I see by your outfit that you are a cowboy.
—“The Streets of Laredo,” American folk ballad published in 1910 in John Lomax’s Cowboy Songs and Other Frontier Ballads
The cowboy is an instantly recognizable American icon, in large part thanks to Hollywood, but unlike many other cinematic stereotypes—pirates, cavaliers, desert sheiks, English noblemen, vampires that largely belonged to an imaginary or at least heavily embroidered and fictionalized past—the cowboy was alive and well when western films first became popular and many of the early western actors really lived the western frontier experience, bringing a gritty verisimilitude to even the most hackneyed and cliché plots.
The American Film Institute defines the Western as “films which are set in the American West that [embody] the spirit, the struggle, and the demise of the new frontier,” and clarifies that, while the setting for this genre is usually the American frontier between the California Gold Rush in 1849, and the closing of the frontier in 1890, it can also include stories set outside that time and place, provided that it meets the other criteria for the genre.
The Western is more than just a film genre: it also incorporates television, theater, music, literature, and the visual arts. Puccini’s opera The Girl of the Golden West is a Western. The Star Wars series The Mandalorian may be set in a galaxy far, far away, but it’s definitely a Western, and so is the popular streaming series Fallout, which is set not in the old west, but in a post-apocalyptic wasteland.
So, how did a bunch of dusty, trail-worn, agricultural workers end up becoming the paragons of the American ideal?
In his book The Invention of the Western Film: A Cultural History of the Genre’s First Half Century, historian Scott Simmon states that the Western derived from the Wild West shows that became popular in the 1870s, but the Western also has its roots in the dime novels and newspaper serials that became popular after the American Civil War and that glamorized and sensationalized the western expansion of the United States.
Dime novels depicting the American West and frontier life were becoming common. In 1869, author Ned Buntline’s 1869 novel Buffalo Bill, the King of Border Men, led to the creation of the real Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show in 1883, which toured all over the country and much of the world, thrilling audiences with action-packed performances by real live cowboys, Indians, horses, buffalos, and steers, involving trick riding and a host of special effects.
Other wild west shows soon followed, but it was a short-lived phenomenon, soon to be replaced with that thrilling new invention, moving pictures.
The first major Western movie is arguably the 1903 Edison production The Great Train Robbery, directed by Edwin S. Porter. It’s just 12 minutes long, but it contained an astonishing amount of action, including bandits firing their guns on film, throwing a victim off of the top of a moving train, and having an all-out gun-battle with the posse. The film has cowboys, bandits, Native Americans and even an adorable tiny tot. It was a tremendous hit. Audiences flocked to the vaudeville theaters to see the film.
The first Western filmed in Hollywood was the 1910 D.W. Griffith film In Old California. That was the same year Hollywood, population 5,000, became an independent municipality. A year later, the Los Angeles Times reported that Griffith was filming scenes for “the world’s greatest film” in the “Topango Wash” (Lower Topanga). The cast included 250 men, women and children, 120 horses, and 11 prairie schooners. Griffith made more than 60 short films that year. The article doesn’t name the film, but it was probably “The Last Drop of Water,” a two-reel short that was primarily shot in the San Fernando Valley.
Two years later, Griffith’s colleague and competitor Thomas Ince established Inceville in Santa Ynez Canyon, right next door to Topanga, and began producing Westerns by the dozen. Ince acquired Triangle Ranch: 18,000 acres owned by the Miller Brothers, who had their own Wild West show empire run out of the Miller101 Ranch in Ponca City, Oklahoma.
Along with the land in what is now Pacific Palisades, known as Triangle Ranch, Ince leased an entire Miller Brothers’ Wild West Show, complete with 200 Lakota Sioux, 300 cowhands, 600 horses, and assorted cattle and other livestock (including bison), and all of their wagons, gear, and personal possessions.*
Some of the Native Americans were said to have witnessed Custer’s massacre of their relatives. All of the cowboys had real world experience riding the range and doing nitty-gritty chores. They were all suddenly movie extras. It must have been a surreal experience, or maybe not. Their life on the Triangle Ranch probably wasn’t that different from the ranch they left behind in Oklahoma. They not only worked on the films, they did the chores and cared for the livestock and went about their lives.
Even the stars of those early westerns had genuine western credentials. William S. Hart, who elevated the Western movie from simple two-reel “cowboy and Indian” fights, to a far more nuanced level of storytelling that involved characters with inner conflicts and more complex motivations.
