Journal Notes

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Dale Evans was born Frances Octavia Smith on October 31, 1912, in Uvalde, Texas. In her words, her upbringing was “idyllic.” As the only daughter of Walter and Betty Sue Smith, she was showered with attention and her musical talents were encouraged with piano and dance lessons. While still in high school, she married Thomas Fox and had a son, Thomas Jr. The marriage, however, was short-lived. After securing a divorce, she attended a business school in Memphis and worked as a secretary before making her singing debut at a local radio station. In 1931 she changed her name to Dale Evans. By the mid-1930s, Dale was a highly sought-after big-band singer performing with orchestras throughout the Midwest. Her stage persona and singing voice earned her a screen test for the 1942 movie Holiday Inn. She didn’t get the part, but she ended up signing with the nationally broadcast radio program the Chase and Sanborn Hour and soon after signed a contract with Republic Studios. She hoped her work in motion pictures would lead to a run-on Broadway doing musicals

In August 1943, two weeks after signing a one-year contract with Republic Studios, Dale began rehearsals for the film Swing Your Partner. Although her role in the picture was small, studio executives considered it a promising start. Over the next year Dale filmed nine other movies for Republic, and in between she continued to record music. When she wasn’t working, Dale spent time with her son, Tom, and her second husband, orchestra director Robert Butts. Her marriage was struggling under the weight of their demanding work schedules, but neither spouse was willing to compromise. “I was torn between my desire to be a good housekeeper, wife, and mother and my consuming ambition as an entertainer,” Dale told the Los Angeles Daily News in 1970. “It was like trying to ride two horses at once, and I couldn’t seem to control either one of them.” Dale’s marriage might have been suffering, but her career was taking off. Republic Studios’ president Herbert Yates summoned Dale to a meeting to discuss the next musical the studio would be doing. She took this as a hopeful sign. It was common knowledge around the studio lot that Yates had recently seen a New York stage production of the musical Oklahoma and had fallen in love with the story. Dale imagined that the studio president wanted to talk with her about starring in a film version of the play. It was the opportunity she had always envisioned for herself. For a brief moment she was one step closer to Broadway.

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Gone With the Wind, the first and only novel written by Margaret Mitchell was a runaway success from the moment it was published in 1936. The book won the Pulitzer Prize and is still considered the most purchased book, other than the Bible, selling over two hundred thousand copies a year. Mitchell learned of the stories she used in her epic while sitting on the laps of Confederate veterans when she was a young girl growing up in Georgia. In fact, she wasn’t told the South lost the war until she was ten. She wrote her book while laid up with a broken ankle and told no one other than her husband of her literary aspirations. At the time she was employed by the Atlanta Journal and had an assignment to take publisher Howard Latham from Macmillan Publishing Company around town supposedly in search of the new southern writers. Margaret brought the partially completed and heaping Gone With the Wind manuscript to Latham’s hotel later that night after a friend of hers laughed at the possibility that she possessed any talent. She sent a telegram the next day, asking Latham to send the manuscript back. He refused, convinced her of its worth, and sent Margaret Mitchell an advance to finish the book. Supposedly, Margaret wrote another book, which was found in notebooks among her letters, but she never pursued publication of anything else.  In 1949 she was heading to see a movie and stepped into the street without looking and was hit by a taxi. She died five days later of internal injuries at age forty-eight. The twenty-five-year-old taxi driver Hugh D. Gravitt was convicted of involuntary manslaughter and sentenced to one year to eighteen months in jail.

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No Place for a Woman:  The Struggle for Suffrage in the Wild West won the

Silver Medal at the

Will Rogers Medallion Awards last evening.  

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On December 27, 1902, the woman many historians referred to as the “Guardian of Yosemite National Park” passed away. Jessie Anne Benton Fremont was born on May 31, 1824, in the Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia. Her father, Thomas Hart Benton, was an ambitious man who went from farming into politics and eventually became a United States senator from Missouri (and great-uncle of twentieth-century muralist Thomas Hart Benton). Jessie visited Washington, D.C., often as a child and met with such luminaries as President Andrew Jackson and Congressman Davy Crockett.

