1923 Recap: Everywhere is America

I’d been wondering what would happen if Taylor Sheridan dared jettison 1923’s stagnant Montana theatre, where the characters and plotlines are stuck in a deep winter freeze. In “Only Gunshots to Guide Us,” he largely does the unimaginable. We get an entire episode of a series about rescuing the Yellowstone without ever stepping foot on the endangered ranch and its frigid corrals. The closest we get is the site of Whitfield’s planned mass grave (which will be recognizable to OG Yellowstone fans as the so-called “train station”). But the change in geography doesn’t change much.

One definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results. So, I’m going to stop watching this show in a way that drives me crazy. With only three episodes remaining, I need to accept that Spencer Dutton may never again see the craggy mountains where his brother’s body is buried (something I naively believed might happen in the season one finale.) This is not a series about a young Indian girl discovering the meaning of freedom after escaping state-sanctioned abuse.

Instead, 1923 poses a question: How much violence — physical, sexual, emotional, verbal, and financial — can people endure in a single calendar year before losing the will to get out of metaphorical bed (metaphorical because most of our protagonists are itinerant by this point)? Thankfully, Sheridan respects his audience enough to also provide the answer: There is no limit, so long as the characters never give up on the mirage of a “home” — be it tangible, ancestral, cultural, or spiritual — waiting to embrace them.

When we first see Teonna in this episode, her blind faith in a new homeland is finally cracking. “Everywhere is America,” she complains to her father after seeing that the Amarillo fairgrounds have been plastered with wanted posters bearing her face. They’re forced to run again. Instead of turning south toward Mexico, Runs His Horse leads the party north, “away” from the posters (though this doesn’t make immediate sense to me because turning south would also lead them “away” from the posters). Regardless, it’s the wrong call. The ranchhands who recently rode alongside Teonna betray her to racist Kent for a measly $250 reward and a blessing from Father Renaud. Over the last seven years, Sheridan has trained me to believe cowboys are the moral arbiters of the American West and so I was caught off-guard by their easy collaboration with such plainly bad men. All hat, no cattle, as they say.

Kent, in particular, makes so many abhorrent remarks over the course of each episode it feels pointless to focus on any one epithet. Yet I was intrigued when he compared Teonna to the wolf. This strikes me as an apt comparison, though not at all for the reason Kent thinks — she certainly doesn’t “lust” for the kill. But wolves are regarded as a keystone species; we know that when their presence fluctuates, an entire landscape changes. White men have been scrubbing Native Americans like Teonna from the Mountain West for decades by 1923 and the effects have been catastrophic for more than those displaced: formerly public lands are now enclosed, extractive industries like mining and logging have taken root, and white men terrorize the region with their unchecked greed.

Heading north out of Amarillo isn’t just a mistake because Kent and Renaud are on Teonna’s heels. It’s an arid, inhospitable patch of country with no place to rest. It doesn’t take long for Kent to run into Pete, who splinters from the group to search for water and shade. The confrontation ends in an electric if futile horse chase. Pete may be fast in the saddle, but that hardly matters when there’s nowhere to hide. His horse collapses of exhaustion, and Pete and Kent are quick to draw. Shots get fired as the episode comes to a close, but we’ll have to wait until next week to see who was hit. It almost doesn’t matter. Pete’s death would be tragic, but Kent’s death would almost certainly portend Pete’s death just a little further down the road. Everywhere is America.

On a very different frontier — the transcontinental railroad — Alex Dutton is also in search of a home that will adopt her and her unborn child. She does not find it in her sleeper car, where a young mother tells Alex that she doesn’t have the grit to survive the humiliation of the immigrant experience. True as that might be, Alex is white, pretty, and well-spoken. Like grit, pulchritude is its own form of armor. For example, when Alex can’t afford dinner on the train, the porter agrees to let her work off her meals as a waitress. She gets a clean uniform and an excuse to be somewhere other than her small cabin with its miasma of broken dreams. Perhaps there might even be something character-building for Alex in the role reversal — to find herself on the other side of the long meals she’s more accustomed to being served.

