Although The Great Train Robbery (from December 1903) is usually called the first Western, two earlier items open tonight's survey of the origins of the genre, as seen through new archival 35mm prints: A Bluff from a Tenderfoot (Frederick Armitage, 1899, 1 min) and The Pioneers: A Story of the Early Settlers (Wallace McCutcheon, 1903, 12 mins). The latter, a full-reel Indian captivity narrative, is screened publicly tonight for the first time in over a hundred years. (It was restored by the Library of Congress from shots separately copyrighted.) After Cowboy Justice (Billy Bitzer, 1904, 1 min), we leap ahead a decade for two films by the genre's first master, Thomas Ince, whose newly realistic Westerns were produced in the rolling canyons above Santa Monica. The Invaders (1912, 40 mins), arguably the first great Western, is a broken-treaty tale whose power owes much to its Native American actors, some fifty Oglala Sioux from the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota. Probably codirected by Francis Ford, who also stars as the cavalry commandant, the three-reeler, an epic for 1912, plays like a taut draft for his brother John Ford's Fort Apache, mixing a large-scale battle with domestic dramas of the commandant's and Sioux chief's daughters. The Struggle (1913, 25 mins), a smaller-scale two-reeler of murder and revenge (seen in George Eastman House's new preservation), anticipates elements of Ford's Stagecoach, with an early stagecoach chase shot with a moving camera.