Settler dramas: Jennifer Lynn Peterson, ‘The Covered Wagon: Location Shooting and Settler Melodrama’, in Rob King, Charlie Keil (eds), The Oxford Handbook of Silent Cinema, Oxford University Press, 2024, pp. 569-593 | settler colonial studies blog

Settler dramas: Jennifer Lynn Peterson, ‘The Covered Wagon: Location Shooting and Settler Melodrama’, in Rob King, Charlie Keil (eds), The Oxford Handbook of Silent Cinema, Oxford University Press, 2024, pp. 569-593

27Feb24

Abstract: This chapter offers an analysis of The Covered Wagon (1923), one of the most commercially successful films of the silent era, through the critical framework of settler colonialism. Shot on location in Utah and California, the film is a period piece depicting white settlers traveling westward along the Oregon trail in 1848. Modeled on the epic scope of D. W. Griffith’s 1915 The Birth of a Nation, The Covered Wagon used landscape and melodrama to naturalize the colonial impulse. The film also made the covered wagon itself into an iconic, nostalgic precursor to the automobile, at a time when the Ford Model T was selling more than a million units a year, and when the federal government was launching its first major road-building initiatives. In this respect, The Covered Wagon helped pave the way for fossil capitalism, serving as an ideological archetype for a generation of Hollywood films to come.

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