1. The exact date of the trip is in dispute. “Carol Dilley Watched Benton Sketch Painting,” Borger News-Herald, 10 5, 1976Google Scholar, provides an eyewitness account by a local resident:

Mrs. Don Dilley, 518 Jackson, watched Thomas Hart Benton make a sketch of his painting, “Boomtown,” from the window of her apartment upstairs of the Dilley Building on Main Street…. “It was in 1927,” Mrs. Dilley said. “I came to Borger in February 1927, as soon as the Dilley Building was completed by my husband, who had it built to house his bakery, with our living quarters upstairs.”

I am indebted to Bruce W. Chambers of the Memorial Art Gallery of the University of Rochester, Rochester, New York, for assistance in obtaining local Borger documentation.

Benton's statement in The Encyclopaedia Britannica Collection of Contemporary American Painting, 2d ed. (Chicago: Britannica Corp., 1946)Google Scholar, opposite color illustration 6, avers, “This painting, ‘Boom Town,’ is an interpretation of Borger, Texas, as it was in 1926 in the middle of its rise from a road crossing to an oil city:”

Benton, Thomas Hart, An American in Art: A Professional and Technical Autobiography, Including His ‘American Regionalism: A Personal History of the Movement’ (Lawrence: University of Kansas Press, 1969), pp. 58–60Google Scholar, is not specific about the date but places it shortly after “a three week walking trip through the Ozark Hills of southern Missouri and northern Arkansas,” around May 1926. He continues: “After completing my Ozark hike, I went out to the West Texas oil country, then ‘on the boom.’ I made many drawings of the western oil industry and the rough life accompanying it. One of these, a street scene in the then wild town of Borger, became the subject of one of my best-known ‘Regionalist’ pictures, ‘Boomtown.’”

Benton's “A Chronology of My Life” in Thomas Hart Benton, catalogue of a retrospective exhibition held at the University of Kansas Museum of Art, Lawrence, Kansas (April 12 to May 18, 1958), unpaginated, includes the following entry at the end of a section dealing with the period 1920–24: “During the period began exploring the ‘back-country’ of America by foot, bus, and train, searching out American subject matter”.

2. The canvas, which is signed “Benton” (lower right) but not dated, was purchased from Senator William Benton's Encyclopaedia Britannica Collection of Contemporary American Painting by the Memorial Art Gallery on January 4, 1951, according to the gallery's curatorial records. The 1928 date of the finished painting has never been in question. Benton gives it this date in An American in Art, plate caption, p. 92. The work was also included in Benton's joint exhibition with Clemente Orozco held at the Delphic Galleries in New York and described in the 1928–29 entry in Benton's “A Chronology of My Life.” That show also featured two other well-known early Regionalist pictures, Cotton Pickers, Georgia (1928–1929, Metropolitan Museum of Art)Google Scholar and Louisiana Rice Fields (1928, Brooklyn Museum)Google Scholar. Baigell, Matthew, Thomas Hart Benton (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1974), p. 76Google Scholar and plate 45, accepts the 1928 date.

One of the Borger sketches, entitled “Oil Town,” is reproduced in Benton, Thomas Hart, An Artist in America (New York: University of Kansas City Press/Twayne Publishers, 1951)Google Scholar, 2d revised edition of 1937 text, unpaginated plate section following p. 20, and, with an added sepia wash, in another edition of the same text known as Tom Benton's America: An Artist in America (New York: Robert M. McBride & Co., 1937)Google Scholar, unpaginated plate immediately preceding p. 221.

3. The postscript to a letter of July 13, 1965 from Margaret Potter, Curator, The Gallery of Modern Art, New York, to Harris K. Prior, Director, Memorial Art Gallery of the University of Rochester, reads as follows: “When I told Mr. Benton we were borrowing his painting, he was delighted and said ‘That's one of my best paintings and I wish I still owned it myself.”’ In An American in Art, p. 59Google Scholar, he states that “a street scene in the then wild town of Borger, became the subject of one of my best-known ‘Regionalist’ pictures, ‘Boomtown.’”

