6.1 Wee cowboy, 1927: a fascination with the cowboy way led in turn to a fascination with horses. (photo credit 6.1)
My assailant, Ernie Cichelly (to end this little tease), was seven. Home then was Nakina, an outpost in northern Ontario. It was a spit of a town, with an odd name that matched others on the railway line: Capreol, Hornepayne, Gogama. I remember my father once crossing the tracks and taking me into the bush, where the bugs left scabs in my scalp the size of dimes; how he made me an Indian bow, with arrows to match. Later, again by the tracks, I proudly handed the bow to an older boy who had expressed interest in it; he snapped it over his knee before passing it back with a laugh. I remember tears, but mostly shock that the world was capable of such malevolence.
Although suddenly bowless, I could still be a cowboy. Minimal attire was a cowboy hat with drawstring, a bandanna at the neck and a metal six-shooter in a leather holster. (Serious quick draws wore one on each hip.) At the end of the holster the leather split off into two thongs that you could wrap round your leg. As we had seen them do in the movies, we would “knock out” the other guy from behind with the handles of our cap guns. There was an art to delivering a menacing-looking blow but stopping the gun butt just shy of the other kid’s head; Ernie had yet to master it.
Later, as I grew up in suburban Toronto in the late 1950s, the emulation of cowboys continued. We supped on westerns at the Golden Mile Theatre and on television. Our first set was a windowed piece of furniture that also housed the hi-fi. At first, we ignored the thing. The giant cardboard box it came in was far more interesting as a fort, a cavalry’s defense against imaginary tribes.
Decades later, this period in my life would become a rich source of trivia questions:
Q. Who played Hopalong Cassidy?
A. William Boyd. (The black-attired Hopalong and his gray horse, Topper, made the cover of Time magazine on November 27, 1950, the year their names appeared on 108 products, from wristwatches to kids’ clothes, thermoses to ice cream. The endorsement bonanza was worth $70 million.) You got bonus points if you knew that my childhood hero at first detested children (“the little bastards”) and feared horses.
Q. Who said, “Wait for me, Wild Bill”?
A. Jingles, played by Andy Devine in the Wild Bill Hickok TV series, uttered those words in the opening credits while jiggling atop a bay horse.
Q. Name the horse.
A. Joker.
Sometimes I wonder if my own affection for horses quietly took root in those early days of television. The Cisco Kid rode Diablo; his sidekick, Pancho, rode Lobo; Wild Bill Hickok rode Buckshot. Five horses named Silver, Scout, Trigger, Buttermilk and Champion mattered as much as the five characters who rode them on late-afternoon TV: the Lone Ranger, Tonto, Roy Rogers, Dale Evans and Gene Autry. The gray, the two paints, the palomino and the Tennessee walking horse entered our hearts as horses in books had before them — Flicka, Black Beauty, National Velvet.
The twentieth century, on the one hand, took work from the horse with every passing decade. The war horse, the plow horse and the ranch horse all fell from view, but in their stead came a far grander version of the horse to fire our imaginations and keep the horse-human bond alive: the heroic horse of the silver screen and the TV screen.
While cowboy extras earned a pittance for their dangerous work, star horses made small fortunes for their trainers. Fury, the black American saddle horse stallion who starred in a TV series in the 1950s, worked only four months a year and still pulled in $500,000 in eight years. Cowboy film stars, meanwhile, also grew rich. Gene Autry earned close to $100,000 in 1937, and by 1948 he owned his own movie and music publishing companies, oil wells, cattle ranches and a traveling rodeo, bringing his net income that year to $600,000.
6.2 In 1949, children were buying two million Roy Rogers and Trigger comic books every month. (photo credit 6.2)
Trigger starred in all eighty-seven Roy Rogers films and 101 TV shows, before finally succumbing in 1965 at the age of thirty-three. Like Topper, Trigger was a merchandiser’s dream. Some sixty-five different Roy Rogers–Trigger products flew off the shelves in 1949, and their comic books were selling at the dizzying rate of two million a month.