Jesse and her sister, Elizabeth, attended the capital’s leading girl’s boarding school, alongside the daughters of other political leaders and wealthy business owners. It was for that very reason Jessie disliked school. “There was no end to the conceit, the assumption, the class distinction there,” she wrote in her memoirs. In addition to the lines drawn between the children of various social standings, Jessie felt the studies were not challenging to her. “I was miserable in the narrow, elitist atmosphere. I learned nothing there,” she recalled in her journal. The best thing about attending school was the opportunity it afforded her to meet John Fremont, the man who would become her husband.

Born on January 21, 1813, John was an intelligent, attractive man with gray-blue eyes who excelled in mathematics and craved adventure. While awaiting an assignment from the United States Corp of Topographical Engineers (a war department agency engaged in exploring and mapping unknown regions of the United States), John was introduced to Thomas Benton. Benton was a key proponent in Washington for western expeditions. He and John discussed the great need for the land west of the Missouri River to be explored. Benton invited the young surveyor and map maker to continue the conversation at his home over a meal with his family. It was there that Jessie and John first met, and they were instantly smitten with each other. Within a year, they were wed.
Jessie Benton was sixteen years old, and John Fremont was twenty-seven when they married on October 19, 1841. The newlyweds lived at the Gatsby Hotel on Capitol Hill until John was assigned to lead a four-month expedition to the Rocky Mountains. Jessie helped him prepare for the journey by reviewing information about the plant life, Indian encampments, and rock formations he would come in contact with during his trip. John headed west on May 2, 1842. Jessie, who was pregnant with their first child, moved into a small apartment near her parents’ home.
John returned to Washington, D. C., in November 1842, just two weeks before their daughter was born. He watched over baby Elizabeth Benton “Lily” Fremont while Jessie reviewed the slim notes John had taken during the expedition and fashioned a report for the government using his data and detailed recollections of life on the trail. Politicians such as Missouri Senator Lewis Linn praised the report for being not only practical and informative but entertaining as well. The material would be used by emigrants as a guidebook.

In early 1843, John moved his family to St. Louis, Missouri, where his next expedition would be originating. Jessie took on the role as John’s secretary, reviewing mail from suppliers and frontiersmen such as Kit Carson. She wrote the necessary correspondence to members of the Topographical Bureau, apprising them of the date the expedition would begin, how long it would take, and what the party planned to accomplish. Shortly before John departed to explore a route to the Pacific Coast, a letter came to the Fremont’s home instructing him to postpone the expedition until questions over a request to purchase weapons had been settled. Fearing the entire mission would be jeopardized if the journey were delayed, Jessie did not give the letter to her husband. John set out on the expedition on May 13, 1843. He returned home the following August, having successfully begun opening up the great territory between the Mississippi Valley and California.

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James Beckwourth was one of the most legendary mountain men of the early 1800s. He was the son of a Maryland Irishman and a slave girl, and he was born in Virginia in 1798. When he was very young, his family moved to St. Charles, Missouri. James worked as an apprentice to a blacksmith until the age of nineteen, when he left the anvil and the forge to sign on as a trapper with the Missouri Fur Company, then challenging Hudson Bay trappers working the rich beaver streams beyond the crest of the Rockies.

In 1824, Beckwourth joined William H. Ashley and Andrew Henry on a fur-trapping expedition in the Rocky Mountains; he was one of the first trappers to go into the new country. During various expeditions, he participated in skirmishes with the Blackfeet and other Indians. He became skilled in the use of the bowie knife, tomahawk, and gun.