4. Baigell, , Thomas Hart Benton, esp. pp. 63–76 and 83–87Google Scholar, and idem, “Thomas Hart Benton in the 1920's,” Art Journal, 29, No. 4 (Summer 1970), 422–29.Google Scholar

5. For Benton's return to Missouri in 1924, see Baigell, , “Thomas Hart Benton in the 1920's,” p. 426Google Scholar, and Benton, , An Artist in America, p. 75Google Scholar. For Benton's comments on his “back-country” travels of the period, see Benton, 's An American in Art, p. 60Google Scholar, and idem, “America's Yesterday: In the Ozark Mountains of Arkansas – Life and Customs on a Forgotten Frontier,” Travel, 63, No. 3 (07 1934), 11, 46Google Scholar. Time commented on the emergence of Regionalism on December 24, 1934, pp. 24–27.

6. One of Baigell's greatest services to Regionalist scholarship has been his dogged effort to pin down Benton's textual sources. It was in a letter to Baigell that Benton first confessed to having read Turner in 1927–28; see Baigell, Matthew, ed., A Thomas Hart Benton Miscellany: Selections from His Published Opinions, 1916–1960 (Lawrence: University of Kansas Press, 1971), pp. 33–34Google Scholar, quoting a letter of November 22, 1967. Subsequently, Benton discussed his discovery of Turner “about 1927 or 1928” in his “American Regionalism: A Personal History of the Movement,” An American in Art, p. 149Google Scholar. Dewey, John's article, “Americanism and Localism,” The Dial, 68, No. 6 (06 1920), 687–88Google Scholar, is related to Benton in Baigell, , Thomas Hart Benton, p. 62Google Scholar, and in idem.The American Scene: American Painting of the 1930's (New York: Praeger, 1974), p. 90Google Scholar. Benton again acknowledged that relationship in An American in Art, pp. 168, 170.Google Scholar

7. Robert Penn Warren used the term “touristic regionalism,” cited by Dennis, James M., Grant Wood: A Study in American Art and Culture (New York: Viking Press, 1975), p. 194Google Scholar. The phrase “picnic regionalism” is used by Davidson, Donald, The Attack on Leviathan (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1938), pp. 82–83Google Scholar. Benton's description of art as localism appears in Benton, Thomas Hart, “Art and Nationalism,” The Modern Monthly, 8, No. 4 (05 1934), 232–36Google Scholar, originally an address presented to the John Reed Club of New York City. This article is reprinted and discussed in Baigell, , A Thomas Hart Benton Miscellany, pp. 50–55.Google Scholar

8. Dennis, , Grant Wood, p. 194.Google Scholar

9. See note 2 above, and a profusely illustrated commemorative booklet published to celebrate the fiftieth anniversary of the founding of Borger, Borger's Fiftieth Birthday, 1926–1976 (Borger, Texas: Chamber of Commerce, 1976)Google Scholar. I am grateful to the Borger Chamber of Commerce for its help in reconstructing the topography of the city in 1927. When not otherwise noted, data on the physical layout of Borger are drawn from information supplied by the Chamber of Commerce.

10. Borger News Herald, 10 5, 1976.Google Scholar

11. The camera, of course, does not provide an objectively truthful vision. Although a file of oil derricks ran just behind the storefronts Benton pictured, as noted in his sketch, they are difficult to pick out in contemporary photographs and are not prominent verticals in any case because they blend into the bleached sky. As cameramen on early Western movies discovered, it was difficult to use a low horizon line because nonpanchromatic film did not pick up clouds and other details against brightly lit expanses of sky; see Everson, William K., American Silent Film (New York: Oxford University Press, 1978), p. 225.Google Scholar

12. See, for example, Baigell, , “Thomas Hart Benton in the 1920's,” pp. 427–28Google Scholar; this analysis pairs Boomtown with Smugglers, also called The Bootleggers, of 1927–28 (Reynolds House Museum of American Art, Winston-Salem, North Carolina), a canvas from the American Historical Epic series in its closing phases. See also Baigell, , Thomas Hart Benton, p. 76.Google Scholar

13. For example, Mathey, François, American Realism: A Pictorial Survey from the Early Eighteenth Century to the 1970's (New York: Skira-Rizzoli, 1978), p. 116Google Scholar, also speaking of The Bootleggers.

