51吃瓜

Growing up in Texas, worked cattle before spending three decades struggling as an actor. That background is what separates his series Yellowstone from every other prestige drama on television. It鈥檚 a show built on the gap between what the American cowboy actually was and what a century of movies made him into 鈥� a man who worked land rather than speculated on it, who passed it down rather than sold it off, whose loyalties ran to people rather than institutions and whose sense of self was built on physical competence in a world that no longer needs it.聽

By the time premiered on Paramount Network in 2018, Sheridan had developed a deep resentment a way of life being devoured by money, convenience and people who had never held a rope in their hands. Yellowstone is his to that loss. And it is, whatever else you want to call it, also a love story.聽

The Dutton ranch stands as Sheridan鈥檚 opening brief against the modern world. Sixty thousand of Montana, the Yellowstone River cutting through it, the Beartooth range in the distance. Sheridan lingers on this landscape the way other showrunners linger on dialogue, and he鈥檚 right to do so. There is something almost about the way the show frames a rider moving through a valley at dusk, or cattle being worked in a morning that鈥檚 mostly fog. The landscape鈥檚 beauty isn鈥檛 a flourish. It鈥檚 the reason everything else matters. You cannot understand what the Duttons are for until you understand what they鈥檙e fighting over, and Yellowstone makes you feel the land as something sacred before it asks you to feel anything about the people on it.聽

To understand what Sheridan is doing, though, one has to go back before the show. Before the myth.

Beyond John Wayne鈥檚 white hat: the cowboy鈥檚 journey from wage worker to violent icon to elegy

The was never quite what the movies made him out to be. The heyday of open-range ranching and long trail drives lasted only about 20 years, and the cowboys of that period were generally wage workers rather than independent operators hired hands, not heroes. cowboys for nearly a quarter of all cattle workers in the nascent American West during the latter half of the 19th century, though they have been almost entirely excluded from the mythology.聽

Moreover, the tradition that gave American cowboys most of their and technique 鈥� rodeos, broncos and lassos 鈥� came from and Spanish settlers who were ranching the Southwest long before Anglo settlers arrived. A typical was anything but romantic: Ten to 12 cowboys might manage head of cattle, working from dawn to dusk and beyond, in a careful hierarchy from trail boss to drag rider, eating dust at the back, urging stragglers forward. Which is why the cowboy belongs in the of the West, not just in its mythology.聽

During the of 1886鈥�87, thousands of cattle died when temperatures reached well below freezing the West. Many scholars believe that devastating winter was the beginning of the end for the cowboy era. Barbed wire closed off the open range, and made the long drives redundant. By 1890, the cattlemen had been forced onto fenced ranches, usually close to a railroad. The legendary era of the cowboys was over, but in the dime novels, nickelodeons and eventually the movie palaces of the 20th century, it was just getting started.

Hollywood invented the of the cowboy, which could carry whatever freight the culture needed at any given moment. In this regard, actor John Wayne as an iconic figure in the genre from American film director John Ford鈥檚 Stagecoach onward, elevating Westerns from B-movie to critical acclaim. These early films often portrayed a romanticized view of the American frontier, emphasizing , individualism and the taming of the Wild West. Wayne鈥檚 cowboy was a moral absolute. The hat was white. The cause was right. The violence was clean. He became an icon of the traditionalist notion of the Old West, and he held on to it until his final moments.

Italian filmmaker Leone broke that open in the 1960s. His A Fistful of Dollars in 1964 鈥� a remake of Japanese filmmaker Akira Kurosawa鈥檚 鈥� marked the dawn of a new age of cowboy pictures, spearheaded by actors such as Clint Eastwood, Charles Bronson and Franco Nero. The spaghetti Western subgenre refuted the classic Western鈥檚 unending romanticism, and Wayne outright its evolution, refusing to star alongside Eastwood even though Eastwood was eager to work with him.

However, Eastwood the test of time as a proper evolution of Wayne, one who could be an idealistic image of an American while simultaneously the kind of violence that the country was founded upon. By the time Eastwood made in 1992, the genre had begun dismantling its own mythology. The film began with a brutish cowboy disfiguring a sex worker鈥檚 face and getting a slap on the wrist as , not an opening Wayne would have countenanced. The result was an Academy Award for Best Picture.

