Follow The River

Settlers vs Shawnee in the heart of Appalachia, 1755

After a raid at Draper's Meadow settlement in what is now the Virginia Tech campus in Blacksburg, several Caucasians are taken captive and brought northwest to the Shawnee village in what is present-day South Portsmouth in northeast Kentucky, and, later, to Big Bone Lick, which is further west. The resilient Mary Ingles (Sheryl Lee) hatches a plan with an older German captive (Ellen Burstyn) to possibly find their way back over the 350 miles of wilderness. Eric Schweig plays the chief warrior.

“Follow the River” (1995) is an American settler survival adventure with the general milieu of "The Last of the Mohicans" (1992) except with a budget and tone closer to the later "Battle of the Brave" or "The Sign of the Beaver," aka "Keeping the Promise.” It’s very similar to “Alone Yet Not Alone,” which came out eighteen years after, and concerned a similar raid, also in 1755, albeit by the Delaware (Lenape) 275 miles to the northeast in central Pennsylvania.

You’ll be inspired to look up the historical account. The movie has heart and should be commended for keeping the gist accurate, although what happens at the close is glaring fiction (you’ll know what I mean). Nevertheless, the flick gives you a good peak at what it was like in the wilderness of Appalachia in the mid-1700s when the French and Indian War was starting (and lasted from 1754-1763).

It runs 1 hour, 31 minutes, and was shot in Sapphire and Turtleback Falls in southwest North Carolina, both about a 1.5 hour drive west of Charlotte.

GRADE: B