The Jayhawkers
One of my favorite childhood memories was watching old movies with my dad. From Bing Crosby to Bob Hope to Bette Davis, my dad enjoys old movies, some of them older than he. I would often get hooked on these films too and we’d spent weekends watching them together in our living room.
During a snowstorm in the early 1990s, my dad and I spent a few hours outside in the sleet and snow shoveling our driveway and sidewalk. Cold and wet, we went inside, put on dry clothes, and sat on the couch to watch an old movie. We watched the entire film, me wrapped in my favorite blanket in front of a roaring fire while the snowstorm raged outside. For years I couldn’t remember the name of it, but I remembered it took place in Kansas and involved an immigrant from France whose husband was murdered. When I was putting together this list, I knew this had to be my Kansas film. I Googled the only thing I could remember about the movie:
“French woman Kansas prisoner”
The answer came pretty quickly. The 1959 film The Jayhawkers takes place when what is now Kansas was first settled by non-natives, during a period of American history just before the Civil War that is only touched on in American History class in passing.
For decades under the Missouri Compromise, the issue of slavery was handled by keeping an equal number of slave and free states in the Union. As part of the Compromise, no slavery was allowed in territories north of what is now Oklahoma. In order to avert the inevitable civil war, and with settlers inching westward, Congress decided that Kansas (and the territory to the north, Nebraska) would be able to decide for themselves whether slavery should be legal or banned. As a result, pro- and anti-slavery settlers flooded into Kansas in the 1840s and 1850s in an attempt to outnumber the other side, and unsurprisingly, conflict arose.
Neighboring Missouri was a slave state, and gangs of pro-slavery fighters would cross the border and raid settlements populated by abolitionists, most notably Lawrence. In response, radical abolitionists, like John Browne, would attack pro-slavery settlements with violence, taking control of the town after town and installing totalitarian fiefdoms over the towns to ensure collective abolitionist support. The ensuing war is called “Bleeding Kansas” for the violence that took place there.
The Jayhawkers is a fictional account of this era, one which defined Kansas’s political and social culture for the next 175+ years.
The film begins with our main character Cam Bleeker (Fess Parker) riding a horse through the plains of Kansas (which looks like a desert for some reason) in a prisoner jumpsuit. It is set in the 1850s at the height of the “Bleeding Kansas” era. Tired and thirsty, he arrives at a farm outside Abilene that he once owned, looking for his wife. He finds a woman, Jeanne Dubois (Nicole Maurey) who explains that she and her husband, immigrants from France, bought the house and that it was vacant except for the grave of a woman behind the house, Cam’s wife. Cam broke out of prison, where he was serving time for leading a group of raiders because he had heard his wife was involved with another man. Jeanne explains that she did not know anything about his wife, but that her husband was killed by pro-slavery Missouri Redlegs not long after they arrived, leaving her a widow with two children.
Jeanne’s storyline is intriguing. When she explains that she and her husband fled France for America in search of freedom and opportunity for their children, the European history buff in me realized they would have likely left France around the time of the 1848 Revolution that permanently ended the Bourbon monarchy; the one in which Les Miserables is set. She would be just one or two generations removed from the French Revolution and would have been born during or immediately after the Napoleonic Wars and the Bourbon Restoration.
Jeanne tells Cam that there is a reward for his capture, but she won’t turn him in if he agrees to stay on the farm and help with the upkeep. He does, but this doesn’t last long. The governor’s men figure out he’s there and capture him, taking him to Topeka to meet Governor William Clayton (Herbert Rudley). Rather than be hanged, Clayton offers Cam a deal; work with him to bring to justice Luke Darcy (Jeff Chandler), a brutal abolitionist vigilante who terrorizes settlements, takes them over, and rules like a dictator. When Cam refuses, Clayton tells him it was Darcy who killed his wife, hoping that would entice Cam into working with him. It does and he agrees to capture Darcy…alive. This is important.
While on the search for Darcy, Cam saves one of his men from being hanged and asks him to take him to Darcy as a reward for saving his life. He does and Cam meets Darcy at a town he had just conquered. Darcy explains that he is using the current political situation in Kansas to wage a war that will allow him to take the territory town by town and set up a fiefdom there, leveraging abolitionist support. Cam talks Darcy into letting him join the fight, so he could get close to him and double-cross him. During the meeting, Darcy confesses to having used “women like wine,” enjoying them for pleasure before disposing of him, a confession that he did in fact rape and murder Cam’s wife. Cam could just kill him right then and there but decides not to, sucking it up and joining his fight, ultimately knowing he will turn him in where he will face justice.
