Changes

The movie is set in a specific historical period. Despite the movies painstaking efforts to be historically accurate, there are a number of inaccuracies and anachronisms. In one scene Fitzgerald states that he is going to Texas and maybe join the Texas Rangers. The Rangers had not been created at this time and Texas was still at this date, Mexican territory. In another scene, which is beautifully shot, we see the Di Caprio character, viewing, in horror, a mountain of bleached buffalo skulls. Such grizzly mounds were a result of the overhunting of buffalos by professional hunters. However, the mounds which actually became quite common, are a feature of the post-Civil War period and not the 1820s. In the movie, we see how US Cavalrymen raiding the home settlement of Glass and his wife. They murdered his wife and many other inhabitants. While such raids did take place, they were not a feature of the frontier in the 1820s. These terrible tactics became a feature of the American strategy to pacify Native American tribes in the 1870s and after. <ref>Hine, Robert Van Norden, Robert V. Hine, and John Mack Faragher. The American West: A new interpretive history (Yale, Yale University Press, 2000), p 119</ref>.