MOST OF THE FILMS and television shows that Sam Peckinpah directed concerned the West. His interest wasn’t just as a filmmaker looking for settings rife with drama and evocative landscapes. He was a westerner himself.
His family came to America from the Frisian Islands in Europe. Eventually they headed west by covered wagon in the mid-1800s. Peckinpah’s great-grandfather settled in Central California and worked in the logging business; the family would eventually run a lumber mill. His maternal grandfather Denver Church was a cattle rancher, judge, and congressman. Born in 1925 in Fresno, California, young Sam spent a lot of time on his grandfather’s ranch — where he cowboyed around, branding, shooting, and trapping — during a period when many