In 1828, he was adopted into the Crow Indian tribe. He packed his traps and buckskin shirts on his horses and moved to the headwaters of the Powder Rivers and into a new life among the ancient people. He proved himself quickly among his adopted people and rose to the position of war chief. His skill as part of a raiding party to steal Comanche horses was exceptional. His prowess and bravery in battle against the hated Blackfoot Indians earned him the name Bloody Arm.

James Beckwourth helped make the Crow a more powerful nation. No more would they give away a tanned buffalo hide for a pint of trade whiskey. Bloody Arm knew the value of hides and the wiles of the whites. He knew the worth of powder and ball and traps and horses and finery for Crow women.

When a fur company opened a trading post among the feared Blackfeet, Beckwourth got the same company to make him its agent among the Crow to see that his adopted people were treated fairly in the trade of pelts for guns. When the beaver trade began fading, Beckwourth went to the Southwest and joined with another ex–mountain man to lead a war party of Utes to raid Spanish ranches in Southern California. They headed east with three thousand head of California horses.

He spent a while in Taos, moved onto Colorado to become a contract hunter supplying meat in places like Bent’s Fort, and then became a trader among Indians. Showing up again in Southern California, he raised a company of Yanquix to fight Governor Micheltorena of Mexico in a quickie revolution.

By the time of the California Gold Rush and the westward movement of hundreds of wagon trains over the worst passes of the Sierra, James, then in his fifties, led a wagon train over a sizable mountain pass that was to be named after him. He still had years of adventure before him. He scouted for the Third Colorado Cavalry tracking Black Kettle to Sand Creek and turned away in disgust at the massacre.

At the age of sixty-eight, Beckwourth embarked on another venture, this one in a bid for peace. The Oglala Sioux were pressing the Crow to join against the whites. The US Army sent for Beckwourth to advise his adopted tribe. He thwarted the alliance.

Mystery surrounds James Beckwourth’s death in Colorado in 1866 in a Crow village. Some historians note he was poisoned by a Crow warrior who caught him cavorting with his wife. The most reliable account of his passing reports that he was poisoned by order of the Crow’s tribal council because he would not accept their offer to go on the warpath with them again. If they could not keep him as a chief, they decided to have the honor of burying him in their burial ground near Laramie, Wyoming. Beckwourth was seventy-eight when he died.

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When Victoria Claflin Woodhull died on June 9, 1927, news of her passing was announced on two continents. The press referred to the controversial writer, stockbroker, and politician as a “most immoral woman.” Not only was Victoria the first woman to be officially nominated for president of the United States, but she was also one of the first individuals to have been jailed on federal obscenity charges. Both events occurred in 1872.

Before her involvement with the women’s rights movement in the mid-1860s, Victoria and her sister, Tennessee, were the owners and publishers of a newspaper called the Woodhull and Claflin Weekly. They printed scandalous articles promoting the idea of “free love.” In a letter Victoria sent to the New York Times in 1871, she claimed that free love was the “only cure for immorality, the deep damnation by which men corrupt and disfigure God’s most holy institution of sexual relations.” She continued, “It is not marriage but sexual intercourse, then, that is God’s most holy institution.” Victoria and Tennessee’s progressive views on sex and the brazen printing of those ideals appalled citizens not only in the United States but also in other countries like Germany and Russia, as well. They “threaten to destroy the morals nations so desperately needed to cling to,” was the opinion voiced in the New York Times on November 23, 1871.

Victoria and Tennessee were not strangers to confrontation with the law. Their father, Reuben Buckman “Buck” Claflin, was a scoundrel who excelled at breaking the rules of conventional society and spent time behind bars for his actions. Buck and his wife, Roxanna Hummel, lived in a rundown house in Homer, Ohio. The couple had ten children. Born on September 23, 1838, Victoria was the Claflins’ sixth child. Although Victoria’s father claimed to be a lawyer with his own profitable practice, he was actually a skilled thief with no law degree at all. He owned and operated a gristmill and also worked as a postmaster. Buck supplemented his income by stealing from merchants and business owners, and he was a counterfeiter and a suspected arsonist.

