If the principle of Amor Fati also applies to the 1923 Season 2 finale, then the Duttons embraced their fate all the way to the wire. Because in the super-sized season finale of the series (“A Dream and a Memory”), as a small army of gunmen descended on the white barn and wood-and-timber frontier mansion of the Duttons’ Paradise Valley plot, and Alexandra miraculously went from certain death in a snowdrift to being held in the arms of her warrior-hunter husband Spencer – but still certain death, unfortunately – the ensuing decades of the Taylor Sheridan’s generational family saga, and how 1923 ties to Yellowstone, were set.
So who survived the Dutton-Whitfield War? How did Spencer and Alex find romance in tragedy? And who is their baby in extended Dutton fam lore? Major spoilers for the season 2 – and series – finale of 1923 ahead.
“Of all the things I’ve had to do for this ranch”
Financial hardship had made Jacob and Cara Dutton’s stewardship of the Dutton family empire susceptible to wealthy, land-grabbing fat cat Donald Whitfield. But Whitfield was never going to accept something as basic as a tax bill paid. He was always going to take the ranch and all of the Duttons’ vast Paradise Valley acreage for himself, through a toxic mixture of greedy coercion and rank violence, because for robber barons like Whitfield, the cruelty is the point. (This is a guy who spent half his time in the series delivering evil speeches to other rich guys, and the other half submitting women to sexual torture.) In the season finale, Whitfield’s mercenaries arrived at the ranch with one directive: “Just start killing.”
Which is how Cara Dutton ended up firing a huge elk rifle complete with scope at the men attacking her home. “Of all the things I’ve had to do for this ranch,” Cara said, and continued to fire while wagon boss Zane and the Bunkhouse Boys backed her up. Elizabeth was also inside the house, and Cara encouraged her to take cover while keeping a shotgun close.
While the battle at the ranch raged, Jacob Dutton and Sheriff McDowell waited at the train station in Livingston for Spencer’s train to arrive. Whitfield’s killing crew was there, too, and the tension on the platform was thick. But Banner Creighton, whose disagreement with Jacob over grazing land was an original driver of 1923’s violence, at least had the sense to finally understand Whitfield’s evil as completely unquenchable. “He takes to make you suffer,” is how Banner put it to his wife and son, who he pledged to send away for their own safety. But Banner’s conversion to what’s right and train station reconciliation with Jacob came too late to save him. He was killed as Spencer’s train arrived in the middle of a gunfight.
“I wanna meet the man who killed my wife”
All season, Spencer had been traveling toward Montana and his family’s armed conflict with Whitfield’s forces. He took a steamer ship to Texas, became a bootlegger for a few minutes, hopped on and off trains, and pledged to walk all the way home if that’s what it took to join the fight. But in the finale, the train on which he traveled took him first to an unlikely reunion with his wife Alexandra.
Her own journey was fraught. And after thousands of miles covered while alone and pregnant, Alex was about to die in a car turned into a coffin by a blizzard. But Spencer and Alex’s romance was way too powerful, and from his train car, he saw his wife’s hypothermic predicament. Spencer leapt from the caboose and swept Alex into his arms. (Alex, whose sense of humor never flagged: “So good of you to join me in this pickle, free from the burden of a solution.”) Back on the train, the seriousness of her condition was revealed. Frostbite had rendered her extremities gangrenous. But she was not going to serve her own well-being over that of their child. Alex and Spencer’s baby was born three months premature, and in refusing treatment, her death was assured. But for her, reuniting with Spencer, if only briefly, was worth it. And she knew her husband would raise their son – she named him John, after Spencer’s brother, who was killed in the range war – to be the best of both of them.
“I wanna meet the man who killed my wife,” Spencer told Jacob, after the gunfight in Livingston, and after Alex was sent ahead to the hospital in Bozeman. The Duttons headed to Donald Whitfield’s palatial mansion, where Spencer immediately killed him with a bullet to the head. Combined with burning Whitfield’s house down, it was a warning from the Duttons to any other wealthy transplants who would try and take what’s theirs.
“Maybe it cost me everything”
Teonna Rainwater’s own torturous saga had run in parallel to the Dutton experience throughout the course of 1923. She was subjected to sexual, physical, and emotional abuse at the hands of the Catholic priests and nuns in charge of a government-funded “Indian School,” and escaped that violence only to be pursued across hundreds of miles of territory by Father Renaud, her former headmaster, and Kent, a racist US marshal. Along the way, Teonna fell in love with Pete Plenty Clouds, and rekindled her relationship with her father, Runs His Horse. But Alexandra Dutton wasn’t the only character in 1923 who Taylor Sheridan’s writing turned into a target for constant pain. After Marshal Kent killed Pete, and Renaud killed Runs His Horse, Teonna was the only one of her people left standing. The priest’s guilt, twisted with his poisoned belief system, then inspired him to kill the marshal, but also demanded that Teonna repent. To him? Please. Instead she killed Renaud as he tried to kill her, and Teonna was left to face her future alone.
For US Marshal Mamie Fossett, one of the good ones, Teonna’s awful recent experience justified her use of violence as self-defense. Fossett still had her arrested, and brought before a magistrate. But there were no witnesses left to speak to those crimes, and the charges against Teonna were dropped. Fossett and her men acknowledged that she was right to fight back, to protect herself when no else would. But Teonna, with her horse and rifle and an intention to build a new life in California, was left with one consideration. Her fight mattered. “But it cost me everything.”
“I’d rather gather ‘em than buy ‘em”
When Spencer finally arrived at the ranch, it was with Whitfield’s killers already inside the house. But it didn’t take him and his big elephant gun long to clean those pests out, and the Dutton Ranch was made safe again. Jacob Dutton retired from the grind to live out his days with Cara, sitting on their porch and helping to raise little John Dutton II. (John Dutton III, of course, became Kevin Costner in Yellowstone.) Spencer gathered the cowboys and headed into the mountains, set on rebuilding the family’s wealth with a brand new cattle herd, sourced from the wild. (“I’d rather gather ‘em than buy ‘em.”) And after Whitfield’s thugs killed her husband, Jack Dutton, there was nothing for Elizabeth left at the ranch; for her, raised in comfort Back East, it had always represented death and destruction, anyway. She departed with a final, kinda cold farewell from Cara.
The final summary on the Duttons and 1923 came from Elsa Dutton, whose series narration emanated from where she died in 1883. After a shot of Alexandra and Jack being buried in the family plot, Elsa told us that Spencer never remarried. He lived out his days on the ranch, raised his son, remained forever in love with Alexandra, and “45 years later, my young brother joined her.” The final moments of 1923 depicted 1969, and an older Spencer dying on Alex’s grave as her generations-sustaining lifeforce appeared as a shooting star above the Paradise Valley.