Review of Far and Away (1992) by Donald W — 25 Mar 2012

Ron Howard made this movie to depict the Cherokee Strip Land Run in 1893. His own ancestors ran in the land run of 1893. He also had an ancestor from Ireland so he made up a fictional story of a young Irishman and woman coming to America to run in the Oklahoma land run.

Most of the story in this movie was just a love story set in a historical backdrop. His reenactment of the land run is the best ever filmed. They even tried to recreate the famous picture of the Land Run taken north of Orlando, Oklahoma.

He filmed it in Montana since there is no where left in Oklahoma that still looks like Oklahoma in 1893. It's all wheat fields now days. In the movie he has Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman travel from Ireland to the Oklahoma Territory in a year and a half.

My Great-Grandfather also ran in the 1893 land run but he left West Virginia a single man and by the time he got to Oklahoma he had a wife and two young children. There may have been a few Irish at the land run but most of the Irish came to America in the 1840's during the Irish potato famine.

Most the Oklahoma pioneers were third generation Americans. The largest number of immigrates were a group of German speaking farmers from Russia. Katherine the Great had invited their grandfathers to settle in central Russia to grow wheat, but they never learned to speak Russian.

In the 1880's the Czar of Russia was afraid of a war with Germany so he expelled the German wheat farmers. They took their Russian wheat and kept going west until they got to Kansas and then to Oklahoma.

I saw this movie at the Heritage Five Plaza in Midwest City, OK. Too much of the movie took place in the slums of Boston. I thought it a little bit too much of a coincident for the same group of people to keep running into each other in Ireland, Boston and Oklahoma.

They kept talking about the "free land". The free land was homesteaded in the Land Run of 1889. The Cherokee Strip belonged to the Cherokee Indians and the participants in the run had to pay $2.

00, $1.50 and $1.00 an acre depending on how far west the plot was. It was the most dramatic land run since the United States was in a depression that year and a lot of farmers had lost their farms. There were three runners for each plot of ground to be claimed.

Many like my Great-Grandfather crossed a week Sooner and staked a claim and then came back to run in the run just to make a show for the authorities. It didn't always work. People who ran in the race just pulled up the stakes and put down their own.

The ones who tried were called Sooners. In the movie they didn't show that a lot of the men rode on a Santa Fe train to get to the town plots first. There were over 10,000 people in Orlando the night before the land run.

After the run only about 1000 people stayed behind to live in Orlando. That was only one of the entry points. Most were on the Kansas border. The part of the movie that took place in Boston showed a lot of bare knuckle boxing.

Bare knuckle boxing was illegal in most state back then. They showed the fights in cloister-phobic bars surrounded by people. Most of the real fights took place in "secret" locations with a stage or ring to keep the fans away from the fight.

They had a set of rules called the "London Prize Ring Rules". It's kind of hard to believe that short little Tom Cruise could win a fight under these rules. The beginning of the movie had the Irish farmers rebelling against their English landlords.

The real Irish rebellion took place the 1920's. The Irish who came to America in the 19th Century came because there was no food in Ireland.