14. For the Synchromist view of Benton, see Levin, Gail, Synchromism and American Color Abstraction, 1910–1925 (New York: George Braziller-Whitney Museum of American Art, 1978), pp. 31–33.Google Scholar

15. Benton, , An Artist in America, pp. 201–4.Google Scholar

16. See, for example, Mumford, Lewis, “The Theory and Practice of Regionalism,” The Sociological Review, 20 (04 1928), p. 133Google Scholar, and related material cited in Baigell, , The American Scene, pp. 43–54Google Scholar, and Jensen, Merrill, ed., Regionalism in America (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1952)Google Scholar, esp. Carstensen, Vernon, “The Development and Application of Regional and Sectional Concepts, 1900–1950,” pp. 99–118.Google Scholar

17. Benton, , An Artist in America, p. 65.Google Scholar

18. See, for example, the long cowboy-dialect passage, or those portions of the chapter on “The South” describing Georgia; Benton, , An Artist in America, pp. 224–34, 155–58Google Scholar, and passim. The relationship between the jumpy pictorial rhythms of Benton's mature style and his deep interest in folk music has not been explored, although sounds, speech patterns, and music-making dominate many sections of his autobiography. Furthermore, Benton “made an album of flute, harmonica and voice recordings with son, Thomas P., an accomplished flutist, and Frank Luther's singers for Decca records. Music based on American folk songs, especially composed for album”: Benton, , “A Chronology of My Life”Google Scholar (note 1 above), unpaginated entry for 1940–42. The harmonica score for this 1941 recording, released as “Tom Benton's Saturday Night,” is reproduced in the 1951 edition of An Artist in America, pp. 287–90Google Scholar, where the project is discussed at length.

This interest and the recording led, it would seem, to one of the more curious and little-known episodes in Benton's career, his abortive collaboration with Walt Disney and Salvador Dali in 1946 on a project to create a second Fantasia (released 1940) with segments based on American and Latin American folk music. Dali's assignment was to create a visual scenario to illustrate the Mexican song “Destiny.” See Arseni, Ercole, Bosi, Leone, and Marconi, Massimo, Walt Disney: Magic Moments (Milan: Arnoldo Mondadori, 1973), pp. 20–25Google Scholar and illustrations; Finch, Christopher, The Art of Walt Disney: From Mickey Mouse to the Magic Kingdoms (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1973), p. 281Google Scholar, photo caption; and Thomas, Bob, Walt Disney: An American Original (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1976), p. 192Google Scholar. Of these authors, only Thomas is aware of Benton's involvement, and he does not describe the project. Benton, , An Artist in America, p. 312Google Scholar, says little enough himself:

I was to concoct and draw the characters for an American folk operetta on the theme of Davy Crockett. Walt would animate this in his usual style. Salvador Dali was already in the Disney studios … and this encouraged me to believe there might be a workable connection between my painting and Walt Disney's art. I had a few conversations with Dali on the subject and he seemed very confident about such possibilities in so far as his own art was concerned. So I set bravely to work with a couple of musicians on a story and a score. However, after about two weeks, it became evident that I wasn't getting anywhere. There were practical objections to all the ideas I dragged up. If they suggested no offensive possibilities at home, they were sure to suggest them for the export trade…. I saw what a tough fence balancing act Disney was entangled with and realized that I was just too “sot” in my ways to learn to cope with it. So I gave up.

The Walt Disney Archives of Burbank, California, contain little more information on this fascinating collaboration:

We do know that he visited the Studio in May, 1940 with members of the Associated American Artists, including George Biddle, Reeves Lewinthal [sic], Ernest Fiene, Grant Wood, and George Schreiber. The artists viewed sketches and storyboards for Fantasia, which was then in production.

