Geneseo ? Just as it has for centuries, the sun slipped above the horizon and painted the sky in blues, grays, pinks and oranges.

That unchanging vista brought an Indiana filmmaker to Jim Gray’s Smoky Hills pasture recently to re-create a Kansas prairie scene from October 1872.

Bill Proctor’s movie “Kansas Moon: The Last Hunt” follows a Pawnee raiding party from northern Texas into Kansas at the height of the buffalo hunting era.

It is based on a true story of a conflict between white buffalo hunters and the Pawnee and Comanche who compete with them for game and hides.

John Torrence of Lebo plays one of the buffalo hunters.

At night, he said between takes, the actors slept on the prairie in tents from the period, surrounded by horses in rope pens.

“One night we were all running around in our underwear and boots catching horses,” Torrence said. “After the third night, we decided the horses weren’t going to go anywhere and we turned them loose. They were actually less trouble than keeping them penned up.”

Because historic authenticity is paramount, no filming could take place until the Herefords that graze Gray’s pastureland — there were no Herefords there in the 1870s — had been shushed far from the camera’s lens.

“Kansas Moon” is a labor of love, said Proctor, who is of Ottawa Indian descent. After it is completed next spring, he hopes to premiere the movie locally and at film festivals next year.

Proctor is a member of the National Congress of Old West Shooters, whose members pride themselves on re-enacting and promoting the Old West heritage.

Gray and Proctor became acquainted in the 1990s, Gray said, when Proctor was invited to Great Bend for the annual Kansas muzzleloaders convention.

When Proctor was ready to shoot the scenes of “Kansas Moon,” he contacted Gray. He wanted Gray’s land to serve as the backdrop for the movie — not only for its beauty, but its authenticity.

Buffalo once wallowed and roamed here. American Indians lived and worshiped. And old, grizzled frontier hunters saw the clash of cultures and sparks of dreams played out in the valleys and ridges of the Smoky Hills.

Since last August, Proctor has shot more than six hours of footage, mostly on Gray’s land. He has financed the filming.

The scenes have included a buffalo hunter coming across a burned-out wagon and the remains of a friend, the slaughter of a family in a Comanche hunting camp, Pawnee Indians eyeing white buffalo hunters as they finished their yearly hunt, and interactions at a trading post in Fort Harker, in nearby Kanapolis.

Other scenes will be filmed in Texas and Indiana.

Proctor said if production goes well, he wants to return next year to film another movie, based on historical accounts from Gray’s book “Desperate Seed,” about life along the violent frontier near Ellsworth.

Gray, a local historian and publisher of the Kansas Cowboy, sees filming the movie as a chance to re-create history on his grandfather’s land.

“It gives me chills to think about how it has been about that long since Indians roamed these hills,” he said. “This is where Smoky Hill Thompson first came into the country in 1859 and got run out by Indians. And later, a group of buffalo hunters came in and saw dugouts and moved here and settled along the creek. This movie and this land is historically correct.”