ABSTRACT
Edwin S. Porter’s The Great Train Robbery, produced in 1903 by the Edison Company, is commonly acknowledged to be the first Western motion picture, for it was the first film to employ within a fully realized dramatic framework the characters, incidents, and settings typical of the later Western. Less widely known are the considerable number of prototype Western films produced before the turn of the century. These films, all Edison Company productions, utilized Western material and, in two cases at least, incorporated the rudiments of drama. The films are certainly interesting enough in their own right as technological artifacts of the dawn of the motion picture industry. Yet they accrue additional historical and cultural significance insofar as they anticipate the development of the feature-length Western film, and thus represent an important pioneering phase in the evolution of the genre.
