that interact in Utah – the Mormons’ desire to build the New Jerusalem, the federal government’s intent to spread secular and republican institutions, the spread of the spirit of emerging capitalism, symbolized by the commercial transactions that take place in the shadow of Fort Bridger – produces only death and devastation.
A warning for the present?
American Primeval has begun to be filmed in February 2023, in times relatively distant from the political resurrection that brought back Donald Trump at the White House in November of the following year. However, it arrives on television screens by pure chance almost coinciding with the celebration of pioneers, the spirit of the frontier and the "manifest destiny" that Trump included in his second inaugural address last January 20. Even if the production clearly could not have set itself this goal, the dismantling the myths associated with the West seems to serve as an inadvertent metaphorical warning of what may lie beneath the establishment of the “golden age” promised by the forty-seventh president to his voters.
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Stefano Luconi teaches History of the United States of America in the Department of Historical, Geographical and Ancient Sciences of the University of Padua. His Publications include The “Indispensable Nation.” History of the United States from its origins to Trump (2020), US institutions from the drafting of the Constitution to Biden, 1787–2022 (2022), The black soul of the United States. African Americans and the difficult path to equality, 1619–2023 (2023). The race for the White House 2024. The election of the president of the United States from the primaries to beyond the vote of November 5 (2024).
