Film Quote of the Day: The Line From Clint Eastwood's 1976 Western Classic That Became a Timeless Life Lesson

Maybe you can identify with this, but as the movie nerd in most of the circles of friends I'm in, I am always the guy people ask for recommendations. I usually try to gauge a mood or want they have before dishing out random titles, but more and more I find myself telling people they have to sit down and watch The Outlaw Josey Wales.

This movie is peak Clint Eastwood, but I think criminally underrated by many. It's a classic Western, but it subverts many of the tropes that made Eastwood famous, and plays as an excellent emotional prequel to Unforgiven, which kind of does a lot of the same things.

Today, I want to look past the gunsmoke and powerful vistas to talk about a line delivered not by the titular gunslinger, but by his traveling companion, Lone Watie (played brilliantly by Chief Dan George).

It's this sort of exclamation of what the old west really was for the first peoples there, and how it translated across the theme of the story.

Let's dive in.

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The Scene In Question

Have you seen this movie? I did for the first time around a year ago, and I was sad I had put it off for so long. It's like this epic treatise on the Old West and its heroes. It picks apart what we think we know and how we think we feel and flips the whole story on its head.

The Outlaw Josey Wales was directed by Eastwood himself. It’s a revisionist western that tracks a Missouri farmer driven to vengeance by the Civil War, who is now trying to outrun his past before it catches him and kills him.

Josey is headed toward Mexico when he meets Lone Watie, an aging Cherokee man who is a tracker sent to find Josey. But after hunting around a campsite, Josey gets the drop on him.

Josey put a gun to his head, and instead of blowing him away, he listened to Lone Watie talk to him about his past and the trauma he's already endured. We get his history with the federal government, whom he can't trust. And the trail of tears that killed his family.

He explains how his people dressed in civilized clothes, wore top hats like Lincoln, went to Washington, and met with the Secretary of the Interior.

This speech is long, but I think it's worth listening to.

"We dressed ourselves up like Abraham Lincoln. We only got to see the Secretary of the Interior, and he said: "Boy! You boys sure look civilized.!" he congratulated us and gave us medals for looking so civilized. We told him about how our land had been stolen and our people were dying. When we finished he shook our hands and said, "endeavor to persevere!" They stood us in a line: John Jumper, Chili McIntosh, Buffalo Hump, Jim Buckmark, and me - I am Lone Watie. They took our pictures. And the newspapers said, "Indians vow to endeavor to persevere."...We told him about how our land had been stolen and our people were dying. When we finished he shook our hands and said, “endeavor to persevere!” They stood us in a line: John Jumper, Chili McIntosh, Buffalo Hump, Jim Buckmark, and me – I am Lone Watie. They took our pictures. And the newspapers said, “Indians vow to endeavor to persevere…”We thought about it for a long time, “Endeavor to persevere.” And when we had thought about it long enough, we declared war on the Union.”

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The Irony of Bureaucracy vs. The Grit of Survival

Man, this is such a great monologue. I know we have covered a lot of quips in this series, but the writing here is phenomenal, and we totally know why Josey is letting this guy talk.

There's this ethereal quality to him, heJosey wants to know how this guy got mixed up chasing him, when it should be one of those Union men following him down there.

We also want to know who this character is and their place in the story.

It's an incredible piece of writing because it operates on two levels at the same time.

On the surface, the line is a brilliant bit of historical dark humor that kind of spins how this guy got into this predicament. Lone Watie is mocking the empty jargon used by governmental oppressors to sanitize a tragedy like the Trail of Tears and the eradication of the First Peoples.

"We endeavor to persevere" is exactly the kind of sterile phrase designed to say absolutely nothing when describing something horrific.

It's meaningless when you're standing over the dead bodies of your people.

In this moment, we get that Lone Watie also completely understands that his same government is trying to kill Josey, which means the enemy of his enemy is his friend.

These are kindred spirits, even if they are very different people.

Josey Wales is a man who should be dead. He fought for the South and then killed a bunch of Union officers trying to escape post-surrender and attempted execution.

Lone Watie is a man who the government has also sentenced to death, just for being who he is as well.

The cool thing about this movie is that this becomes the theme, as the guys decide to ride together and build up a surrogate family of similar people left behind, and that becomes the throughline of the rest of the film.

They build the very thing denied to them by the government, a place where they belong and are free. They are quite literally endeavoring to persevere.

The Takeaway for Screenwriters

As filmmakers and writers tracking our own screenplay development, we often fall into the trap of having big themes we want to explore, so we make them totally overt, which the audience finds boring or even on the nose.

Subtlety and subtext are an art you usually find while rewriting. And this movie, I think, is what allows it to elevate over other films in the game genre.

This is a story about coming together in the face of oppression, and it's people of different walks of life doing it.

This scene and line we pulled apart are excellent, as both have character introductions, a reason not to kill this guy, and then a distillation of what these two guys believe.

• Weaponize the Refrain: A great line can mean one thing when a character first says it, and something different by the time the film reaches its climax. Your story needs to evolve in tandem so we can see these things come to fruition.
• Find the Humor in Tragedy: Lone Watie's delivery works because it doesn't beg for the audience to react; it takes us on a journey by itself. One that, if we're astute, we can see mirror the main character, too.

Summing It All Up

There is a distinct reason The Outlaw Josey Wales has aged so gracefully. That's because it seemedl ike it understood a lot about the Old West, alliances, and the general malaise people were feeling.

It's gunny, tem ovie vamoe out righ as the Vietnam War ended, so it was also capitalizing on the way people felt about America currently. It took these vibes and used them to draw audiences in, and to talk about a world that felt corrupt in the face of people just trying to get by.

We endeavor to persevere.

Let me know your favorite lines from the film in the comments.