The first installment of Kevin Costner’s new Western film series Horizon: An American Saga isn’t necessarily the best Western you’ll ever watch. It’s thoroughly conventional in many ways. American settlers fight Indians and the elements to build a town, which eventually becomes a representative locale of the Old West.
It’s set in the 1870s, and 150 years ago, in 1875, the American Republic was fighting though the thick of the decadeslong Indian Wars. 1875, in particular, saw the United States Cavalry under Brigadier General George Crook force Yavapai and Tonto Apache Indians onto reservations. It wasn’t just Indians whom settlers fought. In Mason County, Texas, German-American settlers broke into a jail and publicly hanged a group of cattle rustlers. The West was dangerous, violent, but somehow seductive.
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The opening minutes of Horizon show a group of settlers trying to settle a river valley in the American West, only to be killed by Indians and replaced by a larger group of settlers who are also slayed by a violent Indian raid. Things finally stabilize, to some degree, when the United States Army shows up as a squadron of well-armed and well-trained cavalrymen.
Horizon is, in many ways, welcome. It shows the U.S. Army soldiers as a serious and professional, if imperfect, force that takes its mission seriously. The soldiers sometimes disagree with the settlers, but Costner’s portrayal of the Army is worthwhile for its complexity. One of the soldiers is a convinced noninterventionist; his superior officer is convinced of the United States’s Manifest Destiny, or inevitable ability and right to rule the American West. Both men represent very real dispositions among the American Army in 1875.
The commanding general of the U.S. Army in 1875 wedded both dispositions. William Tecumseh Sherman was no ideologue, but he was a trained soldier who believed violence needed to put down by superior (but ordered) violence. He extended the vision of war-making he articulated in the Civil War — “war is hell” — to the Indian Wars. This did not mean that Sherman, or the army he commanded, was particularly bloodthirsty in his approach of the pacification of the West. Sherman gave a wide berth for policymakers to try to enact treaties with Native Americans, but when the treaties failed to bring peace, Sherman launched his army into action.
Military action against Indian tribes was brutal and morally dubious. Indian attacks enraged Sherman because he believed they went against the laws of civilized warfare. When a group of American soldiers was ambushed in what became known as the Fetterman Massacre in 1866, Sherman wrote that the U.S. Army “must act with vindictive earnestness against the Sioux, even to their extermination, men, women and children.” Sherman went so far as to propose the American Army match the ferocity of its Indian opponents.
“During an assault,” he wrote to a colleague, “the soldiers can not pause to distinguish between male and female, or even discriminate as to age. As long as resistance is made, death must be meted out, but the moment all resistance ceases, the firing will stop and all survivors turned over to the proper Indian agent.” Violence was for better or worse the story of the American West, but what came after it was American building, educating, and socializing, all the hallmarks of free republican civilization that Americans know and love.
Americans don’t think about the military as a stabilizing or domestically protective force in their lives today. We don’t worry about Indian raids or invasions by foreign powers. We’re insulated from political and social violence to degrees that even other countries in 2025 are not. And we enjoy that insulation because the U.S. Army on the Western frontier was largely successful in its mission. For all the immoral violence the U.S. Army meted out in the Indian Wars (and some of it was indeed immoral), it did bring a modicum of respect for human life and social dignity that did not exist on a frontier dominated by Native Americans or unorganized and sometimes lawless settlers.
Colonialism scholar Bruce Gilley notes that colonialism was not just political stability or railroads or other economic and social benefits: “It is also legitimate governance, opportunities, protection, self-development, emancipation. And dignity. Colonialism gave people dignity, for the first time in their life. Regardless of who you are, which tribe you belonged to, or whether you are friends with The Big Man.”
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Its easy to look at the history of the of the American West as a litany of violence, often instigated by white settlers against indigenous groups. But that would obfuscate the very real lesson of society-building that took place in the great American West. From 1865 to 1900 the United States became the continental power that helped win two world wars and stop the worldwide rise of communism during the Cold War.
An undeveloped Far West would have made all of those prospects considerably more difficult, if not impossible. Calvary raids and Indian Wars, strange as it might seem, paved the way for the dignified Western society we appreciate today.
Miles Smith IV is an assistant professor of history at Hillsdale College.
This article was originally published at www.washingtonexaminer.com
