Taylor Sheridan talks about his Western drama 1883 and portrays that era with unprecedented accuracy

Taylor Sheridan’S Yellow stone prequel series 1883 it’s a western drama unlike anything I’ve ever seen before. He portrayed the pioneer’s journey across America in a thoroughly brutal way. These people in search of a new life for themselves traversed the beautiful yet unforgiving landscape in carts and faced all kinds of dangers and horrific hardships including disease, weather conditions, bandits and more.

When Sheridan developed this series, the reason he wanted to go back in time to 1883 was to show the history of pioneers like this one in a way that has never been done before. He wanted to get it right and not in the same way Hollywood has portrayed him over and over again over the years.

Taylor spoke about it in an interview with the New York Times saying:

“The pioneers have never been accurately portrayed. Many of the pioneers were from Central Europe, Eastern Europe and Asia, and they hired guides to take them west. They didn’t speak the language. They had never seen a horse. I’d never held a gun before. And they had no idea that this land actually belonged to another group of people.”

These pioneers were determined to start a new life and weren’t prepared for what they were going to face when they began their journey, and it was even more difficult for them not to understand the survival instructions they were given! All of this is explored in the series and it is heartbreaking to see these stories unfold.

With all the things these pioneers had to go through, all the other Hollywood movies would have you believe that Native Americans were the number one threat, but that was not the case at all. There were many other things that posed greater danger to these Pioneers and Sheridan explained:

“Native Americans weren’t the biggest threat to the wagon trains. If you look at the leading cause of death along the trail, #1 was falling off the wagon. #2 was disease. #3 was bandits. Native Americans were, like, sixth.

The 1883 series focuses on pioneers from Germany, and in a featurette for the series shared on Instagram, Sheridan explained what inspired these people to sacrifice everything they had to come to America for a new life:

“Most people who went west saw ads in Croatia, Poland and Germany and responded to those ads. America was unique in that wherever you were when you failed, you could just move west to reinvent yourself . And reinventing your life. … They saved up all their money, sold everything they had, hired the equivalent of a 19th century travel agent who booked passage on the ship for them and took them to a group that would carried on these wagons.

My great great grandfather was in this group of people from Croatia. He traveled to America and ended up settling in a small coal mining town in Utah called Helper, which was a melting pot of people from all over the world trying to find their American dream. He, like many others, sacrificed everything, and Sheridan wanted to portray all of this as accurately as possible. He said:

“History is doomed to repeat itself because it’s never accurately taught. To be able to go back and look at a slice of time and study it thoroughly—it’s truth through fiction.”

If you haven’t looked 1883 yet, you must! It’s such a wonderful series and one of the best of the year.

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