Our personnel records do not indicate that he was ever actually on the payroll of Walt Disney productions. But, he did, in March, 1946, prepare a rough outline of a Davy Crockett-themed musical production subtitled “Hunter of Kaintucky.” He wrote, “I think of this thing as primarily musical. [I] want a cohesive score not just a lot of song arrangements thrown together. The idea is to make a distinctly and unmistakably American form — comic opera of the backwoods.” He offered to design the characters, paint the backgrounds, and supervise the animation to maintain the style of the characters and scenes.

The film was never made, and probably never progressed farther than the preliminary outline. It was probably meant, as was Dali's “Destino,” as a segment of one of the “package” pictures that we were making in the late 1940's, such as Make Mine Music and Melody Time. These films were not especially profitable, and as soon as Walt could get back into full-feature production, he did so. Work on Cinderella and its subsequent financial success sounded a death knell for the “package” pictures. It was felt that featurettes such as “Destino,” and probably “Davy Crockett,” could not stand alone in theatrical release. Our use of the Davy Crockett legend on TV in 1954 was completely different from this original story idea.

I am grateful to David R. Smith, Head Archivist, the Walt Disney Archives, Burbank, California, for this information, and to Walt Disney Productions for undertaking a search of their records on my behalf. Smith to author, October 25, 1978.

It is nonetheless possible to see some hint of what Benton's abandoned “Davy Crockett” may have been like in Disney's “A Rustic Ballad,” the Martins and Coys segment of the package picture Make Mine Music (released 1946 and based on plans of 1944), which became, in effect, the second Fantasia. The tempo, the gawky, double-jointed characters and the hillbilly music performed by the King's Men are reminiscent of Benton's treatment of these elements. For Make Mine Music see Maltin, Leonard, The Disney Films (New York: Bonanza, 1972), p. 68Google Scholar. The closest analogues are Benton's folk-ballad paintings, such as The Ballad of the Jealous Lover of Lone Green Valley (1934, University of Kansas, Lawrence)Google Scholar, The Wreck of the Ole 97 (1943, Collection of Marilyn Goodman, Great Neck, New York)Google Scholar, The Engineer's Dream (1930/1, Brooks Memorial Art Gallery, Memphis, Tennessee)Google Scholar, and the Frankie and Johnny section of the Missouri State Capitol mural cycle (1936, Jefferson City, Missouri).

19. Among other Southern and Western works of this hiatus period of experimentation that convey this dreamy, diffuse feeling are Lonesome Road (1927, Nebraska Art Association, Lincoln)Google Scholar and New Mexico (1926, Denver Art Museum, Helen Dill Collection)Google Scholar. For a discussion of the latter, and comparison with Cattle Loading, see Hassrick, Peter, The Way West (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1977), pp. 232–33.Google Scholar

20. Benton, , An Artist in America, p. 201.Google Scholar

21. Ibid., pp. 201–2.

22. Ibid., pp. 202–3.

23. NEA release, Amarillo Daily News, 06 8, 1926.Google Scholar

24. See Borger's Fiftieth Birthday (note 9 above), p. 11Google Scholar, for a photograph of the Rig movie theater.

25. For an extended discussion of this panel, see Dennis, , Grant Wood (note 7 above), pp. 155–57.Google Scholar

26. Benton, , An American in Art (note 1 above), pp. 148–49Google Scholar. This passage comes from his “American Regionalism” essay, originally published as an article of the same title in The University of Kansas City Review, 18, No. 1 (Autumn 1951), 41–75Google Scholar. In this passage Benton – because he is speaking of the years before 1926 – points out that his sources at that moment were Marxist and socialist ideas rather than Turner. See note 6 above for a chronology of his exposure to and interest in Turner.

27. Baigell, , Thomas Hart Benton (note 2 above), pp. 139 and 142Google Scholar, identifies Benton's father.

28. Benton, , An Artist in America, pp. 4–7.Google Scholar

29. It should be noted that the iconographic confusion of Politics and Agriculture (1936)Google Scholar, which associates personal tensions with the column of smoke and with his father's presence, precedes his discussion of those tensions in An Artist in America (first published in 1937)Google Scholar by less than a year. Benton was certainly, in fact, working on the mural and the book simultaneously.