Victoria’s mother was a religious fanatic who dismissed Buck’s illegal activities in favor of chastising her neighbors for what she claimed was hedonism. Her public prayers were loud, judgmental, and dramatic. She preached to her children and insisted they memorize long passages of the Old Testament. By the time Victoria was eight, she was able to recite the Bible from cover to cover. Reflecting on her life, Victoria wrote in Autobiography of Victoria Claflin that her mother’s spiritual zeal so influenced her childhood that young Victoria believed she could see into the future and predict what was to come of those who sought her out to preach.

Tennessee was reported to be the true clairvoyant of the family. Born in 1845, she was the last child born to Roxanna and Buck. Roxanna claimed Tennessee had the power to perceive things not present to the senses. She would slip into trances and speak with spirits, answering voices no one else could hear.

Victoria and Tennessee had very little formal education. Although Victoria attended school for only four years, she was bright, precocious, and well read. She was uninhibited and at the age of eleven delivered sermons from a busy location in Homer, Ohio.

In 1849, the Claflins left Homer and moved to Mount Gilead, Ohio. Victoria’s father had abandoned gristmill work and decided to venture into the field of psychic phenomena with his daughters in tow. He introduced Victoria and Tennessee to the public and announced the girls’ talent for “second sight” or “extrasensory perception, the ability to receive information in the form of a vision by channeling spirits.” Buck rented a theater and charged patrons seventy-five cents to watch the four-year-old and eleven-year-old communicate with deceased Claflin family members and predict the future. One such specific prediction was that one day a woman would be president of the United States.

Victoria and Tennessee’s shows, in which they would conduct séances and interpret dreams for audience members, attracted a large following, and in a short time the two young girls became the sole source of income for their family.

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Am grateful for the award Thunder Over the Prairie won at the Wild Bunch Film Festival last evening. 

Awarding winning director Walter Hill wrote the screenplay based on the book

Howard Kazanjian and I penned.  

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“Lillian Russell, (Mrs. Alexander P. Moore) bright star of American comic opera for three decades and internationally known as a professional beauty who died at 2:20 o’clock this morning, had been ill several weeks following a shipboard accident while returning from Europe. Her death was unexpected, as her physicians two days ago announced she had passed the crisis and would recover.”

—The Clinton Herald, June 6, 1922

It was not so much Lillian Russell’s great dramatic ability or her clear, well-trained voice as it was her personality and physical beauty that made her the most famous musical comedy star of her day and acclaimed for more than a generation as “America’s greatest beauty.”

Born on December 4, 1861, in Clinton, Iowa, Helen Louise Leonard had the kind of beauty that stopped traffic from her earliest years. She had a voice that her mother, Cynthia Rowland Leonard, an ardent feminist, paid to have trained when her daughter was still in her teens. Helen Louise was educated at the Convent of the Sacred Heart in Chicago and attended finishing school at Park Institute. She took singing lessons and sang in the church choir at the Episcopal church.

Her parents separated when she was in her teens, and her mother took Helen Louise and moved to New York, where young Helen started training for the grand opera. She could sustain the highest notes with virtually no effort and do it again and again without strain. Her voice coach, Dr. Leopold Damrosch, told her mother that with a few years of training, he could make her a diva to rival the best.

The beautiful blond from Iowa had other ideas. Years of training and rehearsals, with only bit parts and backup roles as an understudy, lay before her on the road to stardom in opera. Helen Louise joined the Park Theatre Company in Brooklyn. She was eighteen when she danced onstage for the first time in the chorus of H. M. S. Pinafore, a Gilbert and Sullivan operetta that went on to resounding success.

Before the run of Pinafore was over, Helen Louise had accepted a proposal of marriage from an admirer in the show. She married the company’s musical director, Harry Graham. That marked the end of her appearance in the chorus. She withdrew from the company and settled into domestic life, but her time as a homemaker didn’t last.

