The rapist is snow and worms. The rapist is progress and private equity. The rapist is mining. The rapist is skiing. The rapist is the telephone and the icebox and the motor car. The rapist is Donald Whitfield, an actual rapist. Is the rapist ranching? I don’t think so, but you could make a case.
The second episode of 1923’s second season, called “The Rapist Is Winter,” offers a pithy summary of the Dutton family’s worldview. Every ideology and institution, every act of nature and act of man that despoils their way of life, is the rapist, a definition that at this point spares only the disempowered Indians, who they helped to disempower. The Duttons are forever victims of a changing world and its relentless seasons.
To conceive of their predicament this way, if only as a thought experiment, makes it possible to understand why one of the most entitled and influential men in the Mountain West — Jacob Dutton is the Montana livestock commissioner and one of the area’s largest landowners — routinely behaves as though he’s punching out of the corner. When his niece-in-law, Lizzie, announces that she’s going home to her parents after this world-altering blizzard passes, she tells Cara that what the Duttons do out at Yellowstone isn’t living. “It’s surviving.” That’s exactly how they like it.
The notion that the Duttons are survivors is critical to the family mythology. They are targets of perpetual attack. They alone can be trusted. To them, the fate of the ranch and the fate of the world are the same thing, not metaphorically speaking but morally. As if every other family struggling for a future among the purple mountains’ majesty isn’t subject to a similar set of pressures.
When this propulsive episode comes to its ominous end, snow has blanketed the great room of the Yellowstone lodge; a wolf, shot dead by Cara, lies on the carpet beside the sofa. The enemy isn’t at the gates any longer. The enemy is blowing down the windows and making itself at home. I was reminded of that great Isaiah Berlin line: “Liberty for wolves is death to the lambs.” In 1923, wolves and lambs can be tough to distinguish. Ask the Crow, who used to hold the Duttons’ land as their own, who the rapists are.
At the start of the episode, though, the Duttons, for once, seem in the ascendancy. Jacob learns in Bozeman that Zane and Alice won’t be subject to a humiliating jury trial because they’ve already been found guilty of miscegenation on a preponderance of the evidence: They were living together, they have “mongrel” kids together, and they have a marriage license. Without much effort, Jacob leans on the judge to sentence his ranch foreman and his family into Jacob’s own custody. Bigotry might be alive in the Wild West — the inebriated judge refers to Alice as a “flapper,” and her husband, who has been left maimed by police brutality, “the invalid” — but, in the time of Prohibition, it’s not as powerful as Jacob’s threat of blackmail.
Talk of a coming blizzard starts in the cold open; Jacob loads Zane and his kin into the wagon anyway. He would rather take on Mother Nature than face Donald Whitfield in Bozeman. But in 1923, no trip “into town” can go punished. Dutton men who sully themselves by leaving Paradise Valley do so at their peril. This will be no ordinary storm. (“No ordinary storm” is more or less the plot of every 1923 episode, though usually it’s less literal.)
Snow falls in sheets rather than flakes, and the Dutton party quickly loses the trail home. “Picket the horses!” Jacob calls to nephew Jack. “Asses to the wind!” Do I know what that means? Only vaguely. And yet this, for me, is Taylor Sheridan at his best: when the writing conveys a sense of urgency and expertise, when the men who stole this land remind us why they feel they’ve earned it. They abandon their journey and flip the wagon over. Do I understand why? Not entirely. But I trust it’s the right move now, even though I know it was the wrong move to leave Bozeman. The episode leaves burly men and small, scared children huddled together in the cavity of an upturned wagon. I have to believe this is the worst storm Jacob Dutton has ever weathered, but you’d never be able to tell from his face made of stone.
By this time next year, if Whitfield has his way, this trek will be much easier. The road from Bozeman to the valley might be a paved highway dotted with inns and restaurants. If Jacob gets caught in this storm a year from now, he could pull the wagon over and spend the night at a brand-new hotel carved into a hill with a hot spring. A blizzard is bad news for cold livestock, but 16 inches of fresh snow that falls in just a few hours? That’s gold for a ski resort.
