In 1909 the motion picture business was just emerging from a series of tribulations that would have left the ordinary infant enterprise dying on its feet. But the motion picture industry, not being an ordinary one and being made up of a group of ferociously determined people, had come to stay.
A lot had happened since 1895, when Mr. Edison revealed the kinetoscope to the public for the first time. This was a queer-looking wooden cabinet into which one could peer through a slit in the top and see the photographic phenomenon of a child laughing in full 'Motion. It was a sensation. Some people said it was done with mirrors, and some even had an idea there were dwarfs secreted in the cabinet.
When it was proved that these conjectures were wrong, it was said that the peep show couldn't develop into anything bigger, that it was a mere entertainment novelty that would pass into oblivion once the first flavor had been dissipated. Nevertheless, crowds flocked to those first peep shows in New York City.
And people entered into the motion picture business too. By 1900 an astonishing number of companies had been formed, including many one-man organizations. The first years were the most anguished ones in the baby movie industry. There were patent wars and talent stealing and wild experiments. Fortunes made in a week were lost in a day. Only the sturdiest and staunchest of the producers survived the chaos.
But the industry grew with Gulliver strides. People flocked to the tents and the nickelodeons and the music halls where the early films were shown. The "incident" film, where the audience was held in awe simply by seeing something as inconsequential as a man entering and leaving a house with nothing else happening, gave way to a unanimous demand for real stories after The Great Train Robbery stunned the public in 1903. Films grew and sharpened and some were even one half-hour long. The two-reel plotted film came into being. In 1909 it seemed impossible that the film could go much further; technically, the movies were already supposed to be at their zenith.
The Range Rider was to be a realistic portrayal of Western life. It was to be filmed entirely in Missouri against a natural outdoor background; and the interior scenes were to be made in specially constructed buildings. None of the painted and obviously phony backdrops of the early days were to be used.
"It's an important picture," the director told us when we arrived at the ranch near Flemington, Missouri, where the company had gathered to make the picture. "Selig has made more money on Westerns than on any other type of picture, and we're going to concentrate almost exclusively on them from now on. This one will be our biggest so far."
The star system was not established at that time. It would take Mary Pickford and Charles Chaplin to make a permanent entrenchment in that direction. But Selig had already created the first real cowboy star of America in the person of Bronco Billy, known off-screen as George Anderson. Bronco Billy had recently left Selig to start his own producing company.
It is true that the Selig people were striving for better pictures. And they sensed that Tom could bring to the screen, even in that first two-reeler, the broad real gestures and actions of the Western hero. All that was necessary was for him to be natural, for everything they required of him was already his owing to his years of experience.
He had that extra special thing, too, that has never quite adequately been defined, that quality that makes the difference between being a star and not being a star. It was the same in 1909 as it is now in that respect.
Tom's leading lady in The Range Rider was Myrtle Steadman. William V. Mong played the part of the villain.
For there had to be a villain. Audiences would have been terribly disappointed if that black unsavory character weren't around to trip up the hero in everything he tried to do. The plots of Western films were already pretty well formulated. The hero was "Goodness" and the villain was "Evil" and the spotless heroine was the "Reward of the Good." What distinguished each picture a little form every other one was the obstacles the hero had to overcome to get his reward. The obstacles were always different.
Imagination flowed freely in the creation of those films. But as Tom said: "The real truth is basically there, because Good always did eventually overcome Evil in the real winning of the West."
The picture took almost a month to make, a phenomenal period of time to spend in shooting a two-reeler. Some movies were made in a day, and certainly very few of them were in production more than a week.
Much attention to detail was given to The Range Rider. The script was changed almost daily in accordance with suggestions from Tom. Written continuities for films at that time were nothing like the elaborate scripts of today; in some instances the director had no more than an outline of the story and figured out his camera shots as he went along. A few directors disdained having a script at all, and worked out all the sequences mentally. Probably in their wildest dreams they would never have envisioned a writer taking eight months to a year to write a "shooting script."
Otis Turner was genuinely pleased with Tom. "It's good to have a man doing this who's lived the things we're trying to get across in this picture," he said.
Otis was also pleased that he had to hire no double to perform the difficult stunts that audiences had come to demand. Moviegoers weren't exactly jaded from the old tricks by then; but they were always looking for something newer and more harrowing than the last ones they had seen, something that could really make them grip the theater benches in vicarious terror.
