6 details you might have missed in the premiere episode of ‘1923’

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• Warning: There are spoilers ahead for the season one premiere of “1923.”
• The first episode of “Yellowstone” origin story introduced viewers to a new generation of Duttons.
• It also featured a number of callbacks to the franchise’s first prequel series “1883.”

The voiceover at the beginning of the episode will be familiar to viewers of “1883.”

Like the prequel series that came before it, this new “Yellowstone” origin story is also narrated by Elsa Dutton (Isabel May), the first-born daughter of James (Tim McGraw) and Margaret Dutton (Faith Hill) who died before she could see her family settle in Montana.

“Violence has always haunted this family,” she intones in her captivating Southern drawl after the opening scene in which viewers see Cara Dutton (Helen Mirren) mercilessly take out an unidentified man in the middle of the woods.

Throughout the episode, Elsa’s narration is used to fill in the gaps of what has happened to the Dutton clan in the four decades that have passed since the events of “1883.”

While it’s not quite clear how Elsa is able to tell the story beyond the grave, her voiceover does create a certain degree of continuity and connects the two stories which already seem to be very different.

James and Margaret Dutton’s absence from the series and ultimate fate is revealed.

Elsa’s narration also informs viewers what became of her parents, James and Margaret Dutton, and how it’s come to be that it’s her uncle, Jacob (Harrison Ford), running the ranch.

It appears that James died in 1893 from gunshot wounds he suffered while hunting horse thieves. Viewers saw this moment play out in a flashback during season four, episode eight of “Yellowstone,” although the severity of his wounds and his fate were left ambiguous.

As Elsa explains in her voiceover, after this, her mother “wrote to his brother begging that he bring his family to this wild land and save hers.”

Jacob arrived the next year in 1894 only to find that Margaret had frozen to death in a snowdrift. Fortunately, her two sons were still alive – although they were “half-starved and barely able to speak” – and so Jacob and his wife Cara raised them as their own.

It’s hinted that either John Snr. or Spencer will be dead before the end of the series.

“My father had three children. Only one would live to see their own children grown,” Elsa says elsewhere in her narration. “Only one would carry the fate of this family through the depression and every other hell the 20th century hurled at them.”

As we already know, Elsa is one of those children who sadly died, but who is the other?

It feels like an obvious choice to say that Spencer might be the other one of James and Margaret’s kin who will have his life cut short before he can carry on the family name, especially when you consider the episode ends on a cliffhanger after he is attacked by a wild leopard.

Moreover, John Snr. has already become a father, and given the fact that his son Jack is engaged to be married, you could argue that his own child “has grown.”

Of course, we can’t forget that “Yellowstone” began its first-ever episode with the death of John Dutton’s (Kevin Costner) eldest son, Lee. But at the same time, if there’s one thing we’ve learned, it’s that things aren’t always as straightforward as they seem in writer Taylor Sheridan’s Taylorverse — meaning we’re not placing any bets right now.

Spencer Dutton carries the knife that Elsa was gifted by her lover from the Comanche tribe in “1883.”

Although Spencer (Brandon Sklenar) was born after Elsa’s death, the sibling’s connection is shown in an item of Elsa’s that has been passed down to him.

When viewers first see Spencer in the episode, he is shown carrying a knife that once belonged to his older sister.

As viewers of “1883” may recall, in episode seven, Elsa meets Comanche tribesman Sam (Martin Sensmeier) following the death of the man she hoped to marry, Ennis (Eric Nelsen).

While things later turned romantic, they begin their friendship by challenging each other to a horseback race and when Elsa is triumphant, Sam gifts her the knife and its ornate leather case as a prize.

The significance of Spencer inheriting Elsa’s knife could help answer the question that Cara brings up in her letter to Spencer that appears toward the end of the episode.

Cara wonders why he won’t return home to them, and it’s possible that instead of there being some concrete or obvious reason, it could be that, like his sister before him, Spencer just lives for adventure and new experiences.

The house that the modern-day Duttons live in is revealed to be at least 100 years old.

At several points in the episode, we get glimpses of the log mansion that Jacob, Cara, their nephew John (James Badge Dale), and great-nephew, Jack (Darren Mann) are residing in and it’s unmistakably the same building that is used for John’s abode on “Yellowstone.”

So does that mean the Duttons have resided in the same property since the early 20th century and never rebuilt it?

Given that the real log cabin which doubles for the Dutton house, the Chief Joseph Ranch in Darby, Montana, was built in 1914, it’s not such a crazy concept, but it is still wild to see the ranch “Yellowstone” viewers are so familiar with transported back in time.

Jacob’s plight with finding suitable land for his cattle mirrors John’s own struggles in the episode of “Yellowstone” that preceded the spinoff’s premiere.

In both the premiere of “1923” and season five, episode seven of “Yellowstone” which also aired on Sunday evening, we see the Duttons struggle to protect their livestock from disease and find suitable land for them to graze on.

The first time we see Jacob, he is surveying a field full of dead sheep who are covered in flies. It’s not clear what’s killed them, although, during a meeting, a Scottish sheepman Banner Creighton (Jerome Flynn) accuses Irish farmers of doing it.

Jacob seems to think it’s because there’s not enough grass for them all to graze on and suggests that, to combat the problem, the other farmers could sell some of their cattle.

Meanwhile, he plans on pushing his herds higher up the mountain where there is more for them to graze on, but there is also the additional threat of wild predators.

Meanwhile, on “Yellowstone,” John is facing a similar problem when he discovers that his cattle have been infected with a deadly disease thanks to some trespassing bison. He has two choices: euthanize the entire herd or relocate his livestock to greener pastures.

Having these two Dutton men face the same problem with their livestock almost 100 years apart gives us the sense of how history, inevitably, repeats itself and that while the world at large has changed significantly over the past century, ranching really hasn’t.

Whether that’s a good thing or not seems to be the eternal question that “Yellowstone” poses.