Because Donald Whitfield has seen the future, and the future is Big Sky. He and Banner are in a car having one of their signature chats in which Whitfield berates his business partner for no good reason except that a TV show must have dialogue. Banner tells Whitfield that he’s lost his sheep herd to parasites, and Whitfield has the nerve to laugh. Gold, Whitfield reminds him, is immune to worms and drought and winter, and the demand for it never fluctuates. It may, one day, run out, but that’s okay, too. Whitfield has just come up with a new and inexhaustible way to rape this land.
The miners from Norway have brought to Montana a national pastime: downhill skiing. (I Googled out of curiosity, and this seems to be broadly historically accurate.) A developing economy and a modernizing world have produced a class of rich men living lives free from danger; Whitfield’s plan is to sell the “euphoria” of danger back to them in the form of sport. You can only mine a mountain once, but you can sell a ride down the face of it over and over. It’s a good idea, but Banner’s awe strains plausibility. He “sees the greed in our hearts,” Banner later says. Does he? Or does he just see Banner’s? Banner’s wife, Ellie, for example, has no trouble resisting the gold miner with a soul of lead.
I like this plot. It’s new terrain on a show that keeps handing us iterations of the same fight. In Teonna’s theater, too, there’s the sense of a story not just progressing but evolving. What if they didn’t leave Texas to go find the Comanche in Oklahoma, she and Pete ask Runs His Horse? Why trade life on their own reservation under the white man’s thumb for another? Teonna’s father doesn’t immediately agree, but at least he’s considering it. He doesn’t insist on accidentally delivering his daughter into Father Renaud’s wicked clutches for the umpteenth time.
We’re also beginning to see that the life of a Comanche in Oklahoma isn’t a mirror image of what the Crow have suffered in Montana. When Kent and Renaud approach the local U.S. marshal for help, they’re astonished to meet Mamie Fossett, a she-marshal played by Jennifer Carpenter. Fossett agrees to distribute posters featuring a sketch of Teonna’s face — am I the only one who keeps forgetting she’s wanted for murder and just not skipping school? — but Fossett also issues a warning to the newcomers. The Comanche and the Okies share a mutual respect.
Kent already violated this norm when he trampled that poor boy on the rez camp in episode one, so I was eager for his comeuppance. But later that night, the Comanche who arrive on horseback to take their revenge by bow and arrow end up dead. Even Renaud fires on them. (The rapist is religion. The rapist is the gun.)
Less successful, I would say, is this episode’s attempt to create conflict for Spencer in the Free State of Galveston. A grateful Luca delivers his maritime savior to his mafia-don cousin Maceo, who places Spencer under house arrest at his five-star hotel even though the man is in a desperate hurry to get home. When Spencer tries to leave by force — he decks a soldato — Maceo mulls over how to punish him for the insult of “disrespect.” (Did AI raised on Goodfellas write this?) Anyway, all’s well that ends well. Instead of blowing all his cash on a train ticket, Spencer leaves Galveston in a free truck, albeit as a rumrunner. And he got to try pizza for the first time, so that’s delicious for him.
Alexandra, in her own by-the-numbers story line, is still at deadly sea. Her tumultuous third-class voyage to America — the choppy seas! the screaming women! — is set against nonsensical dribble about how happy she’ll be when she’s finally installed at the Yellowstone making an army of Dutton babies.
I’m curious if Lizzie, who once harbored her own dreams of raising an army of Duttons at the Yellowstone, will still be in residence when Alex arrives. On her way to the chicken coop for eggs, she’s bit by a wolf that’s been driven mad by rabies or maybe just the blizzard. When Lizzie learns the cure is a series of vaccinations in the stomach, she decides to take her chances. But she doesn’t really have a choice in the matter. The doctor and the nurse hold her down to administer the shot. Lizzie’s been driven mad by rabies or maybe just the blizzard. Or maybe just the cold, hard loneliness of life on this ranch. The next time Lizzie miscarries, if it happens, I’m sure she’ll think of this moment. Anti-vaxxers aren’t born; they’re inoculated against their wills. (The rapist is Western medicine.)
“People shouldn’t be here in the winter, ” Lizzie says early in the episode. She’s right, of course, but the cattle herd can’t feed itself. The land can’t defend itself. And, anyway, we’re not talking about just any “people” — we’re talking about the Duttons, the last-living avatars for an ever-dying way of life. These men can’t go anywhere else. They wouldn’t be themselves if they ever got there.