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Daughters of Daring: Hollywood Cowgirl Stunt Women

“Chris Enss has done it again. For years and with many, many books, she has brought us wonderful stories and insights about the women of the West. These heroines of calico helped shape, define, and build the frontier. Now we step into the early days of filmdom with strong, independent women who helped create the magic of movies. The weaker sex? Not in a heartbeat. These women mastered feats far beyond those mortal men. An exciting book about women with an iron will, determination, and skill. Daughters of Daring belongs in every western lover’s library.” Peter Sherayko, actor, producer, author

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Daughters of Daring: Hollywood Cowgirl Stuntwomen

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Daughters of Daring: Hollywood Cowgirl Stunt Women

“Once again, Enss has unearthed hidden cinema secrets. In Daughters of Daring: Hollywood Cowgirl Stunt Women, she tells the remarkable story of women who, from the dawn of movies, risked their lives – mostly in secret. Finally, their names are shared and their incredible achievements are told. No one does it better.” Rob Word, producer and host, A Word on Westerns

Daughter of Daring: Hollywood Cowgirl Stunt Women

coming to bookstores everywhere February 3.

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Daughters of Daring: Hollywood Cowgirl Stunt Women

In the beginning, women in Western films were relegated to playing mothers, daughters, or love interests to the Wester heroes. They were generally always in need and too frail to help themselves. Off camera women were seen differently by film producers. Because women sat lighter in the saddle than men they were called on to perform stunts on horseback that were difficult for their heavier male costars. Many of the sensational feats such as riding horses into a raging river, riding full gallop down a cliff face, or over a small chasm were performed by cowgirls.

When Max Sennett decided to feature those daring stuntwomen as stars in his pictures, placing them in perilous situations and filming their hair-raising escapes, other movie executives followed suit. Audiences proved their appreciation for the films by swarming the theaters to watch the heroines deal with danger. Some of the female silent stars that dazzled fans in a series of fast-paced Westerns were Olive Fuller Golden, Bessie Barriscale, and Anita Bush.

When the five-reel western drama A Knight of the Range premiered in early 1916, critics praised silent film cowboy and cowgirl actors Harry D. Carey and Olive Fuller Golden performances. Audiences were dazzled by the equestrian tricks never-before seen in motion pictures. “Stunts that are inconceivable of execution are performed before the all-seeing eye of the camera,” a review of the film in a Hollywood magazine read. “Lovers of riding will miss the treat of their lifetime if they fail to see Western stars Carey and Golden work their magic on horseback. Golden is one of the prettiest and most popular of film favorites. Her long golden curls droop over her shoulders and her bewitching smile is as golden as an Arizona sunset; golden also is her disposition. She will be a star as long as motion pictures are being made.”

To learn more about Olive Golden and many other talented stunt women read Daughters of Daring: Hollywood Cowgirl Stunt Women.

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Daughters of Daring: Hollywood Cowgirl Stunt Women

“Daughters of Daring: Hollywood Cowgirl Stunt Women is a powerful survey of the women who made names for themselves in Hollywood as career stunt women, performing dangerous acts. Most readers have heard of stand-in stunt-men, but few will have prior knowledge of these women, who were chosen both for their ability and because:

That scene and nearly every other thrill the audience witnessed in early motion pictures where a lovely girl was in danger was made by one of Hollywood’s forgotten, fearless stuntwomen doubling for movie stars. She didn’t double for the star because the star lacked courage. She did it because, if she were maimed or killed, it would make little difference to the cost of the picture. If the star tried to wreck a buckboard and suffered even a split lip, the cost of delayed production would have amounted to thousands of dollars. Using a cowgirl stuntwoman in Westerns was insurance for the studios. While beautiful movie stars were expensive, courageous lady equestrians were more common and well within the studio’s budget.

With this introductory surprise, readers are off on a wild ride through the biographical sketches of selected Hollywood stuntwomen whose lives and achievements have, until now, gone largely undocumented.

These portraits embrace how each women got into the stunt-riding act, creating connections between such seemingly disparate circumstances as Lucille Mulhall’s encounter with Will Rogers at the Mulhall’s Congress of Rough Riders and Ropers, which resulted in the teenager’s training and developing extraordinary abilities in roping and riding; or Oregon girl Lorena Trickey, whose early skills with horses and riding led her to work with early film pioneers Mix and Pickford.

