1923 Recap: A Dutton in Sheeps Clothing

This week’s very special Christmas hour of 1923 felt less like the series’ second episode and more like a continuation of the premiere. It was only by its end that we could know who the world’s central players are and which of the Duttons’ sundry foes will torment them all season (I’m looking at you, Ser Bronn). The pilot’s cliffhanger left two Dutton men a hairbreadth from death: Jacob’s nephew Spencer in Africa and his grandnephew Jack on the cattle drive. Now we know they both survive — the outcome I was hoping for. That 1923 eschews a lazy, early grab at only-the-good-die-young gravity speaks to the show’s ambition. Do I believe these two hell-raisers are very long for the earth? No, not especially. But the series will earn their deaths if and when they come.

Yes, Spencer survives his leopard-hunting adventure, but Kagiso, his friend and partner, does not. Spencer blames the safari director, who should have suspected the leopards were a hunting pair but didn’t communicate this information to him for reasons I do not understand. What follows is an extended scene in which Spencer sits shirtless, bleeding from the chest, swigging whiskey, and chain-smoking, all to reinforce his leading-man bona fides. So let us tally them. He’s anti-racist and fluent in at least one foreign language; he can grimace his way through a painful medical procedure; he’s prepared to point a gun in the face of authority (a.k.a. the safari director). In fact, he’s prepared to make authority grovel for its life. And, perhaps most importantly for our purposes, Spencer looks good shirtless, broodingly sucking on a hastily hand-rolled cig.

When he eventually makes it to Nairobi to see his wounds properly dressed, Spencer finds his daring proceeds him. A young Englishwoman of remarkable gumption approaches at the bar to risk small talk with the surliest American in Africa. Both Spencer and I are charmed by Alexandra’s pluck despite the fact she utters an embarrassing “huzzah” when they clink glasses. She — and the coven of twits who follow her about — are tickled to learn that here before them drinks the stone-cold killer they’ve heard so much about.

But Alexandra is regrettably engaged to a drab, beanstalk man in whom she has no amorous interest whatsoever. It’s a society marriage that will leave the leonine bride — her father’s description — bored senseless. Duty calls. And Spencer has no time for romance anyway. Despite the fact his seeping body is almost certainly submitting to the gangrene that will endanger his hunting career, he’s picked up a new assignment. There’s a spotted hyena in Tanganyika that’s terrorizing the railroad workers as they no doubt attempt to strip whatever is valuable from the East African soil and relocate it to Europe. Love is timing.

Meanwhile, back on the Montana range, we quickly learn that the bullet fired at Jack Dutton in the season premiere hit his horse instead. But that distinction isn’t enough to stop Uncle Jake from pistol-whipping the sheep farmer Banner for endangering Jack’s life and, in fact, all of their lives. His math is simple and convoluted at the same time: A family’s survival depends on the man’s survival, which depends on his cattle’s survival, which depends on the grass. If your sheep eat a man’s grass, you may as well have shot that man’s nephew. He’s going to die anyway. And that’s exactly what Banner did when he clipped the fence to graze his sheep on Dutton land.

The punishment that vigilante Jacob doles out is the immediate requisition of Banner’s entire flock and the death of Banner and his men by hanging on horseback. In the year of our Lord 1923. No court, no jury, no law but the wild wind. The men have until their horses spook or simply wander off in search of food to wriggle their hands free and somehow save themselves from the nooses threatening their necks. It’s hanging reimagined as torture; certain death dressed up as a weird kind of frontier mercy. If your horse is as loyal as a cowboy’s, you’ll have time to figure out an escape.

For his part, Jacob hopes at least one of the Scotsmen does survive to tell the tale of his run-in with the big, bad rancher. The Dutton patriarch runs on meat, potatoes, and four hours of sleep; his only stories start with “back in my day,” and every conversation is actually a lesson you’ll thank him for later. “Man will choose to take what you built rather than try to build it for himself,” he tells Jack, who stands to inherit the Yellowstone ranch one day. The sentiment doesn’t register as a true observation about the men he sees — who in this rugged land has taken shit off Harrison Ford lately? No, it’s a ready excuse to maintain his property rights by whatever brutality he sees fit. And on Taylor Sheridan’s range, there’s no woke nephew to object. No one to explain that Hobbes wasn’t writing a history of man; that the state of nature is just a silly li’l thought experiment; that the despotism of capital has infected gramps’s brain.

