owner.
As Jack Manning, Art Acord protects Raven from the pugilist circus owner, Steve Brant (Albert J. Smith) in The Circus Cyclone, 1925.
Hoot Gibson, an expert at Roman riding (the art of standing upright on the backs of two horses working in tandem, which despite its name has no link to ancient Rome), won the Allowed-Around Champion title at Pendleton the same year Art Acord won his award. Gibson began his film career doubling silent star Harry Carey. His daring stunt work eventually landed him his first starring role in a 1919 “two-reeler” series. (The approximately twenty- to thirty-minute “two reelers” consisted of two short reels of film.)
In King of the Rodeo (1929), Gibson demonstrates his rodeo expertise. For most of the movie, the affable Gibson rides his palomino, Goldie. Gibson rode several other horses during his career, including Midnight, Starlight, and Mutt, but he was most often associated with Goldie.
Hoot Gibson and Goldie with the cast and crew of the 1925 Universal Pictures production The Saddle Hawk on the grounds of what is now Universal City.
African-American rodeo star Bill Pickett was promoted as the “World’s Colored Champion” in the Norman Film Manufacturing Company’s 1923 production of The BullDogger. Bulldogs were often used by cattle ranchers to help herd unruly steers. In 1903, Pickett had witnessed such a bulldog force a steer into submission by leaping at its head and biting its lip. By imitating the dog’s technique, he developed the rodeo sport of bulldogging: galloping after a steer, leaping onto its neck, wrestling it to the ground, and biting its lip. In 1907, Pickett joined the Miller Brothers 101 Ranch Wild West Show and, with his courageous steed Spradley, popularized the daredevil sport. (The lip-biting flourish has since been dropped from the rodeo event.) Pickett’s sensational theatrics led to his starring film role, which according to a press release included “fancy and trick riding by black cowboys and cowgirls.” Pickett made one more film for Norman, a Western titled The Crimson Skull, in 1923. Featuring the heroics of thirty black cowboys, the film celebrated an often overlooked segment of America’s Western history.
For a brief time, rodeo champion Yakima Canutt, who won the Pendleton All-Around title in 1917, took a star turn and made a few pictures with a horse called Boy. Canutt eventually gave up acting and concentrated on stunt riding, doubling many Western stars, including John Wayne. In the stunt business, Canutt is revered for pioneering the difficult maneuver of leaping from a galloping horse onto one of the leads of a team of carriage horses and working his way along the rigging of the running team to the vehicle. He perfected this stunt in Stagecoach (1939). For the spectacular sequence, he added shimmying along underneath the moving coach, getting shot by Wayne, and falling to his “death.” Eventually, Canutt became a stunt coordinator and second unit director, staging some of the greatest horse action of all time, including the thrilling chariot race in the 1959 blockbuster Ben Hur.
Yakima Canutt leaps from wagon seat to a team of galloping horses in one of the many spectacular stunts he performed for the movie Stagecoach (1939).
Yakima Canutt and his horse Boy, circa 1925, in a rare portrait on the set of one of the low-budget oaters they made for Ben Wilson’s Goodwill Pictures.
Rarely seen posing, famed stuntman Yakima Canutt inscribed this publicity shot from his acting days with Boy to pioneering Western director Hobart Bosworth, who happened to be a direct descendant of Miles Standish and John and Priscilla Alden.
And One Little Cowgirl
Even child star Baby Peggy (Diana Serra Cary) got into the act. Baby Peggy’s wildly successful films parodied popular films of the day. In several 1921 two-reel Western comedies, the three-year-old superstar was paired with a miniature jet black horse named Tim. Taught to ride by her stuntman father, the cowboy Jack Montgomery, Baby Peggy mustered all her strength to try to control the obstreperous little horse. Although he was only 36 inches tall at the withers, or 9 hands as horses are measured, Tim was a pistol. “He was a difficult horse,” says Diana, reminiscing about her Baby Peggy days with Tim. “He was always cow-kicking and pinning his ears.” He also ran away with her one day when she and her father were out for their Sunday ride on the bridle path that used to run along Sunset Boulevard from the beach to Hollywood. Father and daughter were quite a sight as Jack, in a white Stetson hat, was mounted on his 17-hand gray horse, White Man, and Diana was astride tiny Tim. A passing trolley car startled Tim and he bolted. Jack could easily have reached down and swept his daughter from Tim’s back, but he wanted her to learn to control him. Listening to her father as he shouted instructions at her, Diana managed to turn the runaway Tim on to a side street where she “finally planted him on his tail almost in the laps of a couple who were reading their Sunday paper on the ivy-covered porch of their bungalow.” After that episode, she says that Tim turned into a very honest horse.
Silent star Baby Peggy (Diana Serra Cary) parodied the cowboy-horse partnership on her miniature horse, Tim, in Peg O’ the Mounties, 1924.
Future Legends Get a Leg Up
Marion Michael Morrison was no stranger to the saddle. He grew up in the California desert town of Lancaster and rode an old mare named Jenny to school and back, a 10-mile round trip. “Riding a horse always came as naturally to me as breathing,” he once said, “and I loved that mare more than anything in the world.” Young Morrison, nicknamed Duke, was heartbroken when Jenny had to be put down. He was destined, however, to forge bonds with quite a few more horses in his life as an actor.
Duke Morrison won a football scholarship to USC but, like so many other young men, was drawn to Hollywood. Inspired by his idol, silent Western star Harry Carey, Morrison had a hankering to be a screen cowboy. He worked as a prop man and appeared in a number of films as a bit player until director Raoul Walsh gave him a break in the 1930 Western The Big Trail. Walsh reportedly also gave Duke Morrison a new name: John Wayne.
The Big Trail was not a big success, but it started Wayne on his own trail to superstardom. In a series of films for Warner Brothers, he was paired with a white horse named Duke (after Wayne’s own nickname). One of these movies, Ride Him, Cowboy (1932), is credited with making Wayne a star. Wayne shared billing with Duke, “his Devil Horse,” but the handsome former parade horse, with a long flowing mane and tail, looked anything but devilish.
In later films, Duke (really several different white and light gray or cream horses) became the Wonder Horse. It’s amusing now to watch these old films and hear the actor talking to Duke as if to an intellectual equal, something Wayne later admitted he didn’t particularly like. In those early days of Westerns, however, there was nothing better for jump-starting an actor’s career than the right costar—a good horse.
Another screen legend, Gary Cooper, had his first starring role as “the Cowboy” in the 1927 silent Western Arizona Bound. An excellent horseman who spent part of his youth on a Montana ranch, Cooper performed most of his own stunts, including a transfer from a horse onto a fast-moving stagecoach. Later that year, he starred as the title character of Nevada aboard a bald-faced sorrel and appeared with a horse named Flash in The Last Outlaw. Variety Weekly raved about this last film: “Cooper does some good work, rides fast and flashy on his horse ‘Flash,’
