User Reviews

I really like this show and had only seen a few episodes until its being replayed now on StartTV. It pretty reliably portrays what Colorado life would be like in the period around 1870. This isn't a documentary so people need to forgive if it's not precise. I also like how it has shown how Native Americans, ex-Slaves, black people in general, Chinese, and city-vs-country comparisons and discriminations were. In this ep an Indian accidentally kills a soldier, although it was in the course of the soldier attempting to apprehend the brave and in wrestling for the gun it goes off by accident. So not murder but some type of involuntary crime would be more proper I'd assume. The defense is that if a state of war exists then can't charge the Indian with murder unless you want to charge all the soldiers for the various massacres they did so intentionally. The US District Judge dismissed the case because of there being a state of war. In the referenced case flashed at the end, the above scenario is what happened except that the Indian killed the soldier intentionally and in order to regain "face" in the eyes of other Indians because he had lived at an Indian school for 5 years. At the time the show aired there wasn't the internet so anyone without access to a law library or a good overall library wouldn't be able to find out the fact. As I said this isn't a documentary so I try and give allowances, but in this case I'm a little less forgiving because we know the US indiscriminately killed Indians wrongly, but the reverse was also true. Indians killing in the same light as prevalent soldiers killing is always shown on the show to be limited to the Dog Soldiers, so in other words present it as a small occurrence. Well in this case it was an intentional, indiscriminate murder by an Indian, so why not represent it as that?