Tom used no double for any of the scenes of The Range Rider. And he used no double in any of his later pictures when his stunts, if anything, became even more difficult and complex. This is amazing when you consider that his motion picture career covered a span of more than a quarter of a century. He made a total of around 375 pictures.
Over the years he preserved his marvelous physical stamina by constant and meticulous care of his body. He never for a moment allowed his physical fitness to sag. When he wasn't active before the cameras he devoted his days to riding and to target practice and acrobatic stunts. He watched his weight carefully; it did not vary two pounds from year to year.
Some of Tom's screen stunts were leaping on and off the backs of racing horses, jumping on trains going by at maddening speed, dragging along the ground by the stirrup, leaping over impossibly wide and terribly genuine chasms, and jumping on horseback from horrendous heights. These were only the basic stunts. There were many others, and many variations.
His refusal to use a double landed him in the hospital many many times over the years. His shattered bones in his movie days exceeded many times over his score of bullet wounds and bodily injuries from his soldiering and sheriffing days. But he wouldn't even listen in later years to suggestions that he use a double for some of the seemingly impossible stunts he had designed for his films. Such suggestions grated against his basic honesty.
"The public pays to see the genuine article," he said. "Well, they're not going to get anything phony from me."
He would no more have thought of cheating his fans than he would have thought of cheating his family or friends. Truth was the quality Tom lived by all his life.
When The Range Rider was wrapped up, we still weren't aware that Tom would ever make another film.
Otis Turner and Will Dickey thought otherwise.
"When Chicago sees, this, they'll be breathing down your neck," Will Dickey laughed. "I wish I had authority to sign you to a contract right now, but I don't have it. Just let me know where we can find you."
"If you want us, we'll be at Medora, North Dakota," Tom told him. He had promised Bill McCarty that he would come up and help with the fall roundup, and I was to have a chance to visit Nels and Katrine again.
Tom really didn't think Selig would want him. Neither did I. It was apparent that Will Dickey was a high-pedestal man with Selig and surely he must have authority to give contracts. No doubt he was trying to shuffle us off in a nice way.
I didn't know that motion picture contracts were still comparatively rare in those days. Only the established players had them. Picture companies wouldn't even have tied themselves with these had there not been a rash of "player stealing" among the various companies in the last few years. Contracts came into being when the public began taking a liking to a particular face or personality.
We proceeded contractless to Medora.
There was a wonderful reunion with Nels and Katrine. It took me a week to tell them everything that had happened to Tom and me in the three-quarters of a year that we'd been married. It was only then, when I relived it all with Nels and Katrine, that I realized how fast time had flown for Tom and me. How many episodes we had been through in a few short months!
Now I was to feel my first pang of loneliness at being separated from Tom. For the cattle roundup was strictly a man's job.
There were two roundups a year: one in the spring and one in the fall. The purpose of the roundup was to brand ownership marks on calves that had been born since the last round up and to single out certain of the matured stock for shipment to market.
In between roundups the cattle roamed freely on the ranges and proceeded to fatten themselves up for marketing. It was miraculous that cattle could survive, let alone grow fat, on the arid tablelands of the Plains states. It would seem that the cattle-raising industry would be more logically located in the East, with its hills and fields of thick rich grass.
This would be the case were it not for the grama grass and buffalo grass, known in combination as bunchgrass, which grows in scattered bunches throughout the Plains states. This is the rich fodder that nature provides to support the vast cattle industry. It grows on the ranges only in the late spring and early summer, then dries on its stalk and is cured by the sun. In this dried, cured form the grass is more nutritious for cattle than any kind of fresh grass known. With a stomachful of this fodder cattle can make journeys of hundreds of miles without a bit of supplementary food.
The building of the cattle industry in the West rested on two factors: the vast amount of grazing land available and the highly nutritive matting of bunchgrass that nature provided free of charge. And cattle raising, more than any other contributing factor, gave the West its particular flavor, its real difference from everything else and everywhere else. The byproduct, the cowboy, still is the major symbol of Western life, the colorful individual who gives the Old and the New West its distinctive flavor. The pioneer, the Indian, the gunman, and the miner all played major roles in the seething drama underlying the forming of the West, but the cowboy, in his simplicity and roughness and life of hardship, was to survive all the others as the leading man of the drama.
Tom emphasized this point time and again in his story conferences with movie executives and script writers in later years. He realized that in films some of the realities of the West had to be sacrificed in the interest of motion picture commercialism. But one thing he would not sacrifice was the true character and scope of the cowboy.
He resumed his real-life cowboy role for the fall roundup that year; He was eager to get back on the range again as a relief from his activities in Wild West shows.