On rainy-day Sunday afternoons I would sometimes watch on TV, one of the seven Francis the talking mule movies made between 1950 and 1956. For these, the trainer tied thread to the mule’s lips or, off camera, pressed a muscle on the side of the animal’s face to create the illusion of equine gab. Television emulated this, and Mr. Ed, a palomino, talked his way through his own show for three years in the early 1960s. There was no sense, least of all horse sense, in any of this; there was, though, continuity. Alan “Rocky” Lane, a cowboy star of the 1940s and 1950s and a solid horseman, seemed a natural to give voice to Mr. Ed. And the same director oversaw both Donald O’Connor in the silly Francis movies and equine Ed in the even sillier television series.
While children watched television shows about horses by day, in the evening during the late 1950s and 1960s adults watched Bonanza, Gunsmoke, Cheyenne, Bat Masterson, Maverick, Have Gun Will Travel, Wanted: Dead or Alive, Death Valley Days, Iron Horse, Tales of Wells Fargo, Laramie, Wyatt Earp, Rawhide, The Virginian and Wagon Train. Gunsmoke (1955 to 1975) and Bonanza (1959 to 1973) rank among the longest running episodic programs in the history of television.
Television and film exalted the horse, with plots almost as improbable as those of the silent films. The Lone Ranger — silver bullets, mask and all — had rescued his magnificent wild gray after an attack by a buffalo, nursed him back to health and was repaid a hundred times over by the thankful stallion.
Many cowboy stars (John Wayne, Tom Mix, Gene Autry, Hoot Gibson, Clark Gable and Sal Mineo, to name a few) shared the silver screen with eternally grateful mustangs. As nonsensical as some were, such films may well have helped Wild Horse Annie and her consorts save the real mustangs, who were being slaughtered even as their celluloid counterparts were being celebrated.
It did seem to matter that the horse ridden by film and television characters was not just a horse but a horse with a name: Tex Ritter rode White Flash; James Arness in Gunsmoke rode Buck; in Wyatt Earp, Hugh O’Brien rode Candy.
By the 1960s horses no longer occupied center stage in western films but still were cast in strong supporting roles. In Cat Ballou, Lee Marvin plays the dipsomaniacal Kid Sheleen, and in a morning-after scene, the Kid is on his horse, Smoky, sleeping it off in the saddle and leaning against a saloon wall. The horse hilariously mirrors his rider: with his legs crossed and his head down, Smoky looks almost as hung over as the Kid. When Lee Marvin won an Academy Award in 1966 for his performance, he acknowledged in his acceptance speech Smoky’s role: “I think half of this,” he said, referring to the Oscar, “belongs to a horse somewhere out in the Valley.”
6.3 Lee Marvin on Smoky in the film Cat Ballou: the memorable morning-after shot. (photo credit 6.3)
By this time, the presence of the horse was likewise waning on television. Lorne Greene’s Pa Cartwright rode a horse, all right, but I never learned his name. This was a far cry from the old days, when the horse’s stardom (and acting skills) matched the cowboy’s. The end of programs such as Bonanza and Gunsmoke marked the virtual end of the western as a staple of film and television. It had been a good long run, one that began with the old western horse operas. In fact, the very creation of moving pictures in the late 1800s owes something to the horse.
The ancient Egyptians and every subsequent culture that relied on the horse debated this question: is there a moment in the horse’s trot or canter when all four feet are off the ground?
The man who finally settled the matter did it in 1872 with photographs taken in quick sequence. His name was Eadweard Muybridge, and he had been commissioned by Leland Stanford, former governor of California, a railway mogul and owner of a breeding ranch, to determine through photography whether Stanford’s horse Occident ever had all four feet off the ground during his splendid trot. Stanford had bet a frien
d $25,000 that Occident did.
At Stanford’s ranch in Sacramento, California (now the site of Stanford University), Muybridge arrayed a battery of cameras in rows and triggered the shutters electromagnetically. His accomplishment was a stroke of genius, because rolled film and automatic shutters had yet to be invented: like old rifles, old cameras took only single shots. Muybridge connected clocks and circuits and cameras and obtained exposures as short as 1/6,000 of a second. As Occident passed the shutters went off in perfect sequence, like a neat row of dominoes falling in quick succession.
The resulting photographs clearly showed two points in each stride where Occident did leave the ground. Stanford won his bet. (It was, though, a Pyrrhic victory, since Muybridge racked up $100,000 in expenses over five years to produce irrefutable evidence.) If scientists were intrigued, so were artists. For centuries, painters and sculptors had gotten the horse’s gallop, trot, even the walk, wrong. Drawings of galloping cattle done by the Bushmen of the Kalahari Desert show that they, at least, understood four-legged locomotion.
