INTO THE WEST was not an easy shoot. It began in the winter in the rugged mountains outside Calgary, in Alberta, Canada, and lasted for two months. There were no luxurious accommodations available for the crew, or for the stars. “There weren’t those creature comforts you’re used to,” explains Christopher Kane, who plays the half-blood Abe Wheeler. “It’s ‘what you see is what you get’. The backdrop is real! It was cold. It was dirty. It was hard. Usually you can sit around and say to someone, ’Hey, bring me a diet coke', but not this time. Everybody was doing their job because the quicker you worked, the quicker you got out of the cold.” Actor Graham Greene, who plays Conquering Bear, agrees, “I’m really proud to be a part of this whole thing, but the weather was hard. We were waiting for the weather to do something; the temperature dropped from 10 degrees to -14 Celsius. With the wind and rain, it’s freezing and difficult for the crew and the cast. Everyone had to pull together and make it work.
After much adventure, Jacob takes Thunder Heart Woman back to her people and then decides to stay with them as her husband. But Loved by the Buffalo is not happy with how Jacob, as a wheelwright, “tricks the iron” into forming the rim of the wheel. He says that Wankan Tanka is in all things, and that using fire to shape iron is not holy. He then shows Jacob the mighty medicine wheel he has built of stone, and explains its significance. It is clear to Loved by the Buffalo that his vision of a wheel like those made by Jacob destroying the medicine wheel made by himself needs to be prevented.
After the amulet passes through several hands, it is given to Jacob. After an unhappy visit to his home in Virginia, he and Thunder Heart Woman return to the West, bringing with them the next generation of Wheeler woman. Also joining are their three cousins, Rachel (Jessica Capshaw, Steven Spielberg’s step-daughter), Naomi (Keri Russell) and Leah (Emily Holmes).
Life for a woman on the wagon train was hard. Everyone had to walk beside the wagons for at least 20 miles a day when the weather was good enough for the wagons to pass, because there were no roads, and the wagons were too bumpy to ride. “As a woman, when the wagon train stopped, you had a lot of work to do,” explains Head Writer William Mastrosimone. “If you were a woman and you had children, you had to take care of those children constantly. Maybe even carry them along the way. And preparing meals was a very difficult thing. Women had their share of work to do just like the men. Nobody had it really easy.”
So what would a woman’s day to day life have been like on the wagon train? First of all, she would not have had many clothes. She wore what she had until it wore out. Then, she would have to make something new herself- after she spun the wool and made the fabric. If she wanted her clothes to be colorful, she’d use plants to make the dye- goldenrod for yellow, for example, or walnut bark for grey. For modesty’s sake, you’d likely sew metal bars or lead shot into your skirt hems to hold them down in windstorms.
Since real coffee was very expensive in those days, pioneer women were more likely to drink java, made from parched peas to barley or bran. The typical dinner a woman might make around a common fire, might be whatever meat the men might have hunted, bread, butter, corn and potatoes. Most of the food was fried and the grease was reused for gravies and sauces. If that sounds a little heavy on the fat, it wouldn’t have mattered, since she walked and worked so long and hard she could never pack on the pounds.
Jessica Capshaw, who plays Rachel Wheeler, says, “Rachel is the middle child of the Wheeler family. When she sees her cousins leaving to venture out West, she thinks there is nothing left for her in Wheelerton and joins them on their journey. As the story unfolds, Rachel, who was the most energetic and excited about going, becomes incredibly disappointed, devastated and terrified with all the events that happen on the wagon train.
Mastrosimone continues, “In the case of our character Rachel, she sees her two cousins die horrible painful deaths. She marries one of the scouts on the wagon train, and within a few weeks he is killed, and she is captured, sold to the Cheyenne Indian chief.”
Later however, in the humanist spirit of this saga, “After a while, when she got to know him, she sees the white knight on the charger she’s been waiting for all her life. She sees who he is beyond the skin and everything else. And they have children together. Steven Spielberg was very intrigued by that. The writing task was-we know from history that some people were captured by Indians, and when they had a chance to leave, they didn’t.”
For Tonantzin Carmelo, who plays Thunder Heart Woman, “In my opinion, the gold rush created a certain type of mentality that took over everybody like fire. Thunder Heart Woman, however, was an exception. She’s very practical, adaptive and very matronly, always taking care of her family."
Speaking of her special gifts as the sister of a shaman, she says, “I wouldn’t necessarily say she senses things, but she does have both a female and spiritual intuition. Her spiritual gift comes from her brother, Loved by the Buffalo, who becomes a shaman. Though she has premonitions, she is very much grounded.
She concludes, “The main hardship that my character conveyed was the difficulty when it came to mixing cultures. There was a dichotomy between what was right and proper for each culture, and these stood out very much.”
