Book Description

"Even in the earliest "Wild West" subjects, the lens of settler colonialism reveals major tropes that will become characteristic of westerns in their depiction of "our country"'s expansion across the North American continent. Single and split-reel fiction films initially may not have captured the vistas of plains and mountains depicted in the large historical paintings and murals described in the Introduction. After all, up to 1904, those companies producing motion pictures for sale or rental chiefly were located in or around New York (Edison, AM&B), Philadelphia (Lubin), and Chicago (Selig Polyscope). Moreover, their cameras, especially the bulky Biograph camera (using 68mm filmstock until 1903), kept them from venturing beyond their spartan studios, except for shooting travel films. The stories and characters that had long circulated in popular dime novels, however, proved a welcome source of inspiration. One figure was particularly notable. Kit Carson (1809-1868) was known as a trail-blazing hunter, trapper, scout, and Indian fighter whose frontier adventures led him frequently across the plains and into the western mountains in the mid-19th century. He had guided John Charles Frémont on no fewer than three expeditions (1842, 1843, 1845) through the Rocky Mountains into California on the Oregon and Santa Fe trails. Together they mounted an uprising against Mexico and prepared the way for California to become a state. Later the frontiersman led several campaigns against the Apaches, Navajos, and Kiowas in what became New Mexico. Carson's legendary stature as an American pioneer came largely from dime novels such as Kit Carson, the Prince of the Gold Hunters (1849) and The Prairie Flower, or the Adventures of the Far West (1849) as well as his "memoir," The Life and Adventures of Kit Carson, the Nestor of the Rocky Mountains (1858). Scores of novels featuring his fictional exploits were published and republished through the turn of the century. Even in its book cover design, The Fighting Trapper, Kit Carson to the Rescue (1874), for instance, graphically depicts his skill at hand-to-hand combat. Perhaps it is no wonder that AM&B made him the hero of its early story films, Kit Carson and The Pioneers (both 1903), shot with a more standardized camera (using 35mm filmstock) in the Adirondack Mountains, "amid scenery of the wildest natural beauty and enacted with the greatest fidelity to the original.""--