“A Yellowstone origin story” was added to the branding for Season 2 of 1923. So in that sense, we always gotta be thinking about Spencer and Alexandra’s baby as part of a line of full-sized Duttons, stretching onward toward the known TV future. But that tot’s gotta get here and be born first, and in Episode 3 of this second season (“Wrap Thee in Terror”), Alex discovers for herself how much the American administrative state loves the word mongrel.
Her first glimpse of America and New York City is like newsreel fantasia. Alexandra and her fellow immigrants, holding hats against the wind and clutching cases as they gather on the top deck of their steamer. Montana is right there, beyond the horizon! Just a gangway’s walk away! But third-class arrivals – which for the purposes of her escape, this fleeing member of the English nobility is – are subject to security search at Ellis Island, and layer after layer of legal and medical gatekeepers. The brochures lied. America as land of opportunity? More like the opportunity to be humiliated.
“Alexandra Dutton? That’s your name?” At processing, the latest man with a uniform and a stamp pad wasn’t going to accept “Alexandra of Sussex.” But saying the name she took out loud, with her full chest, feels like claiming it all over again. Now there is a hard copy of her arrival, burned into the country’s migrant ledgers, of a new strain of Dutton. Physical exams follow, tinged with eugenic beliefs and institutional racism, and Alex worries her unborn child will put her in the reject pile. Pregnant, traveling alone, and with an alleged husband whose biographical details sound like dime store fiction – Alex has to impress her personhood upon asshole after starch-collared asshole until she finally convinces the last guy with a graceful reading of Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass.
Alexandra departs Ellis Island as air, and shakes her white locks at the runaway sun. She writes to Spencer. “Are we not done proving that we have earned each other? What calamity awaits to keep me from you?” She follows the advice of both a kindly street vendor and a ticket agent at Grand Central. But a shifty-eyed pickpocket has already clocked where she hid her wad of dwindling cash.
It’s not clear where Alex is writing Spencer, because he’s without an address as she continues her journey into America’s interior. And his brief career as a bootlegger looks to be over. “I’m not dying for a bunch of fucking booze” – somewhere outside Fort Worth, with armed police manning a roadblock ahead, Spencer bails on Luca. He says the route was always a death trap, that Sal Maceo put his cousin on it just to get rid of him, that Spencer would rather restart his walk to Montana than continue on as a Prohibition foot soldier.
Luca did continue on, and from a distance, Spencer watches as the temperance cops shoot him down. Luca did offer a resonant quote, however, as justification. “They’re family – right or wrong. Look what you do for your family.” Lying back in the switchgrass, wondering about what part of the American sky Alexandra is under, Spencer thinks about everything he would be doing for his family if he was only with them.
It looked pristine, like an oil painting of a landscape in deep winter, until the spokes of an upended wagon’s wheels appeared against the treeline. The latest blizzard to hit Montana has passed, and Jacob and Jack and the cowboys did manage to get a debilitated Zane back to the ranch with his family. But the situation is bleak. The rabid wolf stalking the property has bit Elizabeth and devoured the responding doctor’s nursing assistant, and a dayslong rabies-killing regimen featuring long needles has Elizabeth still determined to leave Montana. “Eight more and I’m done with this place!” she declares, and hollers up a new storm while the shots to her belly are delivered.
A wolf literally ate the nurse sent to help treat her, and wagon boss Zane is one room over from hers, about to take a doctor’s drill to his skull – with no anaesthesia – just so he can recover enough from his subdural hematoma to stay in this place. You’d think Elizabeth could endure a few hypodermic needles. But she’s adamant about shoving off from the Dutton ranch permanently and rejoining her mother Back East. (Conceivably, Elizabeth would pass Alexandra on the rails as Spencer’s wife headed west.) “If you want to be my husband,” she tells a bewildered Jack Dutton, who’s standing there in his sidearm and goosefeather chaps, “be him in Boston.”
As the Duttons navigate cold, turmoil, and harm, and Spencer continues his fight to find a route to the fam, Alexandra isn’t the only one witnessing America’s ugly side. Marshal Mamie Fossett just got done delivering a warning about respect to Kent and Renaud. But as she and her men observe where the racist marshal and his killer priest companion trampled Comanche children in their so-called noble quest to find Teonna Rainwater, Fossett knows she’ll have to catch up to the posse before they kill again.
Kent and Renaud enact violence with sneering arrogance. These two should realy be in leg irons or trying to catch bullets in their teeth. But worse even than his dogged, murderous pursuit of a young Native American woman who was only defending her dignity is that Kent is not just a blunt instrument. He’s smart. And Marshal Kent has perceived that Teonna, Pete, and Runs His Horse will have hooked on with a band of herding cowboys. (“Cowboys don’t care the color of your skin or what’s ‘tween your legs, only that you can ride.”) The posse will head toward Texas, and the river valley full of cattle where Teonna and the others hide.
Wait, Texas? Where a certain former lion hunter currently is? Could the Teonna Rainwater chase converge with – and be helped to its end – by Spencer Dutton and his double rifle? Good and bad, anything’s possible in the land of opportunity.
Johnny Loftus (@johnnyloftus.bsky.social) is a Chicago-based writer. A veteran of the alternative weekly trenches, his work has also appeared in Entertainment Weekly, Pitchfork, The All Music Guide, and The Village Voice.
