his isn't worth arguing over, there is controversy over what order is the trilogy movies! If you watch Josey Wales you should be able to tell real quickly that Josey is the same character. High Planes Drifter again is the same character that is drifting from one area to another across the old western frontier. I'm not the first person to come up with stuff either, there was huge Clint Eastwood film movie buff that had these films all pieced together that I read some years ago, but I can't find it now, been searching like crazy for it because I want to see the order myself.
The trilogy chronological order should be this: At the end of The Good, The Bad, and the Ugly, The Man With No Name covers a dying young Confederate soldier with his duster, then takes the young man's blanket. The next time we see him, he's wearing the blanket as his iconic poncho. He wears the poncho at the beginning of A Fistful of Dollars. In that movie, his hand is damaged during a savage beating by Indio's men, and at the end of the movie he has adopted a leather glove for the injured hand. At the beginning of For A Few Dollars More he is wearing the glove when he beats up one of his opponents in the bar shoot-out. I think that establishes the timeline.
Josey Wales shows him wanting to retire out in the plaines but comes out of retirement, but at the end of the movie, he is told by the Colonel it was time to forget the war and to retire, then that film leads to Unforgiven. Then at the end of Unforgiven, there is a huge hint about him moving on to San Francisco, and out of his family comes the law enforcement person, that stuff is all mentioned at the end of the movie, watch it again. Josey Wales was a Missouri farmer, at the beginning of The Unforgiven William Munny ran a pig farm. It becomes apparent as the film progresses Munny is originally from Missouri.
The elderly woman Josey Wales rescues comments that she doesn't trust him because he is from Missouri, where "they kill women and children". That quote ties in directly with Gene Hackman's assessment of Munny in the final scene of Unforgiven. The woman and her daughter are from Kansas. Wales seems to have begun a relationship with the daughter by the end of the film. It seems likely that he could move to Kansas with the girl and marry her. The pig farm run by William Munny, who is widowed, is in Kansas.
Josey Wales is a keen Whiskey drinker but Munny has apparently stayed clear of the liquor for some time in an effort to distance himself from his drunken and violent past.
the Book of Revelations puts it, ''Behold a pale horse: and his name that sat on him was Death, the name of him who sits on the pale horse is, simply, the Stranger, also called Preacher when he chooses to wear a turned collar. However, no matter what his costume is, he's still Death, and it's death that comes to town after getting some booze in Unforgiven, that is why the entire scene of Death gunning down all those town people turns reddish in hue representing blood and death.
the Stranger (from the movie High Plains Drifter), and that he somehow came back after his death, becoming a (likely self-proclaimed) pastor and taking on a mission of justice. The latter part comes from the enigmatic statement from Eastwood that the Rider was “an out-and-out ghost” — when watching the movie with this in mind there are various clues that the Rider is, indeed, dead. For reference, the first line of the Preacher in Pale Rider is a reference to the first line of the Stranger in High Plains Drifter. Obviously, a dead man cannot physically kill someone, but he was left for dead and everyone thought he was dead, but obviously was not.
I think there was a subtle but deliberate effort on Clint's part to portray Munny as an aged Josey Wales, and all of those are linked to the Trilogy and maybe Plaines Drifter and Hang em High, which I think they are all related. Just a theory, don't get to excited, but Clint Eastwood is a very intelligent person and it wouldn't put past him to somehow link all of those films.