https://drive.google.com/file/d/0BxcufOFiIwAvVDVwaTFvQ2FnXzg/view?usp=sharing
Combined Artists' Statement:
Tom: When Trevor pitched his story about how his ancestors
ran out the settlers of the neighboring homestead, I was immediately jealous of
his family history, or rather, I was jealous of such a crazy story. It inspired me to search through my family
history to find something equally kooky that would contribute to the
story. I did not find anything close to
running out neighbors with guns, but it surprised me how similar were some of
the stories that I found. In the book
“An Aspen Creek Homestead,” my cousin Dale J Hartvigsen writes of a neighborly
feud over water. Most of the people in
the valley had to get water from Aspen Creek.
The only problem was that it was contaminated. If you did not purify the water first you
would get Typhoid Fever. However, there
was a fresh spring on a neighbor's land.
So what did my ancestors do? They
piped into the spring without the neighbor’s permission, which eventually
forced him to sell the land. Fights over
water were a real issue in the 19th century.
In our story, it serves as the basic motivation for the Germans to chase
out their neighbors.
Trevor: Looking back at my family history after having
pitched the story, I found that I’d completely exaggerated the events. One
ancestor, Walter Smail from Pennsylvania (not a German) and some sharpshooter
friends fended off claim jumpers after staking their claims. I heard the story
as a seven year old and in the time that passed it grew into something
stranger. The detail that stuck with me is only two sentences long: “Another
man had staked his claim on the opposite corner to Bill’s 160. He set up a
white tent planning on staying, but Bill and Walter shot it full of holes
during the late evening and the next morning he had pulled out.” It’s a smaller
and less terrifying conflict than my childhood memory of the story became, but
there is truth to strangeness of the violence that my little mind honed in on.
Remembering this way turned it into mythological truth, formed through the
weird old tradition of oral storytelling. The story we wrote is heavily
fictionalized, and that reflects the memory distortion and modern perceptions
of a far removed time period.
How we wrote is in contrast to New Orleans after the Deluge
which is journalistic in process and purpose. It looks at people, draws their
faces and transcribes their voices, to bring awareness to the realities of
their experience. Ours is a tall tale and a ghost story, exaggerated to reflect
the weird distance of time and memory as well as the weirdness of a time when
people shoot at each other to take what they want. Ours is also a critique of
the attitudes of a time where actions like that are acceptable, and of how cool
a younger version of me thought the violence was.
Tom: To finish our screenplay, we drew upon another story
from our ancestry. In the same book
before mentioned, Dale Hartvigsen writes about a time when JF Hartvigsen met a
naked Indian on horseback by his homestead.
The Indian was hunting for food while JF was tilling the land. The contrast between settler and nomad was
very interesting to us. Here are our
ancestors trying to “own” the land, even fighting over it, when in reality it
had always belonged to the Indians. In
our story, after all of the settlers have killed each other for land ownership,
the Indian kicks the cabin and it falls to the ground.
Tom Hartvigsen
Trevor Bush
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