Jeanne doesn’t like any of this and distrusts Darcy. When Darcy’s troops are storming a town near the farm, Jeanne’s young daughter recognizes Cam among the raiders and innocently runs to him, during which she is trampled by a stampede of horse-riding raiders. Severely injured, Cam takes her back to Jeanne and advisers her to see a doctor, while Jeanne sternly and brazenly reads Cam for filth for taking part in a violent movement that sees children and innocent people as collateral damage. Feeling partially responsible, and despite feeling some empathy toward Darcy’s cause, Cam devises a plot to capture him. There is a train due in to Abilene loaded with gold. He convinces Darcy’s gang to raid and take over Abilene so they could commandeer the train when it arrives and steal the gold and use it to buy enough weapons to win the war. Clayton asks the federal government to load the train with federal troops who will capture Darcy when he and his gang try to storm the train.
So the plan goes into action. Darcy and his gang, Cam among them, take over Abilene and wait for the train to arrive. Jeanne is a willing accomplice, although she desperately warns Cam not to trust Darcy, harkening back to her experiences with tyrants in Europe (more on this later). Darcy shows a tinge of empathy at this point; he pleads with Cam and Jeanne to leave Abilene, and perhaps Kansas altogether, with the children and start a new life, remarking that he has what he wants now – Kansas.
Cam refuses, vowing to see the entire plan through. Knowing that Darcy would be hanged if he was caught by the governor and probably seeking revenge for his wife, Cam goes back on his agreement to take him to Clayton alive and confronts him himself. However, the entire plot is blown wide open by one of Darcy’s most brutal henchmen, Lordan (Henry Silva) – who earlier in the movie sexually assaults and vows to rape Jeanne in a scene that could only have been filmed in this time period – warns Darcy about the plot. When Cam arrives in the saloon where Darcy is waiting, he is surrounded by Darcy’s men and Darcy himself, who now knows of the ruse. Darcy orders his men to clear out and he and Cam settle scores one on one.
The ending is a bit anticlimactic. They scuffle until Darcy appears to lose, then Cam begins to take him at gunpoint out to Clayton, where Darcy will be hanged. When Darcy begins to lament the “carnival” of hanging, Cam suggests they duel instead. They do, and Darcy is killed.
Afterward, Cam goes out alone to confess to Clayton that he killed him, despite the governor’s orders. The governor lets it slide, finishing with a final thought:
"You don't know why you couldn't let him hang, and I don't know why I'm letting you go free. But I've got a feeling we're both right."
I took that to mean that Darcy died the way he was supposed to, in retribution for the injustice he committed – killing Cam’s wife – and not for the principles that he fought for, which ultimately became those of the Union in the Civil War. Darcy is loosely based on abolitionist hero John Brown, who despite being known today as a righteous fighter for freedom, was an abolitionist who supported ending slavery by violent, oftentimes morally-questionable means. Brown was against pacifism and killed a number of pro-slavery advocates in Kansas before eventually being hanged for his role in trying to start a slave revolt in Harpers Ferry, West Virginia (then Virginia) in 1859. Though his idealism is now seen as morally-righteous, his tactics were brutal and oftentimes ethically compromised, much like Darcy’s in the movie. That is alluded to in Governor Clayton’s final words.
While this movie is clearly a Western, chock full of manly men riding horses and shooting guns, the heart, brain, and conscience of the movie is Jeanne. A refugee of tyranny in Europe, she quickly recognizes the motivations of people like Darcy. She tells Cam at one point:
“Oh, I’ve heard that before. The big ideas of the big man, who knows what is best for everyone else. They’ll promise you the world if you just hand over one little thing: your freedom, your dignity, your right to live like a decent human being.”
I don’t think any quote better explains Kansas’ cultural and political history than this one. Kansas was born in the throes of violent idealism, and that experience has been passed down through generations and the state has always resisted radical turns in ideology, even if the causes at play were somewhat agreeable, and resisted the type of “big ideas of the big man” elitists Jeanne spoke about in the movie.
Thomas Frank, a Kansas native, focused on this issue in his book What’s The Matter With Kansas? where he explains that anti-elitism is a core philosophy in Kansas politics and culture and is the reason the state became politically conservative in the late 20th Century.
Despite being economically populist and pro-worker during much of its early history – Kansas was the first state to introduce unemployment insurance and workers’ compensation – it was Kansas’ Governor, Alf Landon, who became the standard bearer against President Franklin Roosevelt and his New Deal. Throughout much of the 20th Century, Kansas became notorious for its social conservatism. It was Topeka’s Board of Education named in Brown v. Board of Education, the Supreme Court decision that ended segregation. Nevertheless, Kansans have been weary of conservatives going too far as well. A decision by the State Board of Education to teach evolution in schools was quickly reversed and despite electing some of the most hardcore anti-abortion politicians in the country, Kansas voters voted down an attempt to outlaw abortion in the state by 18 points just last year.
The Sunflower State’s resistance to ideologues willing to do anything and everything to win is explained thoroughly in The Jayhawkers. Kansas’ road to statehood was soaked in blood. The descendants of “Bleeding Kansas” have spent the state’s entire history trying to ensure Kansas never bleeds again.