6.4 Photographs like these, taken by Eadweard Muybridge in 1887, led to motion pictures and a starring role for horses. (photo credit 6.4)
Muybridge’s horse photographs were first published as The Horse in Motion and later joined other photos collected in Animals in Motion. The tiny black-and-white images run across the page, comic book-style. If you scan left to right, you can watch a man in a bowler galloping a horse named Daisy, her mane flying, and in two sequential shots all four legs are in the air. On one page, fifteen frames capture a near-naked man jumping a fence on horseback — on the approach, in the air, on landing. Cats and dogs, deer and birds, naked women and horses, lots and lots of horses, swiftly cross the pages in the first stop-action photography the world had ever seen. Muybridge suggested that his device could be used to determine the winner of horse races. And so it was: the photo finish was first used in 1888.
Muybridge also invented a “zoöpraxiscope,” a device to project images sequentially on a screen. He was soon chatting with another inventor, Thomas Edison, about creating talking pictures by marrying the zoöpraxiscope and the phonograph. Someone did just that.
Inspired by Muybridge, Etienne Jules Marey in 1887 invented the chronophotographic camera, which could record the motion of a trotting horse on a roll of light-sensitized film. This machine led directly to the motion picture camera.
Seven years later, Edison made his first film, one of the very first films ever made, a 643-frame short called Bucking Bronco. He followed that in 1896 with The Burning Stable and its sequel, Fighting the Fire. Both vignettes depicted similar scenes involving four white horses being led from a fiery stable and horse-drawn fire engines arriving to extinguish the flames. Other Edison horse shorts, Elopement on Horseback and Cripple Creek Bar-Room, were made in 1898.
The silent film had arrived. Not long after came talking films, then talking films in color. The horse would cling to his starring role in this new medium for at least fifty years. Until well into the 1950s, horse and cowboy were the focus of thousands of cheaply made movies. They called them “B movies,” and for a long time I was convinced the B stood for bad. They were actually movies meant to be the second feature on a double bill, in the days when a single cinema ticket let you see two movies. Plot-poor but action-rich, “B movies” featured runaway stagecoaches, burning wagons, posse chases, warriors on fleet paint horses and cavalry to the rescue.
In these stylized and predictable morality plays, the horse was king, a real character who rescued the hero in the white hat and outwitted the bad guys in the black hats. Some movie horses were as famous as the actors, and even received more fan mail. The horses’ pictures and names took pride of place on posters outside theaters.
Fritz, a red-and-white pinto in films of the 1920s, was perhaps the first horse to get a credit line in a movie. He was ridden by one of the great actors in the early westerns, William S. Hart, who thought Fritz deserved equal billing.
Unlike some actors in later years (who could neither act nor ride), Hart was a capable actor and a fine horseman. He built whole films around Fritz and once wrote a book in “the voice” of Fritz. “I loved every hair of the little scoundrel’s hide,” Hart said in his autobiography. The horse was precious, both to Hart and to his fans.
With his small but extraordinary stunt horse, Hart did the “run and throw,” where the horse in full gallop suddenly stopped and his rider threw him to the ground. They jumped through windows and over fire and crossed raging rivers. One film in 1924, Singer Jim McKee, shows Hart riding his horse over a cliff before a treacherous 150-foot slide down a gorge. Movie fans bitterly complained about cruelty to their beloved Fritz, but they need not have worried.
Hart, who was said to love Fritz more than he ever loved another human, thought the stunt too dangerous even for his gifted horse. The filmmakers therefore constructed an elaborate dummy horse animated by piano wire. The footage obviously fooled many people. Hart placated his fans and the censors by traveling to New York, where he showed clips to explicate the fake horse. But the issue of Hollywood’s cruelty to horses was destined to come up again.
In those days the mark of stardom was to sink your hands in wet cement outside Grauman’s Chinese Theatre in Hollywood. Tom Mix, a famous cowboy of this era, had a horse called Tony who would eventually have his hoofprints grace that sidewalk.
Tarzan, yet another wonder horse, starred in films of the 1920s and 1930s. His partner was a cowboy hero named Ken Maynard. The author Edgar Rice Burroughs, creator of the jungle hero, had apparently visited the Maynard ranch and suggested the Tarzan name. However, an ensuing lawsuit over its use suggests that Burroughs either did no such thing or had second thoughts.
