Trouble on the historical frontier: Will Rogers’ Two Wagons—Both Covered (1924)

When Paramount’s The Covered Wagon was released in 1923, it inaugurated Hollywood’s first significant cycle of epic Westerns. Moreover, for many observers, it heralded arguably the most decisive intervention yet in what was already a long-running debate about the film capital and its social influence. Against a backdrop of mainstream nativism and concerns about the perceived moral slippage of the Jazz Age, these prestige treatments of the nation’s “defining” frontier history were not only credited with helping to revitalise a stagnant national genre but widely cited as singular evidence of cinema’s exceptional Americanising potential. Yet, the inflated vision of national-historical process that brought middlebrow legitimacy to the Western also proved ripe for deflation. This paper examines how the era’s dominant ideas about history and its direction were interrogated through cinema using the example of Two Wagons—Both Covered (1924), an epic Western parody by one of the most influential Native Americans of the day, Will Rogers, whose Cherokee identity is often overshadowed by his “All-American” screen persona. Made by a popular authority on all things “Western” and set within a recognisable screen West, this two-reel comedy appropriated Hollywood conventions to critique the genre and its worldview from within. At once an insider and an outsider, a cowboy and an Indian, Rogers uses humour to construct a counter-history that invites critical reflection on the basic racial and temporal assumptions of American nationalism.