The Invaders (1912)
Production Co.: New York Motion Picture Co. Producer: Thomas H. Ince. Director: Francis Ford and/or Thomas H. Ince. Writer: C. Gardner Sullivan. Cast: Francis Ford (Colonel James Bryson, the cavalry commandant), Ethel Grandin (his daughter), Anna Little (Sky Star), Art Acord (telegraph operator), Ray Myers, Luther Standing Bear and other unidentified Oglala Sioux. Transfer Note: Copied at 18 frames per second from a 35mm print preserved by the Library of Congress (AFI/Blackhawk Collection); 3 reels. New Music: Martin Marks, score and piano. Running Time: 41 minutes.

Featured in More Treasures from American Film Archives, 1894-1931.

Thomas Ince’s The Invaders is one of the first great Westerns, a broken-treaty tale whose power owes much to its Native American actors. At three reels its portrayal of reluctant U.S. Cavalry troops forced to battle Sioux and Cheyenne was also an epic in 1912, when most films still squeezed their stories into a single reel.

Western films were nothing new by that year. Indeed, industry trade papers, if not audiences, were growing weary of them and had predicted the genre’s demise in such 1911 articles as “The Passing of the Western Subject” and “The Overproduction of ‘Western Pictures.’” By December 1911, Moving Picture World howled, “In the name of the eternal fitness of things, has not this cowboy-Indian obsession gone far enough?… Give the public just a little rest.”

In January 1912, however, Ince produced the first in a new kind of Western that dramatized the thrills of the Wild West show and had the same trade journals ecstatic: “The impression that it all leaves is that here we have looked upon a presentation of Western life that is real and that is true to the life, and that we would like to see again and again.” By the time of The Invaders in November, Ince had produced more than fifty such Westerns, although most were single reels. Reviews for The Invaders were again enthusiastic: “an intense photodrama that is artistically satisfying from the beginning,” with “beautiful photography…and some exceptionally fine ensembles” of actors.

The change from earlier Westerns was at least partly in the scale of production. Soon after Ince arrived in Los Angeles in 1911 to take over its Westerns, the New York Motion Picture Company arranged to employ performers from “The Miller Bros. 101 Ranch Real Wild West Show” and to rent its Western gear. Also leased as a home for the “ranch” was twenty-eight square miles of canyons and rolling grassland above Santa Monica. The impressive location—soon known as “Inceville”—could pass for the Dakotas when the camera was pointed away from the surf. (The “Kay-Bee” brand on The Invaders’ intertitles represents the initials of the NYMP Company’s owners, Adam Kessel and Charles Baumann.)

Among the performers who came along with the 101 Ranch show were some fifty Oglala Sioux from the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota. (Before the 1924 Indian Citizenship Act, reservation Sioux were wards of the U.S. government, and Ince had to hire them through the Bureau of Indian Affairs.) Reviews of Westerns in 1911 mocked unconvincing native impersonations by white actors—“We have Indians à la Français, ‘red’ men recruited from the Bowery and upper West End Avenue”—and Ince’s casting answered such complaints. Although the Native American actors in The Invaders remain mainly unidentified (the Sioux chief has sometimes been misidentified as William Eagleshirt, the lead in other Ince Westerns), they perform with a subtle and complex pantomime that impressed critics even then. Ince’s only complaint was that their gestural style was so restrained that their characters’ anger against the whites could fail to register onscreen.

It’s easy to see why the Inceville Westerns were regarded as so stirring in 1912. If they retain power now, it’s partly because of their documentary-inflected visuals and partly because they are so unlike later Hollywood Westerns, which would abandon Native American actors. The Invaders allots something close to equal time for personal dramas among the natives, and is structured through parallel plots within the cavalry post and the Sioux village: In each a father must approve a suitor for his daughter. The simple story derives some of its force by combining the two key American fables of self-sacrifice on the frontier: A Custer story (a contingent of the Seventh Cavalry is again slaughtered) is joined to a Pocahontas story (a chief’s daughter again saves a white community). Playing the cavalry commandant is Francis Ford (older brother of John Ford), who probably had a major hand in the film’s directing as well. The chief’s daughter is played by Anna Little, the one non-Sioux among the Indian characters, although she had some Native American ancestry.

The Invaders is the first long Western not to retell stories of famous frontier figures. (The two previous three-reel Westerns, both from earlier in 1912, were Ince’s Custer’s Last Fight and a Life of Buffalo Bill, which was produced by Cody himself.) It draws its history more loosely from the late 1860s, when the Union Pacific Railroad was surveying through the Black Hills and other Sioux and Cheyenne territory. The treaty signed in the opening scene between “the Sioux nation” and the United States with such apparent mutual trust duplicates terms of the 1851 Fort Laramie Treaty, which also allowed the U.S. Army to build forts and a few roads in exchange for stopping further settlement in Sioux lands. For all the conventionality in The Invaders’ portrait of Indians—who are ultimately both savage and sentimentalized—the film retains surprises. Audiences might presume its title will refer to some rampaging redskins, but it is the Eastern surveyors for the transcontinental railroad, laughing off cavalry protection and treaty terms, who will prove to be “the invaders.”—Scott Simmon

About the Music
This piano score is generally faithful to the methods followed by pianists at the time The Invaders was made. However, in response to the film’s powerful treatment of its theme, I went beyond period conventions by seeking a more authentic repertoire of tunes for the scenes of the Sioux, rather than relying on the hackneyed “Indian” music common to silent film accompaniments. Two key sources were the piano arrangements of native tunes published at the turn of the century by Arthur Farwell (1872–1952) and Woodland Sketches (1896), a collection of lyric piano pieces composed by Edward MacDowell. From the latter I took “From an Indian Lodge,” which opens the score. The first part of this piece is a native-style song of stern and noble character; then comes a dark and solemn series of low chords; after this is a prolonged lament. The piece sets a tragic mood; moreover, the dark chords are matched to the inserted close-up of the treaty between the American government and the Sioux, and the ensuing lament implies the tragedy to come, undercutting the scene of treaty negotiations it accompanies. The three segments of this piece are used sparingly throughout the rest of the film, but a few moments are crucial. Listen in particular for the transformations of the chordal passage when the treaty is shown again and finally when the enraged chief tears up the paper. Farwell’s simple and effective arrangement fills up most of the other scenes involving the Sioux. One fine lyrical number is his “Song of Peace” (no. 7 in his Impressions of the Wa-Wan Ceremony), introduced at the visually compelling moment when the surveyor first sets eyes on the chief’s daughter.—Martin Marks

About the Archive
The Library of Congress, the world’s largest library, is the research arm of the United States Congress. Founded in 1800, the Library mapped its course as a premier research institution with the purchase of Thomas Jefferson’s personal library. The collections include more than 29 million books and countless manuscripts, photographs, films, videos, sound recordings, and other materials. The Library is open to the public and welcomes researchers.

The Library’s motion picture holdings began in 1893 when Thomas Edison deposited paper copies of his early kinetoscope loops for copyright protection. Today the Motion Picture, Broadcasting, and Recorded Sound Division is home to a vast collection of films and television programs. The Library also runs its own film, video, and sound preservation laboratories at the Packard Campus for Audio Visual Conservation in Culpeper, Virginia.