Tearing Off the Sugar-Coated History of the American West – American Primeval
Let’s talk about the American TV series American Primeval today.
The title is American Primeval (2025), with alternative names such as Prehistoric America and Wild America.
This series is adapted from the 1857 Mountain Meadows Massacre. In that year, militiamen from the Nauvoo Legion launched a bloody slaughter against immigrants heading to California on the mountain meadows.
In 1857, on the wastelands of Utah, the sounds of horses’ hooves mingled with gunshots. This is not the romantic West depicted in Hollywood movies, with no heroic cowboys or galloping horse teams, only a group of small figures abandoned by history. Mormons, clutching Bibles, vied for land; Native Americans took up knives and guns to fight desperately for survival; and pioneers sought a way out amid the bloodshed.
American Primeval, across six episodes, drags viewers into this forgotten dark chapter of history.
This series reminds me of the British drama The English, but compared to that glamorous work, it is more somber and bleak.
The series opens with a brutal massacre. Mormon militiamen and Paiute people join forces to slaughter an immigrant convoy; women and children fall in pools of blood, and the cries of infants come to an abrupt halt. Director Peter Berg uses a long take to stare unflinchingly at the violence, with blood and mud splattering onto the lens, as if trying to burst through the screen.
The culprits of the violence are not the Native Americans, but the Mormons who style themselves as "God’s chosen people."
The Mormon leader Brigham Young in the series is portrayed as a cold-hearted power-hungry monster. Cloaked in religion, he commands private soldiers to eliminate dissidents and even shifts the blame for the massacre onto the Shoshone tribe.
Brigham Young’s image is bone-chilling: his eyes twitch when he smiles, he grips the Bible tightly during prayers, and every utterance of "This is God’s will" is like a viper hissing. When he declares "This land must belong to us," viewers instantly recall the lingering specter of colonial history.
Betty Gilpin, who rose to fame with The Hunt, takes on the leading role. She plays Sarah, who becomes the core of the entire series.
Unlike the damsels in distress in traditional Westerns, Sarah is a tough mother on the run, with a large bounty on her head and a limping son in tow.
Facing bandits, she can blow apart their skulls with a shotgun; yet when she discovers her son secretly aiding the Native American girl "Two Moons," she reveals a vulnerable tenderness.
In this moment, the grand epic of the West is condensed into a mother’s primal instinct for survival.
Taylor Kitsch plays Isaac, a typical "white skin, red heart" lone wolf.
Raised in the Shoshone tribe, he speaks the native language more fluently than English, but due to his mixed-race identity, both whites and Native Americans treat him as an outsider.
Kitsch’s eyes are his most powerful acting tool: when he watches whites burn the tribe, the tremor in his pupils is like dying embers; after rescuing Sarah and her son, his silence holds an unspoken tenderness.
Isaac is like a mirror, reflecting the fragmentation and loneliness in the racial divide.
Unlike traditional Westerns, American Primeval does not glorify or idealize any group.
Whether it’s white settlers, Mormons, or Native Americans, they are all portrayed as individuals with complex motives and behaviors.
Mormons massacre to establish "Zion"; Native Americans fight fiercely against invaders to defend their homeland; white settlers kill each other in acts of plunder to survive.
The series blurs the line between good and evil, making it impossible for viewers to easily take sides.
The director depicts the West as a hellish landscape.
Mormon militiamen press Bibles against their blades; French fur traders turn captives into "human wind chimes"; Shoshone warriors’ arrows pierce eyeballs with a wet, muffled thud. This violence is not for show, but a profound satire.
When Sarah raises her gun, she realizes the opponent is a child forced into battle; when Jacob joins the massacre to save his wife, he is ultimately consumed by hatred.
Violence spreads here like a virus, with everyone both a host and a victim.
American Primeval’s ambition goes far beyond historical reenactment.
When Brigham Young shouts "We are the true Americans," and when government troops sweep through tribes in the name of "maintaining order," viewers can’t help but think of the division and extremism in today’s society.
A Native elder says to whites: "You call us savages only because we refuse to become like you." This line is like an arrow piercing the hypocrisy of colonial narratives.
Survivors trek through the blood-stained wasteland, finally reaching the "promised land," only to find the plunderers have arrived first. The so-called "taming of the wilderness" is nothing but an eternal cycle of power shifts.
Colonial violence devours humanity,
The blood-stained wasteland endures an endless cycle.