This is a Kelly Reichardt movie, and all her trademarks are here: it’s set in the Northwest, the aspect ratio is close to square, the dark scenes are almost indecipherably dark, and the pacing is slo‑o‑o‑o‑ow.  Like Meek’s Cutoff, it is a better film to have seen than to be seeing.  But also like Meek’s Cutoff, First Cow takes a deep dive into everyday life on the frontier that fascinated the part of me that goes to history lectures at the university twice a week just for fun.  This time we’re not crossing the high desert near the end of the Oregon Trail, but are on the banks of the Columbia River in what would eventually become Portland: cold, gray, damp, and lushly forested.  The time frame is unclear: the first set of characters we meet are fur trappers, and a later dis­cussion about whether the era of beaver trapping in the region is coming to a close places us in the 1830s, or perhaps the 1820s given that there’s still a debate over the question.  But the refer­ences to the “Oregon Territory” and the “grand hotels” of San Francisco suggest that we’re in the 1850s, as the Oregon Terri­tory only existed from 1848 to 1859, and when Richard Henry Dana visited the San Francisco Bay in 1835, there was no city there by that name, just a single shack, built earlier that year among the ruins of a Spanish mission and presidio.  (California’s patron goddess is Athena, because just as Athena emerged fully grown from the head of Zeus, California became a fully grown state overnight thanks to the Gold Rush.  San Francisco’s popu­lation went from 1000 at the beginning of 1849 to 25,000 at year’s end.)  Then, of course, we have an event we can try to date: the title refers to the first cow brought to the region, which the chief factor of the fortified trading post in the area has imported so he can have milk for his tea.  Names have been changed, but given the location, it seems like the fort must be a stand-in for Fort Vancouver, now located within the city of Vancouver, Wash­ington, next to a Fred Meyer and a Red Robin.  Fort Vancouver was established by the Hudson’s Bay Company in 1825 on the north bank of the Columbia, in the hopes that the river would become the border between the United States and British North America.  By the time Narcissa Whitman visited in 1836, accord­ing to her diary, there were already fifty to sixty dairy cows on site, along with butter-churning and cheese-making operations.  So maybe we say that we’re in the late 1820s and that the locals just don’t know anything about California?

Anyway, the story here is that, as I learned from Centennial back in 1985, bands of men driving cattle or trapping beaver in the American West often brought along a cook, but the band of trappers we meet in the opening scenes are none too enamored of theirs.  They’re down to a handful of dry biscuits and a little jerky, and though “Cookie” tries to supplement that with the salmon, berries, and mushrooms that make up the bulk of the local diet, the trappers are unimpressed by his efforts.  We later learn that the issue is not that the young cook is simply incom­petent⁠—rather, he trained under a baker in Boston, so while he’s not great at keeping a band of burly outdoorsmen fed to their satisfaction, he can make a heavenly pastry.  But he has no way to make use of this talent out on the frontier⁠—until he reconnects with King-Lu, a Chinese adventurer he’d met in the forest when King-Lu was on the run from an outfit of Russian trappers. At loose ends after parting ways with the American trappers once they’d reached the fort, Cookie accepts King-Lu’s invitation to share a drink at his makeshift cabin.  A quick digression: one of the elements I found most interesting about this movie was its blurring of the boundaries between inside and outside.  The trappers sleep out in the open, fully outside; the chief factor has a house built to professional standards, and someone standing inside it could just as easily be in Boston or London as in frontier Oregon.  But King-Lu’s dwelling is somewhere in between: it seems more permanent than Cookie’s tent, but there are gaps between the boards of the outer walls wide enough to stick a hand through, and the “floor” is just the patch of ground those walls (sort of) enclose, fallen twigs and all.  Anyway⁠—Cookie and King-Lu are both outsiders here, hurting for conversation, and soon become friends.  So when Cookie sees the newly arrived cow and idly muses that after months of hardtack, he sure could go for a buttermilk bis­cuit, King-Lu hatches a scheme for the two of them to sneak onto the chief factor’s land and milk that cow.  The plan goes off with­out a hitch.  Cookie whips up some biscuits.  To him, it’s just a one-time treat for himself and his new friend, but as soon as King-Lu takes a bite, the wheels start to turn.

King-Lu has been determined to make a fortune somehow right from the get-go.  It’s all about supply and demand, he explains.  Here in Oregon, a beaver pelt is worth a dollar, while in Paris it’s a hundred dollars; meanwhile, in Oregon it’ll cost you five dollars for a broken fork.  He’s been thinking that there’s plenty of stuff in Oregon that would be worth a mint if only he could get it to Canton or even to California: beaver oil, say, or hazelnuts.  But maybe the play is to find something that’s scarce here, like high-end baked goods, and corner the market?  A test run proves that there’s merit to this idea: frontiersmen line up to hand over piles of silver coin and trading post scrip for the “oily cakes”⁠—basic­ally, donuts⁠—that Cookie and King-Lu sell at the fort.  Even the chief factor himself raves that they compare favorably to the delicacies he’d enjoyed at the best bakeries in London.  Cookie is dubious about making a practice of illicitly milking the cow of the most powerful man in the region, but King-Lu is insistent: they have a very brief window to pull this off, he explains.  More cows are on the way, and as soon as they arrive, he and Cookie will no longer have a monopoly.  To Cookie, that’s not the end of the world⁠—even if milk were to become widely available, he’d still have a local monopoly on the skill required to make blue­berry claufoutis⁠—but King-Lu takes the perspective not of the artisan but of the aspiring entrepreneur.  “It’s the getting started that’s the puzzle,” he explains.  “No way for a poor man to start.  You need capital.  Or you need some kind of miracle.”  Now that miracle has manifested in bovine form, and King-Lu wants to build his pile of capital so long as this narrow window of oppor­tunity remains open.  Once he’s rich, well, for a rich man to get richer is a piece of (oily) cake.  Getting rich in the first place is the hurdle.  The prologue sequence, in which a modern-day woman and her dog discover a couple of skeletons on the banks of the Columbia, suggests that the system is designed to make that hurdle insurmountable.

One of the themes I try to impart to my history students is that countless lives have been reduced to exercises in unfathomable suffering so that others could enjoy comparatively tiny amounts of pleasure.  For instance, slaves in South Carolina had their life expectancy reduced to a matter of months as they spent day after day immersed in hot indigo vats, vomiting at the stench of putrefied plant matter, tormented by the biting insects attracted by the smell… so that a few people could have blue pants instead of gray.  In First Cow, Cookie and King-Lu steal about two gallons of milk, all told.  The chief factor still has enough to offer to guests to put in their tea; what he might have done with those extra two gallons is left as a matter of conjecture.  We know that Cookie uses it to brighten the days of the Oregon pioneers.  But because he and King-Lu made off with what, to us, is a trifle⁠—something like eleven dollars’ worth of milk, or maybe bump that up to fifteen since it’s organic⁠—it looks like they may be executed as thieves.  I know that punishments have tended to be dispro­portionate in times and places where there’s no real law enforce­ment infrastructure and so, to keep order, examples are made of lawbreakers⁠—but, still, for these men to die over this feels like the ultimate case of a rich man crying over spilt milk.

Though there is also a suggestion that they may be murdered because they made people stand in line but then ran out of food.  That’s a lot more understandable.

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