I was glad for the breathing period too. Tom intimated that he was feeding on the idea of organizing another more elaborate Wild West show, and the idea most certainly did not appeal to me.
I was still too young then to know that Tom was going through a stage of confusion too. He had stepped abruptly from a life of adventure to a life-though a still highly unsettled one-of marital responsibility. It was an abrupt change for a man who had always been as free as the wide ranges he rode.
Tom came back from the roundup a month later and looked as though he'd swallowed an elixir.
"It was great to get into it again," he said, smiling. "But I was counting the days till I could get back to you."
I was happy, having counted the days myself, again and again. I urged him to tell me about the roundup, having never seen one.
"Well," said Tom, "Bill and the other ranchers insisted that I be the captain. It took me a couple of days to get all the duties assigned and the provisions laid out, and then we set out with about fifty men and a half-dozen wagons and five hundred horses."
The usual ratio of horses to men in a roundup was ten to one. A roundup meant sixteen hours in the saddle at a time, and it called for frequent changes to fresh horses.
"Each morning the camp was moved to a new spot," Tom explained, "and we spread out on both sides and drove the cattle into the new camping place. Then, in the afternoons, we separated the brands, and branded the mavericks with the brands of the cows they followed."
He went on to tell me that during the nights each wagon took its turn at guarding the collected animals. The whole roundup was a cooperative venture of the various ranchers of the region.
"The final stage, after the strays were brought in, was sorting the animals for market and getting them off for shipment," he told me. "We had good luck on this roundup- only a couple of minor stampedes."
A cattle stampede can be a dreadful thing. Once aroused by a storm or by almost any kind of unusual noise, a herd of cattle can sweep across a piece of range like an avalanching mountain, destroying everything-man, animal, and inanimate object alike-in its path. Few people outside the West realize how dangerous a cattle roundup really is. It is thousands upon thousands of animals against a few men trying to direct and control them. The odds are enormous. It takes only one incendiary moment to bring death. The roundup is only one more manifestation of the cowboy's skill, strength and endurance.
"Well, what next?" I said to Tom one morning after the roundup was over.
We didn't need to figure that out, for Tom's future had already been decided for him. The letter from the Selig Studio in Chicago arrived that very day.
Tom's first contract with Selig covered a period of one year. He wasn't particularly enthusiastic about going into films for such a long period of time, for he still wanted to buy a ranch in Arizona. It seemed to be his favorite state.
I once again reminded him that "we" had a ranch in Oklahoma. He just looked at me without speaking. I read his thoughts. He still wanted a ranch that he could develop himself- our ranch. And also he knew that our place in Oklahoma, although big, did not have the broad sweep of thousands of acres that he had in mind.
He signed the contract because he felt that the films, with a steady salary, would get us to this ranch objective much more quickly than Wild West shows would ever do.
He certainly was not expecting any spectacular film stardom, though he was to achieve the basis of his immense popularity in the eight years, from 1910 to 1918, that he reigned as Selig's most valuable property. The real glitter of his fame came when he moved on to bigger and better pictures with William Fox Studios in the postwar era. The decade after the armistice proved to be the biggest era and the point of maturity for the silent film.
Theater owners cried for more and more Western films. Though the American movie-going public was rapidly becoming a gigantic maw that demanded all types of variety to satisfy its palate, the saga of the development of the West was what it liked best.
"Westerns are the biggest money-makers," Will Dickey said. "The great romance of American life comes right out of what happened in the winning of the West."
American motion pictures were being shipped abroad, and audiences in foreign countries also loved these epics of a life that could be found only in our country.
Tom's pictures for Selig reaped an enormous financial harvest for the company and indeed prevented its bankruptcy during those harassing days when patent lawsuits and antitrust actions threatened the existence of all but the richest of the motion picture companies.
During this period Tom shared the throne of real Western stardom with William S. Hart, who worked for a rival company. The two were equally popular, both here and in Europe, for several years; but Tom's star was to shine much more brightly than William S. Hart's in the postwar era, and he was destined to have a much longer reign, one that lasted for almost thirty years, right up to the moment of his death.
Tom made twelve two-reelers for Selig in 1910. It was a good time for him to enter pictures, for the screen had at last really begun to move. To the end of the first decade of the century, the motion picture camera had served as a stationary eye rather than a moving one. Now it moved with the action. This development was very important in the type of films Tom made. The screen had literally come alive. Audiences wanted to see action, and the faster the better. They would no longer accept the static unrealities of the very early films, which were produced as a succession of short scenes played in front of a stationary camera.
