What Is the True Story Behind Netflix's Violent Western American Primeval?

[SPOILER ALERT: This story contains spoilers from the entire season of Netflix's American Primeval.]

In Netflix's new limited series American Primeval, the western expansion of the American Dream in the 1850s is a deadly fight for supremacy in a lawless land.

Director Peter Berg's fictionalized take on the Utah War between the unyielding members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints and the United States Army, with tribes of native people and innocent settlers caught in the middle, depicts a chapter in American history that is often untold. Gunslingers in the Wild West have gotten their due on screen, and explorers like Lewis and Clark have been immortalized for every generation that followed their journey west. But the struggle for the coexistence of religion and opportunity in a new chunk of America is not the most glamorous take on patriotic expansion.

The series, now streaming on Netflix, depicts the brutality with which the Mormons sought to create a new world for their beliefs, the pride with which the native people held onto their ancestral lands, and the tragedy of the people just seeking to make a new home in the chaos. But is any of it true?

Let's look at the real history of American Primeval.

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The War with the Mormons

In the series, the greatest threat facing the Utah Territory in 1857 was the volatile Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, aka the Mormons. Desperately seeking a place free from the perceived religious persecution they faced at the hands of the U.S. Government, the church, led by territory governor Brigham Young (Kim Coates), strategically sought to eliminate those standing in the way of their new promised land. In 1857, President James Buchanan sent U.S. troops into the region to fortify law and order, but the church saw it as an act of aggression. As seen in the premiere of American Primeval, things go awry in 1857 when members of the church, aided by the Nauvoo Legion (the territory's military force controlled by the Mormons), massacred 120 settlers migrating west toward California. In the series, fictional characters like wanted single mother Sara (Betty Gilpin), her son Devin (Preston Mota), and their guide Isaac (Taylor Kitsch), as well as young Mormon couple Jacob (Dane Dehaan) and Abish (Saura Lightfoot-Leon), manage to escape the chaos, but most weren't so lucky. The attempts to silence the survivors, who could identify the Mormon involvement in the attack, drives much of the series. It should be noted that in real life, the massacre was initially blamed on native tribes in the area.

It stands as the deadliest moment in what is known as the Utah War, which was the culmination of the tension between the Mormons and the U.S. Army. Eventually, the violence was tamped down by the removal of Brigham Young as the territory's governor and amnesty for anyone who had sought to overthrow the U.S. Government's authority in the region. Salt Lake CIty, of course, becomes the sanctuary the Mormon community is seeking to create in the west, but it wasn't without strife, struggle, and blood in the 1850s.

Was Fort Bridger a real place?

When the series isn't traversing the unsettled wilderness of Utah and Wyoming, the rest of the story largely takes place within the ramshackled walls of Fort Bridger, a rough-neck trading post forged by Jim Bridger (Shea Whigham). In real life, Fort Bridger was a real place and Jim Bridger was its founder. But more importantly, it was a vital stop for travelers moving west, and even got a visit from the Donner Party, the famous pioneers who became snowbound in the Sierra Nevada in 1846 and resorted to cannibalism to survive.

As seen in the later episodes of the series, Jim Bridger constantly fended off attempts to seize his fort from the Mormons in the region, who became even more hostile toward the post when Bridger started leasing it to the U.S. military in 1857. By the end of the series, Bridger has been paid off and run out of town by Gov. Brigham Young, who initially threatens to take Fort Bridger by force, claiming he has an arrest warrant for Bridger on the grounds that he was illegally supplying local native tribes with alcohol and firearms. In reality, those threats came well before 1857. As early as 1853, Bridger was threatened with arrest and forced to flee back east for several years, while the Mormons took over the fort and built their own outpost, Fort Supply, nearby. However, by 1857, at the start of the Utah War, he was back in charge of his namesake, as seen in the series.

In the finale, Bridger relents to the pressures of Young, and eventually accepts an undisclosed amount of money to let the Mormons take Fort Bridger, which they subsequently burn to the ground to keep it out of the military's hands and purify the land to start anew. In reality, the fort was indeed burned in 1857, but it was abandoned by the Mormons in time and continued to be used as a military post until 1890 when Wyoming officially became a state. So most of what happened at Fort Bridger in the series was true, even if the timeline was fudged a bit.

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Did the final battle really happen?

In short, no. While the series spends a lot of time with the Shoshone people and the Wolf Clan renegade faction, led by Red Feather (Derek Hinkey), the real Utah War doesn't see the kind of bloody clash between the Nauvoo Legion and the native people that punctuates the series. That doesn't mean there weren't clashes. The most notable of which came in 1858, when members of the Bannock and Shoshone tribes attacked the Mormon settlement of Fort Lemhi. Young had tried to cultivate native allies as part of the Mormon cause, but Fort Lemhi was seen as a step too far in creating sprawling, permanent settlements on native lands. The attack on the fort led to two Mormon deaths, and was a big part of why Young began talks to end the conflict with the U.S.

None of this is seen in the finale of American Primeval, which is largely focused on the Nauvoo's last-ditch revenge effort to silence the survivors of the massacre and quell any further trouble from the members of the Shoshone. The Nauvoo are the ones who storm the Shoshone camp in this version, only to be ambushed, resulting in the deaths of numerous native people and key Nauvoo leaders including James Wolsey (Joe Tippett). In other words, this is where the series charts its own course through history, bringing its conflict to a bloody end that looks quite different than what really happened.

American Primeval is now streaming on Netflix.