During the American Civil War, the wife and son of Missouri farmer Josey Wales are murdered by pro-Union paramilitaries led by the brutal Captain Terrill. With his farm burned down and nothing else to live for, a hardened Wales joins a group of pro-Confederate bushwhackers under the command of William T. Anderson, attacking the Union Army and pro-Union sympathizers.
After the war ends in 1865, Wales' superior and mentor Fletcher persuades his men to surrender, having been promised amnesty by Union Senator Jim Lane. However, Terrill's men massacre the bushwhackers as they swear an oath of allegiance, with Wales, Fletcher, and a young man named Jamie being the only survivors. Wales and Jamie flee, and Lane orders Fletcher at gunpoint to track them down before issuing a $5,000 bounty. A mortally wounded Jamie helps Wales kill two bounty hunters before dying.
Wales flees to Texas and becomes friends with a Cherokee veteran named Lone Watie, who informs Wales that Confederate General Joseph O. Shelby is fleeing to Mexico and suggests they do likewise. Wales picks up another companion in Navajo drifter Little Moonlight, and rescues elderly Kansan widow Sarah Turner and her granddaughter Laura Lee from marauding Comancheros. At the town of Santo Rio, two employees of Turner's deceased son Tom, Travis Cobb and Chato, also join the group. Wales locates Tom's abandoned ranch and settles down there. Discovering that Travis and Chato have been kidnapped by Comanche chief Ten Bears, he rides into the chief's camp and negotiates the return of the two men; an impressed Ten Bears becomes blood brothers with Wales.
A bounty hunter who previously survived a gunfight with Wales leads Terrill and his men to Santo Rio. The following morning, Terrill orders an attack on the ranch only to be repelled by Wales' companions in a bloody shootout. Wounded and out of ammunition, Wales chases Terrill back to Santo Rio and goads him into drawing his saber, before grabbing the blade's hilt and running it through him. Returning to the town saloon, Wales discovers its patrons telling Fletcher, accompanied by two Texas Rangers, that an outlaw named Josey Wales was recently killed in Monterrey by five gunmen. The Rangers accept the story and leave, while Fletcher pretends not to recognize Wales, and tells him he will go to Mexico himself to look for Wales and tell him the war is over. Wales responds by stating, "I reckon so. I guess we all died a little in that damned war." He then rides off back to the ranch.
The Outlaw Josey Wales was inspired by a 1972 novel by supposedly Cherokee writer Forrest Carter, alias of former KKK leader and segregationist speech writer of George Wallace, Asa Earl Carter, an identity that was exposed in part due to the success of the film, and was originally titled The Rebel Outlaw: Josey Wales and later retitled Gone to Texas. The script was worked on by Sonia Chernus and producer Robert Daley at Malpaso, and Clint Eastwood himself paid some of the money to obtain the screen rights.
Reception
Upon release in August 1976, The Outlaw Josey Wales was widely acclaimed by critics, many of whom saw Eastwood's role as an iconic one, relating it with much of America's ancestral past and the destiny of the nation after the American Civil War. The film was pre-screened at the Sun Valley Center for the Arts and Humanities in Idaho in a six-day conference entitled Western Movies: Myths and Images. Academics such as Bruce Jackson, critics such as Jay Cocks and Arthur Knight and directors such as King Vidor, Henry King, William Wyler, and Howard Hawks were invited to the screening. Time magazine
Senator: The war's over. Our side won the war. Now we must busy ourselves winning the peace. And Fletcher, there's an old saying: To the victors belong the spoils.
Fletcher: There's another old saying, Senator: Don't…
