Nature seems to smile a welcome
by Bill Miller for
the Mail Tribune
Monday, July 8th 2019
Last week, I wrote
about the excitement brought to Southern Oregon in 1924 by the silent motion
picture “The Covered Wagon.”
The Mail Tribune gave surviving
pioneers free tickets to a
Oregon editorial writers, reporters and
other folk who were much too young to have ever experienced a four-month walk
across the continent, enthusiastically proclaimed the movie “the greatest
America has ever produced. This is a good thing for Oregon. Nine out of 10
people east of the Appalachians don’t know whether Oregon is a national park or
an outdoor sport.”
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| William Mason Colvig |
William Colvig, one of Southern
Oregon’s earliest pioneers strongly disagreed.
“I cannot entirely agree with you in
regard to the advertising value to Oregon of the motion picture,” he said.
Nearly a year earlier, Colvig had
attended the West Coast premiere of the movie at the Egyptian Theater in
Hollywood (April 10, 1923).
“As I am one of the Argonauts that came
to this state, I am presumptuous enough to believe that I am a better critic of
that picture than those to whom it was submitted,” he said.
Colvig offered a long list of perceived
inaccuracies in the production, starting with the gathering of the wagons in
1845 in Westport, what the film said was the name of Kansas City at the time.
 |
| William Mason Colvig |
“Humbug,” Colvig said. “I don’t know
what it was called in 1845, but we lived within six miles of that place
continuously from 1847 until we left in 1851. It was always known as Kaw
Landing, it being at the mouth of the Kaw River.”
He noted that the 200 movie covered
wagons were all covered in “snow white sheets” in the beginning, and, at the
end of the movie, they were still just as gleaming white.
Yet, even worse than that, “Each wagon
had a brake. Mankind had not yet devised such a useful contrivance.”
Most upsetting to Colvig was the
differing portrayals of the pioneer arrivals in California and Oregon.
“There are some fine pictures shown of
the California end of the journey, beautiful valleys and rich gold mines,” even
though it was supposedly 1845 and the California Gold Rush wouldn’t start for
three more years.
“Contrast that,” he said, “to the
miserable ending on our Oregon Trail.”
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| "Oregon at Last" |
The picture ended with wagons huddled
together in a small mountain valley covered in a foot of snow. Mothers held
babies and pleaded to the heavens, “Oh, my God. Will this journey never end?”
“Just then,” Colvig said, “a
mountaineer appears, and to answer the women’s wails, he tells these
travel-worn people, ‘Why, you’re already in Oregon.’
“Now really? No one ever knew the
ground to be covered with snow in Oregon in early October.”
Colvig preferred that the movie show
one of Oregon’s “fair valleys that border the sundown seas; a land of fertile
soil, warmed by genial sun, and where nature seems to smile a welcome.”
What would the millions of people who
would see the movie see instead?
“They will wonder why anyone would
undergo the hardships, struggles and privations that were endured by these
pioneers to reach such a miserable Godforsaken-looking place as that shown in
the final picture.”
Even though Judge Colvig didn’t like
the movie, like other pioneers, he penned an essay for the Mail Tribune about
his crossing the prairie in 1851.
But, that, my friends, is a column for
another day. See you then.
Writer Bill Miller is the author of
“History Snoopin’,” a collection of his previous history columns and stories.
Reach him at newsmiller@live.com or WilliamMMiller.com.
https://mailtribune.com/lifestyle/nature-seems-to-smile-a-welcome
