Kevin Costner’s The West is an eight-episode docuseries that premiered on the History Channel on May 26th, has been lauded for being a well-balanced, nuanced, and accurate look at the history of the expansion of the United States westward. Hosted by Kevin Costner, a long-time devotee of the Western, the aim of the series is to shine a light on the truths behind that history, warts and all, an aim that Costner himself revealed to have uncovered shocking realities about the deep tragedy the West was built on.
While the series includes stories about some of the more prominent names in that history, such as Lewis and Clark and Sacagawea, it also tells the stories of lesser-known figures, including fur trapper John Colter and Chief Little Turtle. In fact, Chief Little Turtle’s story is indicative of what the docuseries does right, bringing to the forefront the rarely discussed history of the Indigenous peoples at the time, those that occupied the land well before the settlers arrived.
‘Kevin Costner’s The West’ Acknowledges the West Belonged to Native Americans
The popular history of the Natives has long been that of the bloodthirsty savage, tomahawk-wielding wildmen with little disregard for innocents, and it’s really only recently that Hollywood has started to turn a corner in changing that narrative, with films like Martin Scorsese‘s Killers of the Flower Moon dramatizing the injustices committed against Indigenous peoples. Still, when it comes to how history paints the picture, bias still leans heavily toward the settlers who were forced to fight to keep their land.
Kevin Costner’s The West is, arguably, the first docuseries to properly acknowledge that Native Americans already occupied the land, and it was they, not the settlers, who were forced to fight to keep their land, land they had been living on for thousands of years. In the previously cited Fox News Digital, Costner explains how he, and by extension, the series, sees it:
“As we moved across the country, we told them [Indigenous peoples] all different stories, and we talked about that too, like, we don’t want your land, we just want to move through it. Now we want your land, and we want you to cut your hair. We want to change your religion. And we confuse people. And when we couldn’t convince them, we murdered them, and we made up convenient stories to do it. These places don’t have their names anymore. We named them after ourselves.”
That narrative is reinforced through appearances in the series by experts from those Western Indigenous tribes, who share the perspective that their land had been taken, and their ancestors defended it to their last. The first episode, “Fallen Timbers,” details the Indigenous resistance to the settlers’ infringement, a far more organized effort than what has been believed to date.
The ‘Kevin Costner’s The West’ Episode, “Fallen Timbers,” Tells the Tale of an Underseen Historical Movement
In one of the most surprising revelations, “Fallen Timbers” details the actions of Chief Little Turtle, who organized an attack on the man tasked with seizing control of the land between the Ohio River and the Great Lakes, U.S. Gen. Arthur St. Clair, and his legion by a coalition of eight tribes (Shawnee, Delaware, Miami, Ottawa, Ojibwa, Potawatomi, Wyandot and Iroquois). The attack was a rout by this Northwest Confederation, claiming two-thirds of St. Clair’s men in the U.S. Army’s biggest defeat. Costner explains, “For Little Turtle and his allies, it’s a triumph. Not only have they wiped out America’s only army, they block westward expansion.” Again, the series doesn’t romanticize the event by making it clear that the area wasn’t a wilderness to be tamed, but a Native American homeland.
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Gen. Anthony Wayne was selected by George Washington to create an army to fight the Native Americans. Wayne was a savvy military strategist who knew that his army had to learn to fight hand-to-hand so they wouldn’t face the same fate as St. Clair’s men, who applied the same tactics that had been successful against the British. The image of Wayne’s army cutting through “immense fields” of corn, destroying swaths of it as they make their way through, is one of the series’ most subtle nods to how Eastern forces literally scorched Native land to secure the area.
Wayne and his forces move slowly and deliberately, causing unrest among the Confederation, many of whom had been separated from their homes miles away for days on end. Finally, the Shawnee snap, attacking Fort Recovery, built on the spot St. Clair had been defeated earlier, against the advice of Little Turtle. They pay dearly, and the move severely demoralizes the entirety of the Northwest Indian Confederation, setting up a rout of the Natives by Wayne’s army. Defeated, the Native Americans were left to cede possession of the Northwest Territory, their ancestral homeland, to their conquerors in the 1795 Treaty of Greenville.
‘Kevin Costner’s The West’ Simplifies a Complex History and Misses Out On What It Meant for the Future
Cait Clark, the director of the Mercer County Historical Society and administrative director of the Garst Museum in Greenville, had worried that Kevin Costner’s The West‘s “Fallen Timbers” wouldn’t do justice to the story, but admits she was “pleasantly surprised,” saying, “You don’t really get a lot of attention drawn to this area when it comes to the opening of the West, so I was very impressed that they provided what was basically an entire episode just for this area.” She follows that up with acknowledging that while accurate, the time restrictions of a single episode meant a large amount of historical information had to be packed in, saying, “So some parts, of course, were left out, but it really, I think, gives the public a wonderful idea of what was going on here and how important it was.”
That points to one of the things where Kevin Costner’s The West falls short: simplifying a complex narrative. It succeeds at accurately depicting the events and the story as seen from both sides, but the complexity of the situation gets sacrificed to get that information in, like the negotiations and coordination undertaken by Little Turtle to organize the Confederation into action. Granted, it still shines the spotlight on a criminally underrepresented historical moment that honors and sympathizes with the Indigenous resistance to their homeland being taken from them, and in doing so, meets its goal of bringing those stories to the forefront. Ultimately, it’s a fair trade-off, bringing the tragic tale to vivid life instead of weighing it down with a scholarly breakdown of the complexities. The series also fails to dig deep into how this event, and others like it, led to the state of Native reservations and the people in them today, a legacy of demoralization that is still largely prevalent. But in honoring the truth of the past, Kevin Costner’s The West succeeds in a way that no other documentary before, and likely after, will be able to meet.
