Tumbleweeds

The last open range is about to close. In Caldwell, Kansas, a town balanced on the edge of the Cherokee Strip, the tumbleweeds still roll across the prairie but not for much longer. The great land run is coming, and with it will come settlers, plows, and the end of everything Joe Hinman has known. An old settler reflecting on his past, Joe watches the West he loves slip away while Donald Carver, a younger man, sees opportunity in the changing land. Between them lies the fundamental question of the American frontier: what do we lose when we tame the wild? Evarts captures a pivotal moment in American history, the instant when the open range surrenders to the homesteader's plow, when the cowboy gives way to the farmer. The tumbleweed becomes something more than vegetation here, it is the symbol of a passing era, rolling endlessly toward a horizon that no longer belongs to the men who first chased it.