But — just like Ellis Island, New York City, in general, and Grand Central Station, in particular — the railroad is no place for a young woman. In her very first dinner service, Alex is coerced into patting down a man’s groin with a tea towel. It’s not that I want Sheridan to shy away from this country’s warts, but statistically speaking, how many forms of assault is one woman likely to encounter across three days in 1923? She’s been robbed, beaten, verbally and possibly even medically abused. What’s next? Are Mary’s small children going to pee in her new work shoes? “Mothers can endure anything,” her spiteful bunkmate tells her condescendingly. Still, maybe the line can work as an affirmation — a mantra to help Alex make it through the indignities of dishing up breakfast.

Just when things are looking up — a haughty British couple leaves this daughter of Oxfordshire a handsome tip — the dinner pervert turns up for his morning coffee. Luckily — I suppose — the couple is watching when he takes his hand, slips it under Alex’s uniform, and rapes her with his hand. For a second, no one moves. When her fight or flight instincts kick in, Alex quite rightly beats the daylights out of him with a silver coffee urn. The conductor puts Alex in a makeshift clink, but by the time the train pulls into Chicago, the Brits have given witness statements and she’s free to board the next leg of her journey.

Except the train to Fargo has been canceled on account of a snowdrift. Alex has two choices: Linger at Union Station and see what rascals cross her path, or take up an invitation to join her British guardian angels at their home in Winnetka. Alex opts for the devil she knows, and I, for one, can’t wait to learn why this is the wrong choice. Will they sell her out to her parents, who are friends of friends of friends? Will they want to steal her baby?

Meanwhile, Spencer edges nearer to the Yellowstone, though the lesson he’s taking from the journey is that you can’t go home again. “What happened to this country?” he asks the train porter, who suggests he’ll need to safely stow his rifle away from the other passengers. “What did Spencer expect to happen?” is perhaps the better question. Anyone who’s ever left home before will find themselves sympathetic. When you leave a place, it’s easy to picture it as you left it, stuck in a deep winter freeze. Perhaps he even imagined a Spencer-sized hole that he could pour himself back into.

But in this new America, Spencer’s not himself anymore either. He left to fight a war and expected to return the scion of the most powerful ranching family in Montana. Instead, he’s a vagrant, nodding off against a tree like Huck Finn when Marshal Mamie Fosset intercepts him. In a state the size of Texas, it strikes me as unlikely that these storylines could converge, and yet a television series must have some cheap thrills. Fosset hauls Spencer to Amarillo so she can make sure he’s not a criminal, which is just as well because he’s about to fry death on the same patch of desert that’s ensnared Teonna & Co.

From town, Fossett is able to call Sheriff McDowell to confirm that Spencer is who he says he is and that he’s heading where he says he’s headed. Until this point, I’m not sure we’ve seen the Sheriff do more than sit next to Jake Dutton and say, “mm-hmm,” so this must have been an exciting day on set for Robert Patrick. But when McDowell hears the vengeance in Spencer’s voice, he begs him not to come home and start trouble. Fosset buys Spencer a one-way train ticket out of her jurisdiction anyway.

Perhaps the most amusing exchange of the entire episode is a completely meaningless aside. The switchboard operator putting through the phone call from Amarillo to Bozeman lightly sasses Fosset over not knowing that Bozeman is a city, not a county, after which Mamie Fosset pronounces: “Impudence rides side saddle with anonymity.” The line is 100 percent superfluous to the plot, which leads me to believe Mamie isn’t saying it to the man sitting across from her. She’s saying it to us. Taylor Sheridan is saying it to us.

It’s a conspicuously didactic moment on a show that’s full of plausible didactic moments. (In a moment or two, for example, Fosset will declare that “you can’t arrest a man for what he might do,” which is at least tethered to the plot.) The more you think about it, though, it’s a sentiment easy to imagine coming from any number of characters with interchangeable life philosophies. Jake Dutton might say it. Append a “darling” to the end and it could be dialogue from Spencer. Tweak the diction, and it’s easy to imagine Kevin Costner’s John Dutton grumbling about it a hundred years later.

Across the Yellowstone universe, Sheridan writes of men and women dissatisfied with various aspects of the modern world, from the motor car to private equity. His heroes are creatures of a made-up forever past when the West was wild and cowboys kept to a code. Usually, I buy it. But distrust for “anonymity” strikes me as an anachronism in 1923, and finding its origins in the invention of the telephone switchboard feels like a stretch. Seemingly, Sheridan — like the Duttons he writes — has something to get off his chest.