Netflix softens the true story of the Mormon War and the Mountain Meadows Massacre.

Six dark-toned episodes of American Primevalan expensive-looking Western created by Mark L. Smith, the screenwriter of the Oscar-winning film The Revenant, is now in TV spot no. 1 on Netflix. This limited series unites for the fifth time, Friday night light‘ Peter Berg and Taylor Kitsch, for a history of the struggle for control in what is now Utah and southern Wyoming, just before the Civil War. Like many other past and recent entries in the genre, American Primeval is full of blood, weapons and death. The creators aimed for a singularly bleak aesthetic, so much so that the show’s sound designer, the interview about the project in the New York Times mentioned that Berg made him remove all birdsong from the mix. In promoting the show, Netflix claims that the series has a lesson that makes it stand out among entertainment set in the American West. Namely: The American West was a mess.

“We’ve consistently proven that we’re … a very violent, territorial species,” is Berg’s philosophical takeaway, per press material shared by the streamer. “An exploration of the inherent ability to become very violent is at the heart of it American Primeval.” And sure enough, everyone in the show is surrounded by murder, rape, and all manner of abuse. There’s a lot of history in here—perhaps too much—all loosely set during the events of 1857-58 Utah war (or Mormon War), a conflict between the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and the federal government.

Betty Gilpin’s uptight Victorian lady Sara is heading west with her tween son (Preston Mota) in tow. (As a nice touch, the son has a copy of Charles Dickens’ David Copperfieldanother story of vulnerable people struggling to make it through the mean 19^th century.) Kitsch’s Isaac, a classic Natty Bumppo/Hugh Glass, raised among the Shoshone tribe, grieving alone in the bush after his wife and their child were killed, reluctantly agrees to guide Sara across the Wasatch Mountains. The three are joined by a Shoshone girl (Shawnee Pourier) and pursued by a bounty hunter (Jai Courtney) who is after Sara, dead or alive.

This small ad hoc family’s struggle across the countryside would probably be enough history for some. But American Primeval is filled with a lot of people who want a lot of things. We also get Mormon émigré Jacob Pratt’s (Dan DeHaan) quest to find his wife Abish (Saura Lightfoot-Leon), who has been separated from him by violence; the war of words that famed frontiersman Jim Bridger (a wryly funny Shea Wigham) has with LDS leader Brigham Young (Kim Coates), who wants to buy Bridger’s fort and trading post to protect Mormon sovereignty over the territory; the despair of an idealistic American army captain (Lucas Neff) who tries and fails to keep the violence in check; and the conflict between the warrior Red Feather (Derek Hinkey) and his mother, a Shoshone chief who wants only peace.

That’s a lot of story lines, and some may seem familiar to consumers of many stories set in the American West—there was both a battered woman escaping punishment via the frontier and a younger warrior feuding with a peaceful tribal elder in Kevin Costner’s Horizon: An American Saga – Chapter 1e.g. Some of the plot tricks – a white man is scalped but survives; a token (a pocket watch; a canteen with a spiral scratched on it) travels across the landscape and tells a story when people cannot – come directly from The Revenanta much tighter and (for my money) better tale of multifocal Western conflict, set decades before the events of American Primeval. Bridger himself appears in both stories, first as The Revenant‘s idealistic good guy, played by Will Poulter, who tries to help Leonardo DiCaprio’s beleaguered Hugh Glass, then in Primeval saltas Whigham’s tough old hand who has seen it all.

Oddly, given the many, many individual moments of violence in the show, the Mountain Meadows Massacre, a fictionalized version of which sets the major events of the plot in motion and accounts for many of the casualties historians assign to the Utah War, is downplayed in comparison to the historical record. In real life, the Baker-Fancher wagon train, about 40 separate families mainly originating in Arkansas and went to California, spent five days after the beginning of the attack in September 1857 that led to the massacre with their wagons drawn into a defensive position, pinned down by a group of Mormon militiamen and Paiute people and suffering from lack of water, food and ammunition. The massacre itself took place on September 11, after a small group of Mormons approached the wagon train with a white flag and offered the emigrants safe escort away from the Native American raiders if they would leave their belongings as an atonement. The travelers took them up on this offer and started walking, and then their companions turned on them and killed them all, except 17 children aged 6 and under whose testimony, the attackers believed, would not be believed. These children were placed in Mormon homes and were only reunited with their relatives a few years later after the US Army launched a search to find them.

That massacre and its aftermath would make a good subject for a longer treatment, but doing that project would be a lopsided choice given the politics surrounding the story, and no one would want to see the result either because it would be too horrific. (The film from 2007 September dawnwith Jon Voight, tried this but was terrible for various reasons while in the 2022 miniseries Under the banner of heaventhe massacre is a B-plot in the finale.) Berg and Smith try to solve the problem by watering down the violence of the massacre and spreading it around across the plotlines until it seems to be everywhere. In their version, instead of being drawn out over days of siege, the attack comes quickly, out of the blue, with a female emigrant cut off mid-small talk by an arrow to the forehead. Yes, we see a lot of people die and it’s intense – but because we’re following the point of view of Sara fleeing, we don’t spend as much time on the scene itself. And you don’t see all those who are older than 6 emigrant children being killed. (You see one die. The Mormon who kills the little boy immediately rips off his hood and vomits.) In the show, the Mormon raiders let a group of women live and give them to their Native American collaborators as prisoners; historically, no women were allowed to escape the violence.

In Netflix’s promotional material, Smith hints at why the show softens the massacre: “We wanted to make sure we also showed both sides of the attack. It was driven by Nauvoo Legionof the Mormon militia, indeed, but we must understand that they perceived (the emigrants) as a threat.” To that end, Smith has Coates’ Brigham Young speak real words taken from the historical record. Headlines of the Terrible anti-Mormon violence that drove the church members westward to hover over the screen, and the script reveals many negative encounters between the Latter-day Saints and other white settlers, who engage the Saints in polygamy and threaten them with murder. Smith also adds a small batch of Mormon émigrés to the Baker-Fancher train, including the married Pratt couple, who are likable characters with views, “good eggs” whose separation during the massacre and subsequent reunion story drives much of the plot. (This creature American Primevalit doesn’t end well.)

There is nothing wrong with merging the story and combining it again to make the drama better. And it’s great to see religious conflict incorporated into a story about the American West; this story, even in other plot-heavy epics like Horizon: An American Sagatends to be flattened into a settler-versus-Indian scenario. But the cosmology of American Primevala relentless and (some of Jim Bridger’s lines aside) absolutely humorless TV series, sees violence as a floating plague, a random affliction that visits each group in turn, an inevitable thing that cannot be controlled, rather than something with a infinitely variable relation to human agency. Television has its needs, and Primeval salt can’t be blamed for trying to excel in a genre increasingly filled with Taylor Sheridan shows alone. But I’m afraid “the West was violent” isn’t as novel an idea as this show’s creators make it out to be think.