In late 1879, Helen Louise gave birth to a son. A nurse was hired to care for the baby so the actress could once again take up her career. Her paycheck made a big difference for the little family. Her much older husband was not happy with his wife being the bread winner, however; he wanted her to stay home and take care of their child. But a woman raised to be independent is not easily swayed when fame and fortune call.

Then one day Helen Louise returned from the theatre to find her baby desperately ill. Despite all attempts to cure the infant, he died in convulsions. Apparently, the inexperienced nurse had accidentally pierced his abdomen with a diaper pin. Harry accused his wife of neglect, and he divorced her in 1881.

Grieving over the death of her son, feeling betrayed by her husband’s accusation, and devastated over the end of her marriage, Helen Louise concentrated on her career. Tony Pastor, legendary producer of musical comedy, heard her sing at the home of a friend and consequently offered her a job. Helen Louise liked the immediate success she’d already tasted in comic opera. At nineteen, with a statuesque figure, golden curls, skin like “roses and cream,” and a soprano voice that could do everything with ease she had found her first mentor in Tony Pastor.

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The Cowboy and the Senorita:

A Biography of Roy Rogers and Dale Evans and

Happy Trails:

A Pictorial Celebration of the Life and Times of Roy Rogers and Dale Evans.

There’s almost nothing more important to a cowboy than his horse. He depends on his reliable steed to help him with his job and to be his friend and all-around partner through thick and thin. Throughout the 1930s, 40s’, and 50s, Roy Rogers was the quintessential cowboy, but a big part of this heroic appeal was his palomino, Trigger. Billed as “the smartest horse in movies,” Trigger was Roy’s riding partner in eighty films and one hundred television shows.

Roy purchased Trigger in 1938 from Hudkins Stables in Los Angeles for $2,500. He knew Trigger was a special horse the moment he saw him trotting through a field. With the help of expert horse trainer Glenn Randall, Roy worked with Trigger to teach him a myriad of tricks, including counting, writing, and bowing to an audience.

Trigger’s fame grew with every new Roy Rogers movie. The horse was a star with four stand-ins. He made $750 a week and received 200 fan letters a month. In 1940 Roy insured the valuable animal for $100,000.

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Under Western Stars

An Essay for the National Film Registry

By

Howard Kazanjian and Chris Enss

King of the Cowboys Roy Rogers made his starring motion picture debut in Republic Studio’s engaging western musical Under Western Stars.  Released in 1938, the charming, affable Rogers portrayed the most colorful Congressman ever to walk up the steps of the nation’s capital.  Rogers’ character, a fearless, two-gun cowboy and ranger from the western town of Sageville, is elected to office to try to win legislation favorable to dust bowl residents.

Rogers represents a group of ranchers whose land has dried up when a water company controlling the only dam decides to keep the coveted liquid from the hard-working cattlemen. Spurred on by his secretary and publicity manager, Frog Millhouse, played by Smiley Burnette, Rogers campaigns for office.  The portly Burnette provides much of the film’s comic relief and goes to extremes to get his friend elected.  His tactics include pasting stickers on the backs of unsuspecting citizens he engages in conversation and helping to organize a square dance to highlight Rogers’ skill and dedication to solving the constituent’s crisis.  Using his knowledge of land and livestock and his talent for singing and yodeling, Rogers wins a seat in Congress.

The sweep of this picture, which moves rapidly from physical action on the western plains to diplomatic action in Washington and back again, is distinctively thrilling. The surging climax in the dust-stricken cattle country makes for one of the most refreshing films of its kind.  The politicians Rogers appeals to about the drought are not convinced the situation is as serious as they are led to believe and decide to inspect the scene for themselves.  The investigation committee is eventually trapped in a real dust storm.  The shots of the storm and the devastation left in its wake are spectacular.

