KANAB -- Cowboy poet Sam Jackson sees it this way:To conjure a vision of "cowboy"
Could carry your mind two ways,
Most common's the Hollywood version;
Gun fights and adventure-filled days.
Tall, lean and disgustingly handsome,
Tailor-made shirt on his back,
Sittin' a straddle a near-silver saddle,
Just matching the rest of his tack . . .
Now picture this work-a-day feller:
Five-eight, and he's built sorta slight,
Boots decorated with cow salve
And clothes that ain't fittin' just right.
His face might'a wore out two bodies,
Hair brings to mind moldy hay,
But -- a big toothy smile breaks out'ta that pile,
Says -- "disguise keeps the girls away!" . . .
There's a lot of truth in poetry, as well as sometimes humor, and this one's no exception. The distance between reel cowboys and real cowboys has always been wide. And no one knows that more than a group of real cowboys who also worked as reel cowboys during the heyday of moviemaking in Kanab.
They gathered to honor Western filmmaker Howard Koch and to reminisce about those days at the first "Western Legends Roundup" held recently in that town.
Rancher Mel Heaton put it this way: "The movie cowboy has more fun and gets better pay. All the real cowboy gets is dirty." But, he said, every cowboy ought to experience that glamor at least once -- it puts a new perspective on what you do.
"The real cowboy earned it in dirt," said Trevor Leach. "He worked hard for little earnings. In the movies, you got to dress up, ride a pretty good horse." He remembered one time he was playing a soldier, and his horse started bucking. "They turned the camera on me. They told me they could get riding any time, but they couldn't get bucking like that."
From the '20s through the '60s, more than 75 movies and 10 TV series were filmed in Kanab and surrounding areas. Not all were Westerns, but the majority were. And a lot of local folks worked with the stars.
Back then, said Dennis Judd, one of the organizers of the festival, Kanab was the wild West. "In the '30s, Main Street was a dirt road." And the business Hollywood brought was welcome, indeed.
"The movie business helped pay off notes on the ranch," said Calvin Johnson. "We were thrilled they paid us union wages. We considered movie money to be mad money."
Money, in fact, is a big part of the difference between real and reel. "I'm getting older," said R.W. Heaton, "but I still live on a ranch. Sometimes, if you were lucky, you could make $500 a month on the ranch. On some of them movies, we got $360 a day."
And, said Ronald Mace, they would use one wrangler for every five horses. "Sometimes they had 50, 60 horses, so we got a lot of work that way, too."
Still, for all the glamour, working on the movies could be hard work -- just like ranching.
The first film Sylvan Johnson worked on was a silent movie. "I was an extra in the cavalry. We made our charge, then went back in and got dressed up like Indian to do the other side. They used to cover us with cocoa water to make the skin look dark." Dabbed in cocoa, dressed only in a breechcloth, trucked out a distance to a film location -- that made for some interesting bus rides, he said. Later, some of the Indians on local reservations also worked as extras.
Mace remembered that they used to pay a dollar extra for every fall the cowboy -- or Indian -- took. "Once I took 25 falls in one day. I didn't go to work the next day -- but it wasn't because I was hurt."
Jackie Rife is one of the few women who worked in a lot of the movies, often doing stunt riding. "They treated us well, but you ate a lot of sand." In the movie, "Westward the Women" (1951), she said, "They didn't wash the costumes because they wanted them dirty. I couldn't stand that, so I'd take mine home and wash it and then put mud on it to make it look dirty."
They don't make Westerns like they used to, much to Howard Koch's sadness. The producer of such films as "Yellow Tomahawk" (1954), "Fort Yuma" (1955) and "Sergeants Three" (1962) said "it costs too much, for one thing. But the interest isn't there. Nowadays, it's all diamond heists and car chases."
And the folks in Kanab miss that. "We're all very fortunate," said Duke Aiken. "We had the business, but we also had the romance of the Old West."