Hart got his start in acting on the New York stage, but his childhood was spent in hard-scrabble prairie towns where his father worked as a miller, but rarely stayed in one place for long. In his autobiography, Hart says he didn’t remember learning how to ride, he just grew up with horses. “I learned to ride almost as soon as I learned to walk,” he said.
Hart learned to speak Sioux language and use traditional Sioux hand signs as a child, and could converse with the Sioux people who lived and worked at Inceville in their own language. His choices in wardrobe, set dressing, saddles, horses, and gear reflected an authentic knowledge of the West, and helped set the tone for the early Westerns. Hart didn’t just act in his films, he often wrote them and sometimes directed as well.
Hart is credited with reviving the Western. The market had been saturated with uninspired one-and-two-reel shorts in the genre and audiences were losing interest. Ince paid him only $70 a week at first, but that changed as his short films surged in popularity. It was the 1915 feature film Hell’s Hinges that really catapulted Hart to star status. The film, about a preacher wrestling with his inner demons, and a bad man finding conviction, concludes with the entire set going up in flames. It received both critical and popular acclaim.
The man responsible for much of the image was actor Tom Mix. Mix began his career in film at the same time William Hart did. He, too, grew up in the saddle, and knew what life was like on the frontier. He was working for the Miller Brothers in one of their Wild West touring companies when he landed a role in a short produced by Ince’s competitor, the Selig Polyscope Company in 1909.
Mix performed in more than 100 films for Selig before moving on to the Fox Film Corporation in 1917. His early films were mostly two-reel shorts. William Fox, who ran the studio, was impressed by Mix’s athleticism—he and his horse, Tony, did their own stunts. Fox paid Mix $350 a week, and he soon became a super star—the hero who always saved the day.
Hart was already middle aged when his film career began. He helped to broaden and deepen the Western genre, but he wasn’t the archetypal cowboy hero. He was more concerned with authenticity than image.
“Demanding realism in his [film] settings, Hart knew that it was not merely his physical presence, but the entire design of his films that audiences recognized,” writes film historian Richard Koszarski, in his book Hollywood Directors: 1914–1940.
Mix was sixteen years younger than Hart. He reveled in the Hollywood cowboy image. He wore large hats and custom boots. He spent money lavishly, buying a ranch in the San Fernando Valley and building a house for himself on Catalina Island. Instead of hiding from the public, he put his name in Christmas lights on the roof.
Mix encouraged or did not deny numerous myths that sprang up. He never rode with Teddy Roosevelt’s Rough Riders. He wasn’t a Texas Ranger. But he didn’t deny those things when the stories circulated. He did his own stunts, and he and “Tony, now officially the “Wonder Horse,” were injured many times. During the height of the silent era he was the definitive cowboy hero.
Neither man made the transition to talkies. Hart retired to his own ranch in Santa Clarita. When Mix’s career waned, he returned to his Wild West show roots, touring the country, no longer able to afford his Hollywood lifestyle. On one occasion, he brought his show to the Rodeo Grounds in Lower Topanga Canyon. A newspaper article states that “Los Angeles Superior Court judges enjoy the Tom Mix Rodeo, presented in their honor in the Rodeo Grounds by the cowboy actor and Archie Cooper (of Cooper’s Camp) on September 30, 1923.”
Mix died “with his boots on” in a solo vehicle car crash in Arizona in 1940. He was sixty.
Hart died in 1946, peacefully at the age of 81. He left his ranch to Los Angeles County to become a park and museum.
There were many other influential Western film stars in the silent era. They include Gilbert M. “Broncho Billy” Anderson, a vaudevillian who appeared in that 1903 “Great Train Robbery”; Harry Carey, Sr., another real-life cowboy who went on to become a playwright and a lawyer as well as an actor, and Buck Jones, who, like Mix, also got his start at the 101 Ranch. France had its own answer to Hart and Mix: Charles de Rochefort , whose 1921 film Roi de Camargue brought him to the attention of the Hollywood studios, but Hart and Mix had a defining role in the evolution of the Western.
