Kansas Pacific

For those who like those old B westerns that have fallen into the public domain, I recently came across one that is definitely worth a wath. That film is Kansas Pacific.

The movie is set in the beginning of 1861, after the election of Abraham Lincoln as president but before the actual fighting began in the US Civil War. It is, as you can guess, set in Kansas, which had a reputation at the time as "Bloody Kansas" because as it was still a territory, it was unclear whether it would become a state as one that allowed slavery or one that didn't. With the territory bordering the slave state of Missouri, it was not a surprise that people on both sides of the slavery issue flooded into the territory and that violence ensued on both sides.

Meanwhile, as the US included a contiguous landmass from the Atlantic to the Pacific, the race was also on to build railroads and telegraph lines that spanned the continent, along with serving the forts that the federal government had been putting up on territorial land to deal with the Native American tribes that were understandably unhappy about the encroachment by the white man. Confederate sympathizers especially were unhappy with the building of railroads that in theory would enable a non-slave state like California to transport men to the east much more efficiently, so they tried to sabotage the building of railroads like the Kansas Pacific.

As for the actual plot of the movie behind the history, this one involves Cal Bruce (Barton MacLane), a construction foreman for the railroad who is out in Kansas with his adult daughter Barbara (Eve Miller) and an engineer with whom he has worked since the early days of railroads, a man nicknamed "Smokestack". They're trying to get the railroad built, but southern sympathizers, led by William Quantrill (Reed Hadley), are trying to sabotage it. (Recall from any number of movies about Jesse James or the Civil War in the Missouri-Kansas border area that William Quantrill was a real figure leading guerilla groups including the James and Younger brothers.)

The federal government back in Washington is concerned about the sabotage, since they want the rail line built to connect to their forts in the Colorado territory. But because the war is not officially on, they can't sent active duty military to build the rail line. So Gen. Winfield Scott sends a man undercover, Capt. John Nelson (Sterling Hayden) to help oversee the project and stop all the sabotage going on.

It's a fairly basic plot, and as you can guess, the presence of Barbara is so that the hero will have a love interest (and, I suppose, some female beauty for the male demographic to enjoy). It's all fairly predictable, but all well enough done, especially for those who like the less complex westerns or movies with old trains. The landsacpe doesn't look anything like Kansas as far as I'm aware, but that sort of geographic accuracy isn't the point of a movie like this. It's more a film you're just supposed to sit back and enjoy.