Linda Crew

Linda Crew is the award-winning author of nine novels. Her readers range in age from children who enjoy the Nekomah Creek books to adults who have appreciated her recent cross-over titles such as Brides of Eden: A True Story Imagined, and A Heart for Any Fate: Westward to Oregon 1845. She and her husband live in her hometown of Corvallis, Oregon, at Wake Robin Farm, where they were married under the oak trees thirty-seven years ago. When not writing, she enjoys working on their forest properties.

Now that I’ve seen it, I can say that I found Meek’s Cutoff beautiful. In researching the Meek Cutoff incident for my own book, A HEART FOR ANY FATE: WESTWARD TO OREGON 1845, I watched every old wagon train movie and recent reenactment documentary available, and none held a candle to Kelly Reichardt’s film for authenticity in terms of the costumes and equipment. Shooting the film in the exact locations where the pioneers who followed Stephen Meek on his “shortcut” was perfect, so much better than one more wagon train winding through Monument Valley or some Hollywood back lot.

But there the authenticity ends. I simply don’t know why the filmmaker had to hijack a true historical incident if she had so little interest in the truth in it, especially when what really happened is so much more interesting than the script written by Jon Raymond. Of course nobody owns history, and she’s breaking no law in ignoring it to suit her purposes, but why? Why not just commission a dramatic but wholly fictional script based on a group of lost pioneers? If it isn’t going to work as history, why not let it work better as dramatic entertainment? Because—as some before me have pointed out—this is one boring movie.

Reichardt’s insistence on supposedly basing the film on a true story breaks one of the rules I set for myself as a writer of historical fiction. I will not take a real person –in this case Stephen Meek—and give him a personality and negative traits for which there is no evidence. In the movie, the plot hinges on Meek’s mistreatment of a Native American man and his terrible attitude toward the natives in general. In truth, in 1845, Native Americans were actually more help than hindrance all the way along the trail, and most of the white leaders quickly came to understand this. When the two hundred wagons of pioneers (yes, two hundred, not three) found themselves stranded in Central Oregon, the solution had nothing to do with Native Americans and everything to do with simply finding water. Stephen Meek was too busy trying to talk his way out of being strung up himself by his irate followers to be threatening some poor Native American who might have stumbled onto the camp. It wasn’t about Indians. It was about water. And when Meek’s followers did finally come upon the heavenly vision of the Crooked River rising from the desert, this must have been a thrilling moment, worthy of dramatizing in fiction, I thought, and one that would have been a highly cinematic moment as well. But Reichardt doesn’t let us have that. And where were the children? Where were the people dying of typhoid fever, which was how so many were lost? For audiences unencumbered by any advance knowledge of the facts of the incident and its outcome, I suppose the conflicts and relationships among the characters might have provided more interest. But for me, and, coincidentally at the same showing, a half dozen descendants of the King family who were actually among Meek’s followers, it was harder to buy the story.

My own Great- great- grandmother came to the Willamette Valley on the Oregon Trail, and I’m a sucker for a covered wagon, so on one hand I loved every beautiful image in Kelly Reichardt’s film and thought that in some ways this must have been exactly how things looked back in 1845. I felt grateful to her for putting it on the screen. At the same time, it struck me that the film didn’t begin to encompass what this true and dramatic incident must have actually looked like in its scope and humanity. So my question to the filmmaker is, if our true story didn’t interest you that much, or you simply didn’t have the budget to do it justice, why come out to Oregon and lay claim to it by name?