Even if those old movies were more myth than fact, that myth was an important part of this country's culture, says Jim D'Arc, curator of the arts and communications archives at Brigham Young University. "What you see in a Western may be lies, but they were the lies the audience wanted to see."
The appeal of the Western, that whole mythic West, grew out of Frederick Jackson Turner's thesis that our freedom was defined by the space we had left, he says. "And when the frontier was closed, we looked for other ways to continue that search, and we found them in the Western."
Those movies not only gave us heroes larger than life and epic adventures, they also became a mirror for society, he says. If you look at Westerns and see how they changed, you see the changing mores and attitudes of society.
"In the '30s," D'Arc said, "we had the loner who comes on the scene and takes the part of the townspeople who are fighting bad guys -- outlaws, rustlers, whatever. The town needs him because he can handle a gun well. But the bittersweet irony was that when it was finished, he had to leave." A gun and the violence it represented was no longer welcome in tamed society.
The epitome of that classic hero is probably Alan Ladd in "Shane," says D'Arc. "He rides in and drives out the cattle barons. But then he has to move on."
Then, after World War II and the increased use of psychology to treat shell-shock and war trauma, society became more aware of the human psyche. "The Western hero became almost an anti-hero, a tortured hero with a chip on his shoulder and a mysterious past."
The most extreme example of this conflicted hero is John Wayne in "The Searchers," D'Arc said. After the Civil War, Wayne's character comes to stay with his brother, and then goes to find the brother's daughter, who was kidnapped by Indians several years earlier. "The racial tension between whites and Indians in that movie and others also reflected our own struggles with civil rights and the blacks that were going on in the '50s."
Then, in the '60s, during the era of Vietnam and free speech, the key Westerns -- films like "The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance" (1962), "Ride the High Country" (1962) and "Lonely Are the Brave" (1962)-- are the ones saying goodbye to the Old West.
"Westerns are a transparent window. If you look at the history of Westerns, you get an idea of what was going on in popular culture," said D'Arc. "They depict a time 75 or 100 years ago, but how they are crafted is a dead giveaway to what's going on in society at that time." More so, he believes, than with any other genre.
So, what does it mean that very few Westerns are made these days? "I guess it says that we've thrown out the myth, the traditional values of heroism."
Part of the problem, D'Arc says, is that it gets harder and harder to get younger generations, who weren't raised on Tom Mix and John Wayne and Roy Rogers, to understand the mystique of the West. "The idea of the valiant hero and the struggle between good vs. evil has been co-opted by science fiction. That aspect of the Western myth has caught popular attention."
And the decline of the Western probably reflects, in part, how the real cowboy's life is changing, too, he says. "The real cowboy is losing his land to higher taxes and land values. He survives best in remote areas. Now a lot of ranches are owned by agri-business. And those who do have ranches often have to have another job in order to make it."
D'Arc laments the loss of the Western. "For one thing, it makes for great motion-picture making. The West has a lot to show off. The landscape is stunning in theaters. We're robbing ourselves of one of the country's natural wonders. And the stories are there. Many true accounts of life in the West are as good as the myths. I'm just grateful for video technology that lets us still bring back the past." Even with flaws, it's a past worth remembering.
One of D'Arc's all-time favorite lines from Westerns came at the end of "The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance." The man who really did shoot Valance wasn't the man everyone thought, and one character asked a reporter if he was going to print the truth. "This is the West," says the reporter. "When fact meets legend, you always print the legend."
That's what the Western was, says D'Arc. Big, bold, beautiful. "And not all of it was a myth. Certainly, the part about the rugged individual being the one who survives was true in part. So were the personal characteristics that came to be the code of the West: stamina, honesty, good will, fair play, word-as-bond -- those were found in generous doses."
But even though it became more myth than truth, even though reel cowboys were never much like real cowboys, that Western myth has value, he says. "It helps us look in the mirror and see who we are."