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.
