‘1923’ Season 2 Episode 4 Recap: “Journey the Rivers of Iron”

“The place I left ain’t the place I’m going back to.” That’s Spencer Dutton in Episode 4 of 1923 Season 2 (“Journey the Rivers of Iron”), as he considers America in the years after the Great War. It is a country linked by lines of innovation – rails and power – but riven with unchecked wealth disparity and culture war issues. (But it’s not like that anymore though. Right?) Anyway, it’s the very rich and the very poor, and in between are the culture issues of race, class, and Prohibition. Detained while still in Texas, Spencer is forced by the Fort Worth cops to deliver the booze he tried to walk away from. He escapes the law’s clutches while white lawmen gleefully shoot up the Italian mafia’s immigrant-operated warehouse. But before he hoists himself into a boxcar rumbling its way out of town on Taylor Sheridan’s “rivers of iron,” Spencer also finds time to free a sex worker tarred, feathered and publicly shamed by the women of the local temperance movement. (One of the 1920s Karens has a creatively-spelled sign: “Slease = Disease.”) In the America depicted by Sheridan in 1923’s second season, insidious forces at work across the entire country are all in torsion against representatives of the Duttons, the nation’s last noble family.

In New York City, another Dutton runs for a different train, forced to stand tall in the face of yet another calamity. Alex made her connection to Boston. Even after the thief who targeted her in a Grand Central Terminal bathroom struck. He beat her up and stole her cash. But: “I’ve never seen anyone so desperate to reach Billings,” the conductor says as Alex tosses her remaining belongings and leaps onto the sleeper car. The pickpocket took everything he could see, but left the only thing that really matters. As the train rattles up the East Coast before heading west, Alexandra might be beaten and penniless, but she is resilient as she rests her hands on her pregnant belly. In this world, even unborn Duttons fight.   

Trains, those behemoths of the Industrial age, were the engine of American expansion. They’re also passé in the oligarchy being built by Donald Whitfield. In Montana, wealthy white men down drinks and laugh it up at a fancy dinner as the area’s most sexually deviant mining baron describes his three-pronged plan to develop a “winter park resort” on Paradise Valley land. First the rich investors are enticed, then the physical infrastructure is funded by the government, and finally America’s new modern wealth class brings its spending power to Montana via commercial airline flights from New York and Chicago.

“That resort sits in the middle of Yellowstone,” Banner Creighton reminds his boss. “That’s Jacob Dutton’s land.” But Whitfield doesn’t see his funding up of the plan as premature. “Time to build that army you promised me,” he tells his enforcer/lackey. And as to Banner’s questions about motive – he needs a reason to gather sheepherders and other men in another bloody battle against the Duttons – Whitfield spits out a sinister, arrogant dismissal. “I’ll do it again” – pay Jacob’s tax bill – “and when he doesn’t pay me back, the land is mine.” Weaponized capitalism is the only reason Whitfield requires. Financing a gang of killers to exterminate his competition is just a rounding error. Rich take egg.

Beyond Whitfield’s sneering, murderous greed is another directive, one that should interest observers of 1923 as Taylor Sheridan’s branded “Yellowstone origin story.” He orders Banner to kill the Duttons and dump their bodies in a boundary area not beholden to any state or federal law. The pocket of land, which he indicates to Banner on a topo map, sounds a lot like the Train Station, the area controlled by the Duttons of the future as an extralegal depository for all their family foes. But for now it’s in Whitfield’s hands. And to test its value, he makes Banner carry out the dead body of Christy, one of the two local prostitutes Whitfield subjugated to his sexual perversions.

This week on 1923, we also have a segment we’ll call The Pitt: Vintage Trauma. It’s no-anaesthesia surgery time for Zane the wagon boss, who has his body strapped down and his head fitted into wooden restraints fabricated by Jacob and Jake Dutton. Pressed into service as nurses, they hold him straight as Zane huffs on a rag doused in chloroform and the doctor takes a hand-cranked drill to the clotted hematoma putting pressure on his cranium. Zane’s screams bounce off the mountains of the Paradise Valley, and Elizabeth covers her head with a pillow in the next room. But the improvised field procedure works. (After, the doctor takes a pull off his flask of illegal booze.) With the pressure lessened, an upright Zane is soon hugging his wife Alice. And in a second miracle for a ranch house that has seen the opposite for far too long, Elizabeth’s rabies screams and plans to leave are replaced by yelps of joy and hugs with Jake, because she is pregnant. 

But can that baby also fight? Like the yet-to-be-born Dutton currently on a train to Boston? Because while he’s barely recovered, and still with an Acme-style Looney Tunes bandage around his chin, there is one thing on Zane’s mind. “Are we going after ‘em? For what they done to us?” As Whitfield staffs up his new offensive, let’s hope Zane doesn’t miraculously recover from an improvised emergency medical procedure only to be shot down in the latest pitched battle of an ongoing range war. 

“Montana is the opposite of their convenient lives.” That’s what Donald Whitfield told his moneyed friends about the region’s new tourism allure. But for the Duttons, the inconvenience of the land always was and always will be its most hardening attribute. Their ranch is under threat, but it’s their entire way of life that’s under attack, a way of life itself threatened by the encroachment of modernity. (Elsewhere in this episode, a brief visit with Teonna Rainwater, her father, and Pete Plenty Clouds dwells on extended shots of a cattle drive, in another version of Taylor Sheridan’s adoration for cowboys at work.) While people like Whitfield wish to kill them all and take it all away, the Duttons will fight whoever they must to retain what is theirs, whether those fights happen in Montana or during journeys on rivers of iron. Somewhere west of Texas, after he had to kill two boxcar tramps who came at him for his rifle and bedroll, Spencer Dutton jumps off the moving train to continue his journey home, back to his family.

Johnny Loftus (@johnnyloftus.bsky.social) is a Chicago-based writer. A veteran of the alternative weekly trenches, his work has also appeared in Entertainment Weekly, Pitchfork, The All Music Guide, and The Village Voice.