Roy Rogers came to Hollywood from Duck Run, Ohio. He made a name for himself as a member of the successful singing group the Sons of the Pioneers.  Reigning box office cowboy Gene Autry’s difficulties with Herbert Yates, head of Republic Studios, paved the way for Rogers to ride into the leading role in Under Western Stars.  Yates felt he alone was responsible for creating Autry’s success in films and wanted a portion of the revenue he made from the image he helped create.  Yates demanded a percentage of any commercial, product endorsement, merchandising, and personal appearance Autry made.  Autry did not believe Yates was entitled to the money he earned outside of the movies made for Republic Studios.  He refused to include Yates in the profits and threatened to leave the studio if Yates did not reconsider.  Autry was also demanding a raise in pay.

Yates decided it was time to begin grooming another talent to take Autry’s place should the need arise. Rogers was a contract player with the studio making $75 a week.  Billed as Leonard Slye he appeared in a handful of films with Gene Autry singing along with the Sons of the Pioneers.  Rogers even had a part as a bad guy in one of Autry’s films.  When Autry caught up with Rogers in the picture, instead of taking him to jail he demanded the wily character yodel his way out of his troubles.

Yates had been looking for a musical actor to go boot-to-boot with Autry and Rogers was to be the heir apparent. His sweet, pure voice and wholesome image made him a natural for the hero in Under the Western Stars.  Whether regaling the audience with a song about fighting the law entitled Send Our Mail to the County Jail or delivering a stump speech via a tune called Listen to Rhythm of the Range, Rogers makes the most of his leading role.

The Maple City Four, the well-known quartet who made the number Git Along Little Dogies popular, added their talents with Rogers harmonizing on the film’s most important song entitled Dust.  Written by Johnny Marvin, a recording artist from Oklahoma, Dust was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Original Song.  It was the first song from a B-western to be Oscar nominated.

According to the February 24, 1938, edition of the Hollywood Reporter, Dust was purchased by Republic Studios from the composers, Gene Autry, and Johnny Marvin, for use in Under Western Stars.  A subsequent news item in Hollywood Reporter on April 13, 1938, just prior to the film’s release, noted that Autry was suing the studio for $25,000 for unauthorized use and dramatization of the lyrics with Dust.  According to contemporary sources, the suit over Dust was settled out of court and Johnny Marvin is listed as sole writer of the song.

Audiences made Under Western Stars a box office success and critics called its star “the new Playboy of the Western World.”

Director Joseph Kane, Republic’s top director of westerns delivered a film with a slight new slanting to make it different from all other B-westerns before it.   In addition to the political intrigue in Under Western Stars there is a fair number of gunfights, fast horses, and unforgettable stunts.  What makes Kane’s film unique is that the fight is not over horse thieves, but the rights of man.  Critics at the Brooklyn Daily Eagle newspaper sited Kane’s “sensitive directing eye with giving the horse opera a social consciousness.”

Actors Carol Hughes, Guy Usher, Tex Cooper, Kenneth Harlan, Curley Dresden, Bill Wolfe, Jack Ingram, Jack Kirk, Fred Burns, and Tom Chatterton round out the exciting cast of players and no happy ending would be possible at all if not for Roy’s magnificent Palomino horse Trigger. Brothers and veteran western writers Dorrell and Stuart McGowan penned the screenplay for Under Western Stars along with actress and screenwriter Betty Burbridge.

The film was shot in the Alabama Hills of Lone Pine, California. The scenic location has been used for the backdrop in hundreds of motion pictures and television programs.  The high desert surroundings are integral to the story line of Under Western Stars and could be billed as a supporting role in the film.

Roy Rogers’ first starring vehicle solidified his place as a rising star in B westerns. Film writer and critic Louella Parsons likened Rogers to “Gary Cooper in personal appeal.”  According to her report with the International News Service on November 29, 1938, she called Rogers an “upstanding young American who made the picture Under Western Stars a delight.”