‘It was wilder than wild’: Kevin Costner on The West
Was the Wild West really as volatile as its reputation suggests? We ask acting legend Kevin Costner ahead of his new docuseries The West arriving soon on Sky HISTORY.
Image: Kevin Costner's The West
There’s no shortage of iconic Westerns — from The Good, the Bad and the Ugly to Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. Such films have propagated many stereotypes about the ‘Old West’, the period when the then-nascent United States expanded westward.
More recent Westerns, however, are just as historically authentic as they are entertaining. This trend was kickstarted by 1990’s Dances With Wolves, depicting a US army lieutenant meeting members of a Native American Lakota tribe.
The star and director of that film was Hollywood legend Kevin Costner, who has helmed many further well-received Westerns in the decades since. Now he’s even made a Sky HISTORY docuseries on the era, having teamed up with acclaimed historian Doris Kearns Goodwin for Kevin Costner’s The West.
What can the new series tell us about what the Wild West was actually like? Why is it that much of what you think you already know about this romanticised era is probably wrong? Sky HISTORY recently had a chat with Kevin himself to find out.
It’s time to bust some myths
Kevin has previously enthused that watching 1962’s seminal How The West Was Won made him fall in love with the Western genre. Nonetheless, he’s also open about how, when he became a filmmaker himself, he decided to divert from the established template long laid down for Westerns.
Kevin explains to Sky HISTORY: ‘Everything that happened in Dances with Wolves or Open Range or Horizon actually happened out there. I didn’t make those stories up. They were interactions and they all have truth to them.’
Of course, his Westerns do largely focus on fictionalised characters or events, as Kevin himself concedes. However, the general point still stands. ‘They’re made-up ideas, but those interactions happened a million times. The documentary serves to back up those kind of stories.’
In Dances with Wolves, Kevin plays John J Dunbar, a US army lieutenant who assimilates himself into a Sioux community. This is despite the fractious relationship between the United States and the Sioux in 1865, when the film is set.
Kevin points out: ‘We did mislead Native Americans for our own good — and we kept doing it, from one shore to the other shore.’ As the decades went on, the US increasingly took over Western land once the exclusive domain of Indian tribes.
How long the Wild West actually lasted
How long did the Wild West last? Some sources narrow it down to only about 30 years, from the 1860s to the 1890s. Other scholars disagree with this assessment, tracing the onset of the era as far back as the early 17th century.
That’s because it was in 1607 that Jamestown, North America’s first permanent English settlement, was established. From there, English settlers migrated west to take up even more land.
Along the way, they came into conflict with Native American tribespeople already occupying this supposedly barren territory. The most famous such tussle is the Battle of Little Bighorn, where Sioux chief Sitting Bull triumphed over US Army Colonel George Custer in 1876.
This was obviously a big setback for the United States’ dreams of continued westward expansion. However, the inspirational Sitting Bull eventually met his tragic end in 1890, when he was shot by his own people.
This pendulum-swinging nature of US and Native American fortunes typified the centuries-long struggle — and yes, it did linger for centuries, not just a few decades. That’s another message Kevin is eager to get across in the docuseries.
The actor observes: ‘I think what’s interesting about America and the West is that that was a 400-year march and we are such an infant country.’ He elaborates: ‘America happened in inches. For 400 years, we were moving by inches and it was hard fought. It was contested, it was taken, it was regained.’
The true ‘wildness’ of the Wild West
Kevin acknowledges that early Westerns painted a somewhat sanitised picture of the American frontier. ‘When we first started making Westerns, people fell in love with the imagery. They couldn’t believe how big the country was and how beautiful it was. When we put music to it and we saw someone on a horse, we just wanted to continue to see that image.’
He adds: ‘To look at a town, you didn’t really understand how the town came to be; you just saw that it was existing. You didn’t think about any of the hardships, so we just romanticised what we saw. We didn’t see the exploration and the confrontation, which was inch-by-inch and usually ended in blood.’
Not all the victims of the westward migration actually perished on a battlefield. Even just trekking across the vast stretch of land that eventually became the modern United States could prove an immense, life-threatening hardship.
This is evidenced by California’s gold rush, which features in the fifth episode of Kevin Costner’s The West. When carpenter James W Marshall stumbled across gold in California in 1848, it wasn’t long before the news spread and thousands flocked to the area.
Unfortunately, the relatively few transport options available at the time weren’t really designed for coast-to-coast journeys. In fact, many of the travellers risked succumbing to accidents or disease on the way to California.
Kevin comments: ‘Wagons moving across a prairie must have looked like a sight like no other, but they were all equally nervous. They were heading into the great unknown. And America was just that, it was unknown. It was uncharted.’
It all also rather makes a mockery of idealised depictions of the Wild West. Kevin remarks: ‘You hear the term "Wild West" and it’s kind of a cliché, right? But it’s not. The West was wilder than wild. It was dangerous. We can make a movie about it and we can write about it, but it was a daily moment to be able to survive out there.’
The brave women of the Wild West
Kevin and Doris Kearns Goodwin are both executive producers on Kevin Costner’s The West, with Doris also appearing as one of the show’s many talking heads. The pair worked closely together to decide which topics to feature on screen.
The series’ fourth episode tells the especially intriguing story of Cynthia Ann Parker — who, as a child, was abducted by a Comanche band. She was brought up by this group of Native Americans and even had three children with a Comanche chief. Parker was eventually captured by Texas Rangers and returned to white society, albeit against her will.
Kevin comments: ‘Doris loves talking about Cynthia Ann Parker. It’s a story worth telling — but while that story is incredibly compelling and we chose it, that story happened hundreds of thousands of times. She was not the only captive that had that experience. That was a way of life in the West. That was a reality.’
He adds: ‘If you can absorb that, you have a better chance of absorbing what the West is really about. There was nothing romantic about what happened to Cynthia Ann Parker. It was tragic, heroic and, in some way, inevitable.’
Another woman of the Wild West appearing in the series is Narcissa Whitman. She and her husband Marcus were missionaries attempting to introduce Christianity to Native Americans, who didn’t respond entirely positively to these efforts.
More reasons to watch Kevin Costner’s The West
Kevin has already played a big part in turning around traditional perceptions of the Old West. Doris notes: ‘One of the strengths of all the movies that Kevin has made in this field is the understanding that there was a feeling of romanticism about the West — but it was a really, really hard time in the West.’
She continues: ‘There were conflicts every day. It was difficult physically and it’s important to understand that because that’s the way people lived.’
Even if you’ve already avidly watched many of Kevin’s Westerns, the man himself knows how you can deepen your knowledge of the era even further. ‘It’s a golden age of being able to communicate. We have documentaries about every facet of life and every corner of the world.’
He is especially excited about how Kevin Costner’s The West could supercharge young people’s interest in the period. ‘I can’t make them watch a show. Neither can Doris. But if they stumble on it, what they’re going to see is a level of truth.’
He opines that ‘young people are on their own course — or on their own wavelength — but when they do stumble into history, if they stumble into truth, it can mark them forever. There’s humanity and also inhumanity in this series — and that’s what happens in the formation of a country.’
The eight episodes of Kevin Costner’s The West collectively cover a period of about a century, from the 1790s to the 1890s.
Has Kevin Costner’s fascination with the American frontier piqued your own interest in the period? That’s a great incentive for you to subscribe to our newsletter. By email, we’ll keep you updated about new shows heading to Sky HISTORY.