When Griffith and Ince first arrived in the vicinity of Topanga and the Palisades there were still plenty of real life cowboys employed in the area. Most of Topanga’s homesteaders were farmers rather than ranchers. The canyon’s year-round water supply and fertile soils enabled the families who settled there to make a living off of their crops, but they still depended on horses and mules for transportation and farm work. Life in the canyon required all of the independence of spirit, determination, and grit of any Wild West town depicted on film. The stagecoach route connecting the canyon to the coast was completed just 16 years before Ince’s film crews arrived, and plenty of the local pioneers—men and women—carried a shotgun and wore sturdy boots, and a broad-brimmed hat.
Malibu was still cattle country in the early twentieth century. Ranch hands lived on the land, so they could keep an eye on the animals at all times. Cowboy was a going profession. One that didn’t pay well, but that at least offered three meals a day and a place to stay.
The movie cowboy was often a solitary figure, but most real-world cowboys worked together as a team to tackle dangerous and exhausting work that ranged from driving cattle to mending fences and doctoring sick animals. Movie cowboys were usually white, all-American, and almost always male, but in the real world, cowboys were often African American, Hispanic, or Native American. Many were immigrants, some were women.
Working with cattle was hard work and it could be dangerous. The traditional cowboy gear was adopted to protect the rider, not to look heroic. Even the guns were practical. The Malibu Rancho cowboys are often shown in photographs with revolvers and gun belts. Cattle rustling was a real hazard, even in the early twentieth century, and the Malibu Rancho was remote enough to be a tempting destination for real life outlaws fleeing justice. Newspaper reports from the time include accounts of cattle being killed and butchered, and of vandals deliberately harming animals. There are also stories of sheriff’s posses searching for fugitives.
May Rindge, who inherited the entire more than 18,000-acre Malibu Rancho in 1905 after the death of her husband Frederick Hastings Rindge, armed her riders and also her own daughter Rhoda, and Rhoda’s best friend Jessie Matheson. Years later, Matheson recalled that, “Mrs Rindge bought each of us a 32 Smith and Wesson and always made us wear them when we went wandering [on the ranch]…the only things we ever really shot up were numerous rattlesnakes.”
The Rindges were fabulously wealthy and were early adopters of the automobile. They spent weekends and holidays on the ranch but lived in Los Angeles, in a house equipped with electricity and running water. The ranch hands lived on the land year-round. They were provided with bunkhouses at Point Dume and Zuma Canyon, and had various camps on the range that would have been supplied with water and firewood. Going into town would have been a relatively rare event, probably one that coincided with payday. Presumably a picture palace might have been a desirable destination for a rare day off. One can’t help wondering what the real cowboys thought about their fictional counterparts.
The rapidly growing popularity of the automobile made access to Santa Monica and Los Angeles easier, but only for those with access to a vehicle. Topanga was a lot closer to Los Angeles than Malibu, but during the silent film era, life here was also more like the nineteenth century than the twentieth. There was no electricity, few houses had running water and the roads into town weren’t paved until 1915, the same year Hart’s Hell’s Hinges was released, and when it was paved, the labor was provided not by steam shovels but by mule teams.
We know from the notes made by Topanga’s first school teacher, Theresa Sletton, that those without transportation, including herself, had to walk to Santa Monica unless they could hitch a ride with a neighbor. There are several accounts from this period of Topanga residents killed or seriously injured not in automobile accidents but in horse and wagon incidents.
When Ince set up shop next to Topanga he wasn’t just recreating the wild west, he was surrounded by it. By the time he moved his operation to what is now Culver City a decade later, the local cowboy and cattle era was almost over. There were still a few head of cattle in Malibu until the 1980s. Sheep were ranched in Calabasas until the 90s. Topanga, and the more remote corners of Malibu still retain a little bit of the local horse culture, but the cowboys—real ones and fictional ones—would eventually be displaced.
The Western film genre waxes and wanes. It reached its all-time peak in the 1950s with TV Westerns, but the tropes and themes are still popular. Sometimes the characters ride horses, sometimes they wear capes and lycra super suits, or work as bounty hunters on alien planets, but the themes remain the same.
“The cowboy has become a symbol of American values—independence, bravery, and self-reliance,” writes Western storyteller Chip Schweiger, in his 2025 essay “Hollywood vs History: The Real Story of Cowboys in the American West.” “Hollywood’s version is easy to digest, full of action and clear heroes and villains. But the truth is more nuanced, and that’s what makes it worth exploring.”
*Read more about Inceville: https://topanganewtimes.com/2021/06/04/inceville-hollywood-history-on-the-road-to-topanga/
