Why Even Bother?
There is, to the best of my knowledge, no evidence of any kind that any romances blossomed during the Journey of Discovery. This is in large part because the only woman to go along on the trip was married. In fact, she gave birth to a son during the trip. Certainly the end of the movie has been
fabricated out of whole cloth. To the point that it gave me the impression that Martha Jefferson was actually a character in it, an utter impossibility. I'll admit I wasn't paying the strictest attention, but it seemed to me as though at least one of the men--and there didn't seem to be enough men, leaving out York and Pompey, neither of whom appear at all--was killed in an accident, which was flatly wrong. They lost one man, probably to appendicitis. Of course, all things considered, there's no reason to expect anything approaching authenticity out of this movie.
Because explorers Meriwether Lewis (Fred MacMurray) and William Clark (Charlton Heston) encounter Sacagawea, and she's Donna Reed. They have been sent by Thomas Jefferson (Herbert Heyes) to explore the vast territories acquired from France in the Louisiana Purchase and find a route to the Pacific Ocean, for preference one navigable by boat, the legendary Northwest Passage. This is officially the only historically accurate moment in the movie, or near enough to. It is also true, admittedly, that Sacagawea--or Janey, as Clark starts calling her--was a slave taken from her Shoshone people. She was probably given to Charbonneau (Alan Reed). However, in this version, it's after Lewis and Clark get there, and she runs away from him to join their expedition and lead them to the Great Salt Water, or whatever stupid fake Indianism they use.
You may note a distaste for the telling of the story. It's because this is a terrible telling of the story. Someone on IMDB is complaining about the absence of York. This is the politically correct complaint about the failings with the expedition. York, you see, was Clark's slave. However, I really do feel the absence of Pompey to be the bigger issue here. Pompey was in fact christened Jean Baptiste Charbonneau. He was the son of Sacagawea and, obviously, Charbonneau. He is more important than York in that his existence makes the whole story fall apart--I'd argue that the actual Discovery aspect of things is a subplot to hang the romance on. With the existence of Pompey and the continued presence in the expedition of his father, you can't make a plausible case for a romance with Clark.
And even beyond that, this just isn't a good movie. It goes without saying that Donna Reed's makeup isn't good; there isn't enough makeup in the world to make Donna Reed look like a Shoshone woman. What's even worse is that there are shots where her makeup hasn't been applied correctly, and you can see a strip of her natural skin colour along her hairline. The costumes are simply ludicrous. Poor Fred MacMurray gets stuck with a pastel velvet coat at the beginning. Barbara Hale as his fiancée, Julia Hancock, gets slightly better clothing, but not by much, and the "frontier" costumes are the worst of all. Two of the men look to be wearing not coonskin caps by skunkskin caps. The script is clearly tailored to a '50s perspective on how people of that era talked, largely peppered with how people in the '50s talked. And while Clark did in fact spell "Sacagawea" eight different ways in seventeen mentions of her in his journal, there's no evidence he ever called her anything else.
So let's get down to brass tacks. Why Donna Reed? This, I cannot entirely answer. No one seems certain. I suspect, however, that it's to give the character the most wholesome nature possible before throwing in an interracial romance. Remember, we were still under the Code, and miscegenation was still forbidden in the film. (This strikes me as yet another reason to avoid the romance, but there we are.) Of course, that's why the pair can't end up at the end--we will not speak of Fred MacMurray's eventual probably-suicide on the Natchez Trace, either, apparently. You can't have a white man and an Indian woman end a movie Happily Ever After, and I have to tell you, the description she's given of what a white woman does as a wife doesn't much appeal to me, either. But to even consider a Shoshone woman in a relationship with Charlton Heston, she's got to be a squeaky-clean Shoshone woman, and even in that dreadful makeup, Donna Reed still qualified.
March 10, 2011
