Winter Soldier (FTLR)

The captain reluctantly decides to spend a bit of time looking for a "winter soldier" who joined in the cold months and deserted at the first turn of spring. They find him and a lot of trouble at the same time!

Fort Laramie is really growing on me. Honestly, the subject matter is tough for me to think of as entertainment because it highlights a fairly bitter element of U.S. History. Having pushed Native Americans west for decades, the frontier wars were really about seeing through the process of invading America to the bitter end. (Americans like to think of themselves as the "colonizers" of America, but "invaders" is really a more appropriate label.) By the time period depicted in Fort Laramie, the relations between the U.S. Government and Native Americans were permanently soured. The indigent populations in question were disaffected, displaced, and disgruntled.

What I like about Fort Laramie is that it takes a stoic approach to this problem. It doesn't try to paint a saccharine portrait of clean-cut cowboys vs. heathen Indians that one often sees in 1950's films, nor does it try to address the underlying racism and Machiavellian politics directly. Instead, Fort Laramie simply tries to chronicle life among a particular frontier troop and how it went about doing its job. Dealing with winter soldiers, raw recruits, newspaper reporters from back East, etc. are all more of a focus than the Native American issues. What arises is a fairly bleak image of hard men doing a hard job. And that is something to like, actually. We get to imagine, along with the cast, what we would do in such situations. Whether we would have the mettle to endure and to make hard choices with integrity. Whether underneath all the strife we would find opportunities to be "human" - to joke and have fun, show mercy and compassion, harbor dreams of a life beyond frontier wars.

Note that the audio file seems to have suffered a little "damage" somewhere along the line. It is perfectly clear, but the voices are slightly sped up. I thought about trying to time-correct the file but I'm not confident enough in my skills and don't want to do more harm than good. Once you get over the slight chipmunk-like quality to the voices, it's a good listen.

Fort Laramie #21
Winter Soldier
17 Jun 1956
19560617(021)_FTLR_WinterSoldier.mp3
Raymond Burr, Les Crutchfield (writer), Joseph Cranston, Paul Dubov, James Nusser, Howard Culver

Fort Laramie, 1851, by Alfred Jacob Miller