Luckily, Banner’s horse is so loyal that the sheep herder manages to take a nap with the noose around his neck! He’ll survive to tell the good people of Bozeman the laws their livestock commissioner broke in the name of justice. And I’m glad for it because he’s already making an interesting foil to Jacob. He’s just as industrious, just as hardscrabble. Despite what Jacob says, Banner’s not a pariah swooping in to take what’s his. He just had the misfortune to point his wagon westward a few years too late. He could be Jacob if not for the accent and the “grass-maggots” he keeps for company.

But the range isn’t the only part of the west that still runs wild in 1923. At the reservation school, life persists in the direction of unchecked cruelty. Sister Mary’s only pedagogy is violence, which just so happens to be her most rebellious student Teonna’s go-to form of protest. There are sweeping lessons, laundry lessons — it’s a charm school for remaking Native American girls into wives a white man wouldn’t refuse. It’s boring and brutal, and the food they serve is maggot-infested. When Teonna objects to eating it by pulverizing Sister Mary, who, of course, hit her first, she’s given a punishment so backward and callous — and, oh yeah, America still uses it on about 45,000 prisoners on any given day.

At the Rez school, solitary confinement is called the hotbox, but it’s outside in North Dakota, so really, it must be freezing. Teonna is locked inside overnight or maybe over several nights; it’s hard to say. Father Renaud warns the “petite sauvage” that the penalty for her next infraction will be death, but that only invites the question of who the real sauvage is here: the young woman who resists the indignity of maggot slop or the clergyman who puts it on the menu? When Teonna emerges from the locker, she’s feverish and broken, too weak to resist a nun’s molestation or another beating from Sister Mary. I’m beginning to think the priest is correct: She will not survive this place.

As contrast, “God’s Empty Throne” offers our first glimpses of the reservation itself and the families these girls were ripped from. It’s overseen by white men and women who govern from a place of total antipathy, where men wait two days to see the governor, even with an appointment. An older woman — who I think we can assume is Teonna’s grandmother — attempts to petition for her granddaughter’s return home where she can attend a new day school established by the Baptists. The governor throws up nothing but bureaucratic obstacles, but the resolve on the grandmother’s face is clear. There is hope for Teonna yet. And maybe some glory in her future, too. Did anyone notice Grandma’s appointment slip? Do I spy the surname “Rainwater” — a storied and preeminent family in the Yellowstone universe — written out?

By comparison to the white overlords installed by the U.S. government, the Duttons look downright neighborly. They’re Robin Hoods, except they steal from the poor to give to the even poorer. They bring sheep they took off Banner to the reservation as a gift for the tribe, whose grasses have suffered from the locust, too. Now, they’re eating mutton and wearing wool, all thanks to Jacob, whose family stole their land in the first place.

Helen Mirren sadly sits most of this episode out. The women just wait at the Yellowstone for the men to return from moving cattle around. They pass the time with chores and meals and gossip about whether or not Elizabeth is already pregnant with Jack’s child. But there’s one woman who finds herself emboldened to seek out adventure before the episode ends.

Runaway bride Alexandra ditches her wedding party and demands Spencer whisk her away to the bush with him. She’s so spirited and intriguing and rose-cheeked that he can’t say no. He’s her reluctant knight in shining armor, but it’s clear she’ll be saving him — from his night terrors, from his days on the run from his own family. What was it Helen Mirren said to Elizabeth last week? “You will be free in a way that most people cannot conceive.” I didn’t wholly believe it then, but seeing what a firecracker like Alexandra has just escaped in favor of becoming a rancher’s wife, I’m nearly convinced.

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