Shortly after we arrived in Chicago, Tom and I were both assigned to appear in minor roles in a Selig film featuring Harry Pollard, Marguerite Fisher, and Mary Mannering. Selig was merely making use of our time while a new Western film was being written for Tom. The profits from The Range Rider, even though the picture had barely been released by that time, were already far exceeding expectations, and Selig was busy laying plans for a whole series of Tom Mix films.
In the meantime, we were "utilized" during the waiting period. I must admit that Tom looked a little stiff in the formal evening suit he was required to don, though I was thrilled with the elaborate evening gown I was to wear. The film was a drawing-room drama, the only film of that type Tom ever appeared in. It was notable not only for Tom's brief appearance in it as an English nobleman, but also because it introduced Wallace Reid to the screen. Wallace had a very minor role, but the film was his springboard to the perch he held eventually as one of the most popular lovers of the silent screen.
Between scenes we all pitched in to help get properties and scenery ready for the next take. In those early days filmmaking was a really cooperative venture. When they weren't acting before the cameras, actors were painting the canvas backdrops for the next scene. Directors and cameramen, when no shooting was going on, were busy with hammer and saw, building sets. Technicians served as actors and extras when required. The great day of specialization, when actors did nothing but act and directors did nothing but direct, was to come in later years when the star system was entrenched and when unionization thrust its wedge into the industry.
In those days, of course, there were no sound stages. Interior scenes were built on a huge platform with walls on four sides. The ceiling of these crude structures consisted of a series of strips of white canvas worked with pulleys, so that the sunlight could be regulated by letting in as much as needed.
There were no huge banks of lights, and as a rule only one camera. A husky assistant always went along with the cameraman to move around the clumsy contraption with its heavy tripod, or carry it up hill and down dale. When a scene called for moving from a long shot to a close-up, the camera had to be moved manually. There were no dollies or electrical booms to make these maneuvers easy.
By the time the drawing-room drama was completed, the script for Tom's next film was ready; so we went to Tennessee for the filming.
The second film was even more crammed with violent action than The Range Rider had been. The biggest scene in this picture involved Tom's leaping on horseback down thirty feet into a lake. This trick had never been done before in the movies, and it left movie-goers gasping throughout the breadth of the nation.
Tom emerged from the violence of this film with one broken tooth and two broken ribs. After brief hospitalization he was thoroughly mended again. I was already becoming used to having him sacrifice his personal safety to his career. The prospect of danger and broken bones never daunted him in his quest to give all of himself to the public that grew to adore him.
Colonel Zack Mulhall, in whose show Tom had appeared with Will Rogers at the St. Louis Fair in 1904, tracked us down on location just as Tom finished the picture. Zack was putting on a show at the Appalachian Exposition in Roseville, Tennessee, and he wanted Tom to star in it. Since we had three free weeks before we had to report to Florida for Tom's next picture, we accepted the offer.
We found a star's tent waiting for us in the show camp at Roseville. Zack even provided an Oriental rug for his star performer. Tom was elated to get back into a show before a live audience again, and he gave a performance of daring tricks that brought howls of acclamation from the spectators, and tears of appreciation from Zack.
One night Theodore Roosevelt was in the audience. There was nothing reticent in Mr. Roosevelt's nature, and when Tom made his grand entry on Old Blue, Mr. Roosevelt rose from his seat and started shouting greetings to Tom. The two men talked back and forth before a vastly amused audience.
After the show Mr. Roosevelt had dinner with us. At first I could hardly get a word in anywhere while he and Tom swapped reminiscences of the Spanish-American War.
"Yes, Sir," Theodore Roosevelt said, "the Rough Riders were the finest bunch of men I've ever had the pleasure of working with."
A large proportion of the Rough Riders had been cowboys and men of the plains such as Tom. Regardless of the worldly circles Mr. Roosevelt moved in during his political career, he still felt closest to the men who had led the "strenuous life." He loved the West and had poured that love into a four-volume history called The Winning of the West, the most comprehensive coverage of Western development up to that time. He gave us an autographed set of his volumes on the West before he left town.
We prepared to leave for Florida then. So far 1910 had been an important year for us, though at that moment we weren't really aware just how important it was.
Olive Stokes Mix, with Eric Heath, The Fabulous Tom Mix, (Englewood Cliffs: Prentice-Hall, Inc.), 1957, pages 68-80.
© 1999, David Pierce, on editing and revisions (if any)
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