I always ending up siding with Joshua Graham. Mainly because it seems like the other guy (david?) is just doing a really basic “noble savage / white saviour” routine. Like his “solution” is to just pack up and leave in order for the people to preserve some inherent quality of “innocence” he thinks they possess. He would rather have them hounded for the rest of their existence, than do something that challenges his perception of them.
On the other hand Joshua Graham is a mormon
I think a big issue is also a limitation of technology/scope. As with any piece of fiction, not everything can be described (characterisation of sorrows for example) and so some stuff must be left up to ones own interpretation/imagination. How one fills in the blanks heavily influences how Joshua Graham is perceived. It’s a very good point about him using the Dead Horses as nothing more than a tool for his own salvation, I hadn’t really thought of that.
I think I’ve also been very dismissive of the games critique of Graham’s methods, because it reeks of “both sides” centrism to me, but that is in large part me treating metatext as text and that’s not really fair.