A $50 horse with palomino looks, Tarzan was astonishingly versatile and learned to respond to one-syllable commands. He could dance, bow, roll over and feign death; he could nod in response to questions, ring a fire bell, untie the ropes that bound his master and jump from great heights. Maynard’s character was forever getting stuck in quicksand, finding himself surrounded by hostile Indians, or being knocked unconscious in burning buildings. Tarzan always came to the rescue, and he would nudge the reticent hero into the arms of the heroine for the kiss that ended the movie.
In his book The Filming of the West, Jon Tuska called Tarzan “the most exceptional horse in pictures … Ken loved Tarzan deeply, in a manner that he never loved a human being. Tarzan reciprocated.”
Tuska tells the story of the two attempting a stunt in a film called Gun Gospel. Horse and rider were to leap from a cliff sixty feet down into a lake, but Tarzan slipped on the planed runway (put there, ironically, for safety’s sake) and somersaulted before landing in the water on top of Maynard and driving him thirty feet below the surface. Each swam for opposite shores — Tarzan for the far shore, as he had been trained; Maynard for the near shore after almost drowning. When he spotted his rider, Tarzan immediately swam back to Maynard, who waded out to meet him. There, in the shallows, the horse dropped to his knees and nestled his head in Maynard’s arms.
Another horse called Dice (Gregory Peck rode him in a film called Duel in the Sun) could pull a revolver from a pocket, lift cowboys by the seat of their pants and smile or yawn on command. In one picture Dice, a pinto stallion with a mostly white face, walked through a hotel lobby, entered an elevator, then backed out and began to climb the stairs.
I doubt that audiences believed in the cleverness of these celluloid horses, any more than they swallowed the saccharine truths of the Shirley Temple films, but moviegoers did delight in the fantasy of horses-to-the-rescue. Two films produced during the First World War were called, respectively, Saved by Her Horse and Saved by His Horse. In one film called Trail Through the Hills, released in 1912, Indians tossed the hero off a cliff, and the cowboy’s pony later showed up at the precipice, dropped a rope and pulled up his two-legged pal. (A logical sequence might have seen horse and rider retire to the saloon for a chat and
a beer.) In another film, we were to believe that the horse galloped in front of an outlaw and intentionally took the bullet meant for his master.
H. F. Hintz, the author of an exhaustive survey called Horses in the Movies, observed that the notion of a horse, a flight animal, entering a burning barn to untie his master’s hands “was nonsense. But it was nonsense we enjoyed.”
Some of the actors in these films — Tom Mix, Ken Maynard, Hoot Gibson — had been rodeo stars or stuntmen. The fine Canadian writer Guy Vanderhaeghe wrote a novel in 1996 entitled The Englishman’s Boy, which touches on the lives of cowboys hanging around Hollywood movie sets in the 1920s, hoping to be hired as extras, stuntmen and doubles. The author describes how compounds were built to house the sullen men until a director came along to cut one or two “out of the remuda for a day’s shooting.”
In those days, lead actors often performed the stunts themselves. But they also had doubles, and so did their horses. Actors in the next generation, such as William Boyd, were sometimes poor or reluctant horsemen. Gene Autry, a green rider, got only marginally better. Jack Palance, who played the mean boss on the cattle drive in the City Slicker movies with Billy Crystal and acted in countless westerns before that, did not at first ride tall in the saddle.
In that classic western Shane, released in 1953, gunslinger Palance walks his horse into town, and the effect is both chilling and dramatic. In fact Palance walked the horse because the director’s instruction to gallop him, even a subsequent plea that Palance trot him, was then beyond the actor’s equestrian skills.
The word on John Wayne was that cowboys on the movie sets liked him — the horses didn’t. Corky Randall, a second-generation Hollywood horse trainer, recalls Wayne as “a rough rider. He never squeezed with his legs to make a horse go, just kicked him with his spurs.” After two movies, a replacement horse would have to be found because the original horse had learned to anticipate spurring and would launch himself into a full gallop when the word “Action!” was uttered. Clint Eastwood, on the other hand, says Randall, “knows how to sit on a horse.”
Wild About Horses Page 15
