Taylor Sheridan Explains The Historical Inspiration For ‘1883,’ And It Proves You’re A Weakling
Yellowstone Creator Taylor Sheridan Talks 1883’s True Historical Inspiration With Joe Rogan: “We Needed People To Settle The West”
The man behind the most popular show on television got himself a spot on the biggest media platform on the planet.
Yellowstone took the world by storm when it was first released in 2018 and since then has done nothing but skyrocket in popularity.
If you’re a fan, you’re probably well aware of the drama surrounding the series final season, but in case you aren’t up to date, you can read about Kevin Costner’s contractual disputes HERE and the insane cost of producing the show HERE, but the delay in the flagship series allowed Sheridan to focus his efforts on a number of spinoff series that were also incredible, and incredibly popular, in their own right.
After the flagship series wraps up, we have a sequel show, possibly starring Matthew McConaughey, in the works which is currently titled 2024, and two prequel shows were released titled 1883 and 1923, which gave the backstory on how the Dutton Family was able to secure the land for the Dutton Ranch, and another prequel series, 1944, has been green lit as well.
During Sheridan’s appearance on the Joe Rogan Experience, the two dove into the actual history of the wild west in the late 1800’s that was the framework for which 1883 was built on.
To start, Sheridan laid the groundwork for why the US Government was encouraging settlers, especially new immigrants, to move west:
“What our government was doing was, we needed people for a multitude of reasons after the Civil War. So many of the workforce had been killed, you know, 1 point something million soldiers died, that we know of, we don’t know how many civilians…
We needed people to settle the west because Manifest Destiny basically said, hey there’s all this land we bought… and we can’t settle it because every time we try the Lakota or Comanche kick the sh*t out of us, so we should send a bunch of central Europeans and eastern Europeans over there and let them get in the middle of it…
You can pull up all of these pamphlets they would put out and ads they would put out in newspapers in Romania and Norway, obviously Ireland… Germany and said ‘Come, free land. Come get your free land.’… There were people that would come from areas where it was against the law to swim.”
If you watched 1883, than you know exactly why he threw the swimming bit in there…
The conversation then rolled on into a number of other topics which give color to the actual happenings of the region in that timeframe, like the Europeans being unaware that Indians already lived in the land until they were well into their journey, the slew of diseases that were responsible for wiping out some 90% of the natives, and how the people that decided to leave their country in search of a new life weren’t some well off folks, but rather those who had no other options.
Sheridan then tells a story which explains just why his shows always seem so lifelike.
Joe was making a comment saying how the CGI storm in one of the episodes looked so good, when Sheridan jumped in to say:
“The other thing is I waited until a day with 60 mile per hour winds to shoot that. I let God do a lot of the CGI. They’re like “There’s a terrible storm coming in!” and I said “Let’s switch the schedule!”
That’s what makes him the best, folks…
