Indians in The Early Western

The other major figure besides the cowboy during the first ten years of the Western is the Indian (thus justifying the popular term 'cowboys and Indians' as a synonym for the Western).

As well as stories of conflict between Indians and whites there are a surprising number of films which deal with Indian life, if not exactly on its own terms then without the intervention of white characters. Indian Justice, a Path film of 1911, and A Squaw's Love, a Biograph film of the same year directed by D.W. Griffith, are both stories of Indian love affairs. Hiawatha was filmed by the Imp company in ioio and Longfellow's poem was doubtless a major source for this theme. Those who assume that the Western hero traditionally preferred horses to women may be unprepared for the frequency with which romantic love turns the mechanism of the plot in these early films. The theme of miscegenation is especially common; predictably love between the races is usually doomed. In Back to the Prairie, a Pathe film of 1911, Red Fox falls in love with the daughter of a white man he has rescued. His suit is rejected by the girl's father and, disillusioned, he returns to his own people. Love across the racial border is not always unsuccessful. In Flaming Arrow (1913, Bison 101), White Eagle, the son of a white prospector and an Indian woman, falls in love with a colonel's daughter from the neighbouring fort. After he saves her from an Indian attack, the final close-up shows the white girl and White Eagle together. But the more usual outcome is found in Ramona, the best known of the early films on this theme. The first version of Helen Hunt Jackson's novel was made by D.W. Griffith for Biograph in 1910. Allessandro, the Indian hero, runs away with his Spanish sweetheart. Eventually he is shot by hostile whites and she is left to grieve by his graveside.

Not all these early films are concerned with cowboys or Indians. No less than thirty-seven films from the period 1908-16 have 'Mexican' as the first word in the title; almost invariably characters from south of the border are villains, often referred to in the most unflattering terms, as in D.W. Griffith's The Qreaser's Qauntlet (1908). There are stories about miners, lumberjacks and emigrants in wagon trains. There are films about real-life characters such as Kit Carson or Daniel Boone, and many set in the far Northwest or Mexico. Films about the Civil War, many with Western elements, almost constituted a genre on their own.