The frontier鈥檚 final evolution: myth, anti-myth and the hired guns of the Dutton Ranch

The genre鈥檚 deconstruction didn鈥檛 stop there. Greek-Italian film director and screenwriter George P. Cosmatos鈥� (1993) gave the Western its most human antihero in years. American actor Val Kilmer鈥檚 Doc Holliday was a dentist-turned- dying of tuberculosis in the Arizona desert. Beset by coughing fits, alcoholism and a healthy dose of self-loathing, Kilmer鈥檚 portrayal emphasized the human frailty of an Old West legend over masculine . He says what he thinks to the point of offending almost everyone he meets, and he has a vocal disdain for any authority. Yet he himself to be the most loyal character in the movie. What Kilmer understood, and what the film , is that the cowboy myth works best when it鈥檚 inhabited by someone the myth is killing. Doc Holliday is not a hero. He鈥檚 a man with nothing left to lose, which is the only kind of man the frontier could really use.

Then came Australian film director Andrew Dominik鈥檚 The of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford (2007), a Western about what happens when myth eats the men inside it. There鈥檚 no honor here, no grandiose dueling in the town square, no damsels in distress needing to be . Dominik takes his time, exploring the psychological depths of his characters, choosing complexity over cheap thrills, humanizing and therefore shattering the myth of a world that has been worshipped and lied about the history of cinema. It is an epic about the development of the American cult of celebrity and the effects of this obsession on the individuals caught in its web. The was always a projection. By 2007, cinema was honest enough to say so.

This is where Sheridan walks back in. Yellowstone is not naive about this history. The cowboy life it depicts is not romantic in any soft . Cowboys get with hot irons. They sleep in bunkhouses and follow orders and occasionally get beaten or killed for loyalty to an employer who may or may not deserve it. There鈥檚 a feudal quality to the Dutton ranch that Sheridan doesn鈥檛 try to dress up.聽

John Dutton, by American actor Kevin Costner throughout the first five seasons, is a powerful and complex man, guided by a primal code of frontier . He murders and manipulates in the name of preserving his family鈥檚 legacy, calling it stewardship. His daughter Beth, by English actress Kelly Reilly in one of the great unhinged performances in recent television, is worse. She is a sociopath with a substance abuse problem who resorts to violence at the slightest provocation, and hates everyone except Rip, the ranch foreman played by American actor Cole Hauser, with whom she is besotted.聽

Where the franchise earns its depth is in the prequels, which flesh out the myth with actual history. The series , set during the great cattle drive era, pulls no punches in its depiction of what made the wild frontier so dangerous, following a wagon train of German immigrants westward alongside James and Margaret Dutton. Sheridan a team of historians and was widely praised for the show鈥檚 historical accuracy and attention to detail. The violence isn鈥檛 stylized. The deaths aren鈥檛 heroic. This is the West before it became a myth 鈥� before anyone had a chance to clean it up.

The year moves the clock forward to a moment of ecological and economic collapse. The foundational American myth of the frontier as a land of possibility is thoroughly dismantled. The promise of the Act has curdled into unpayable debt and despair. The land itself, once a generous benefactor, has become a hostile antagonist. Sheridan chose this moment because it was a of great drought, Prohibition and all this 鈥� the Wild West was truly becoming a relevant center of resources. The series tackled historical events such as the frontier wars of the early 20th century and the existence of boarding schools for Indigenous Americans 鈥� the machinery by which the land was cleared, distributed and emptied of its original inhabitants.

The West was never won: Yellowstone ends by giving the land back and leaving the guilt

What the franchise is doing, across all three series, is narrating the full arc of the cowboy era from the inside. The Duttons are an accurate of the West: people who built something on contested ground and slowly lost it to forces they couldn鈥檛 outrun, outspend or outshoot. Sheridan early that Native people want power and money as much as white people do 鈥� which in his moral universe means everyone is playing the same game on land that was never anybody鈥檚 to own. have noted that this framing can flatten a history that deserves more than equivalence. Sheridan seems to know it. He never resolves the tension; he simply learns to live within it, perhaps the most honest response the circumstances allow.聽

In , a Native elder delivered a prophecy that his people would reclaim the land after seven generations. Kayce and Monica Dutton鈥檚 son Tate, with his Indigenous heritage on his mother鈥檚 side, is that seventh generation. The delivers on it: Kayce sells the Yellowstone ranch to Rainwater鈥檚 tribe, sealing the agreement with a blood pact.

Whether it is read as a genuine reckoning or a settler鈥檚 hope of probably depends on what was brought to the show in the first place. What鈥檚 harder to argue is that Sheridan didn鈥檛 mean it. The whole franchise is around this ending. Yellowstone ends with the land returned, the Dutton family broken and the frontier myth brought to its natural conclusion. It leaves viewers with the question that the West has spent more than a century avoiding: Who did this land truly belong to, and what was the moral price of taking it?聽

[Ainesh Dey edited this piece.]

The views expressed in this article are the author鈥檚 own and do not necessarily reflect 51吃瓜鈥檚 editorial policy.