Westward the Women

Two weeks ago, I happened upon Westward the Women, a movie I hadn’t seen since I was about eight years old. I grew up a fan of the Western genre, and back then there were plenty of Westerns being filmed to keep my fire lit. At the age of five, according to my mother, my boyfriend was Roy Rogers. One day she saw me making mud pies and asked who the pies were for. “Roy,” I answered. A year later I carried my lunch to school in a Roy Rogers lunch pail.

Many western-themed movies in the 50’s and 60’s treated America’s westward expansion lightly and tritely. There was always singing and dancing around a campfire and an attack by indigenous people which the natives usually lost. Westerns featured male actors more than they did female, and actresses along for the ride usually had well-coiffed hair and pretty dresses that were clean and unwrinkled.

Westward the Women was an exception. This movie about a wagon train of mail order brides traveling to California was filmed in black and white, one way to highlight how dirty and treacherous such trips were. It has since been colorized, but for me, blue skies and blue eyes are a distraction. These women got muddy, sweaty, sunburned, broken and bloodied. Their hair was usually a mess, and their dresses looked like rags by the time they reached California. The stark realism in the black and white version I saw as a child may be why this movie made such an impression it stuck with me most of my life.

Movies filmed years later such as Meeks Cutoff (2010) also show how strong women had to be to make the endless trek across deserts and mountains. I have seen two episodes of 1883 since it was released this year, and thus far it appears to have even more realistic roles for women than Meeks Cutoff or Westward the Women.

Another accurate depiction of women pioneers can be seen at the National Historic Oregon Trail Interpretive Center located in Baker City, Oregon. In the museum’s living history displays, the hems of the women’s dresses are caked with dirt as they walk alongside, not ride in covered wagons. Painstaking details, such as the fatigue etched on mannikin pioneer faces and artificial flies perched on artificial oxen dung, make this replica of the true Oregon Trail experience worth a trip to Baker City.