Hollywood history, women’s lives, and extraordinary talents of the times meld in a series of stories that are vivid and engrossing, adding depth and dimension to each woman’s experiences.

Enss’s focus not only on what they did but how they became stunt women and often embraced even more achievements outside of Hollywood makes for a vivid collection of biographical sketches supplemented by equally eye-opening vintage photos of the women.

Libraries and readers seeking thoroughly engrossing Western and women’s history accounts will relish how both come to life in this intriguing, unusual survey.

The juxtaposition of U.S. history, western culture, and Hollywood interests assures that, as it deserves, Daughters of Daring will receive broad interest from a wide audience of history buffs, women’s history readers, and general-interest readers alike.”

Midwest Book Review

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Daughters of Daring: Hollywood Cowgirl Stunt Women

America’s earliest movie creators learned quickly that audiences expected to see more than just a few pretty faces on flickering screens. Moviegoers wanted action, danger, heart-stopping shootouts, and startling displays of horseback heroics.

Chris Enss’s lively new nonfiction work, Daughters of Daring: Hollywood Cowgirl Stunt Women, delivers eye-opening looks inside the risky careers of more than two dozen female horse riders who became stunt performers in the early decades of the 20^th century.

Filmmakers could not jeopardize the looks, careers, and lives of their high-paid stars by making them actually fall off horses or roll down dusty hills. But stunt doubles could take those risks—and more—at very low cost to a movie’s budget.

Some of the intrepid young women who became stunt doubles for well-paid movie stars were self-taught. Others had learned trick riding skills while working in open-air vaudeville shows such as “Buffalo Bill’s Wild West” and Oklahoma’s “101 Ranch Wild West Show.”

In either case, “Hollywood couldn’t have gotten along without them,” Enss contends.  “Many cast as stuntwomen were fated to spend a considerable amount of their motion picture career accumulating a large variety of cuts and bruises. Even when they were granted a small speaking part, there was always a fall, a dive, or a wagon collision to go with it. Talented stuntwomen took backward, forward, head-first, and feet-first falls into water, ditches, and nets, over chairs and tables, from the tops of pianos, out of high windows, through trapdoors, and down haylofts. Some rode wild horses; worked with bears, goats, pigs, and cows; and chased donkeys and steers. They doubled for such luminaries as Joan Crawford, Barbara Stanwyck, and Jean Arthur.”

It was a risky arrangement to be a stuntwoman. To get paid, a stuntwoman had to create a stunt, negotiate a price for it, rehearse it, and successfully pull it off on camera. If you got hurt and could no longer work, you were just out of luck.

The stuntwomen profiled in Daughters of Daring include five who rode in the Wild West shows, six who did stunts in the silent-movie days, and six who were standouts in “the talkies,” the movies made after the introduction of sound revitalized the motion picture business.

Helen Gibson, Texas Guinan, and Ruth Roland are three examples of Enss’s focused profiles. Gibson, who grew up near Cleveland, Ohio, is “recognized by film historians as the first professional American stuntwoman,” Enss notes. Guinan, a Waco native, preferred to have speaking parts in movies and but often did her own stunts; and Ruth Roland, a San Franciscan who became known as “the queen of the early movie serials.”

In 1921, Guinan formed her own film company and produced and starred in numerous Western shorts. “I had twelve real cowboys, a scenario writer, a cameraman, a carload of cartridges, my horse ‘Waco’ from Texas, and went to work. We made a picture a week,” she remembered years later. “We never changed plots, only horses.”

Regarding Roland, Enss writes: “Whether in chaps or an elegant gown, Ruth was always just a hair’s breadth away from the most appalling situations in her pictures. Her director, with an astute comprehension of how to build suspense, would leave her tied to a railroad track with the express thundering around the bend or leaping on horseback from the edge of a cliff to escape a fate worse than death.”

Daughters of Daring is fun, informative reading. It offers significant insights into how experienced stuntwomen helped shape and boost the motion picture business in the Southwest and kept audiences coming back for more.

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Daughters of Daring: Hollywood Cowgirl Stunt Women