30. Benton, , An Artist in America, p. 18.Google Scholar

31. Ibid., p. 15.

32. Ibid., p. 19.

33. Ibid., pp. 11–14. Senator Thomas Hart Benton's speech of 1854 is quoted in Bergon, Frank and Papanikolas, Zeese, eds. Looking Far West: The Search for the American West in History, Myth, and Literature (New York: New American Library. 1978), pp. 114–16.Google Scholar

34. For discussion of the Western dime novels of the turn of the century, see Nye, Russel, The Unembarrassed Muse: The Popular Arts in America (New York: Dial Press, 1970), pp. 200–210Google Scholar. A copy of this particular lithograph hangs on the saloon wall in the Frankie and Johnny panel of the Missouri State Capitol Murals (1936). See Plate 99 in Baigell, , Thomas Hart Benton.Google Scholar

35. Both of these incidents are mentioned in Benton's “A Chronology of My Life” (note 1 above), unpaginated entry for 1900–1904. Baigell, , Thomas Hart Benton, p. 20Google Scholar, says that Benton recalled shaking hands with Buffalo Bill. Benton mentions only the Geronimo encounter in An Artist in America, pp. 9, 14.Google Scholar

36. Cody, William F., The Life of the Hon. William F. Cody, Known as Buffalo Bill (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1978)Google Scholar, reprint of 1879 edition, pp. 149–50.

37. Ibid., p. 151.

38. Benton, , An Artist in America, pp. 24–25, 26.Google Scholar

39. Ibid., pp. 27, 29.

40. Ibid., p. 30.

41. Benton, , An American in Art, pp. 159–60.Google Scholar

42. Benton, Thomas Hart, “Thirty-six Hours in a Boom Town,” Scribner's Magazine, 104, No. 4 (10 1938), p. 16.Google Scholar

43. Ibid., p. 53.

44. Benton, Thomas Hart, “My American Epic in Paint.” Creative Arts, 3 (12 1928), xxxi–xxxviGoogle Scholar, quoted in Baigell, , A Thomas Hart Benton Miscellany (note 6 above), pp. 19–21Google Scholar. For another account of his father's death, see Benton, , An Artist in America, p. 75.Google Scholar

45. For a suggestive discussion of the iconic memorability of these works, see Alberts, Robert C., Benjamin West: A Biography (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1978), pp. 110–11Google Scholar and notes. Of particular interest is Albert's analysis of the use of fact in Penn's Treaty. In painting his picture of an event of 1682 West used the brick houses he remembered seeing in the village of Schackamaxon in the 1750s and the costumes worn by Quakers of that era. Two of the Quakers are portraits of West's father and his half-brother as they appeared in 1770–71. Thus Penn's Treaty was constructed through a kind of historical layering process, which reads the year 1682 through subsequent facts of local significance.

46. Benton, , An Artist in America, p. 315, a postscript added to the 1937 text.Google Scholar

47. For a discussion of Demuth's poster-portraits, see Farnham, Emily, Charles Demuth: Behind a Laughing Mask (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1971), esp. pp. 149–50, 184–85, and 208Google Scholar, dealing with the portraits of William Carlos Williams, John Marin, and Eugene O'Neill. The theatrical billboards of New York City also appealed to the European Cubists; see, for example, Gleizes, Albert, Broadway (1915, Collection of Mr. and Mrs. Arthur G. Altschul)Google Scholar, in Cooper, Douglas, The Cubist Epoch (London: Phaidon, 1970), Plate 239.Google Scholar

48. Goodrich, Lloyd, Reginald Marsh (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1972), pp. 93–98Google Scholar, assembles a suggestive portfolio of Marsh's source photographs of New York signs.

49. Kelder, Diane, ed., Stuart Davis (New York: Praeger, 1971), p. 6Google Scholar, traces the use of signage in Davis's work from a lost mural in Gar Spark's Candy Store in Newark, New Jersey, dating to about 1916. One of his earliest “modern” pictures, Multiple Views (1918, Collection of Mrs. Stuart Davis)Google Scholar, places a signboard reading “G ARA …” squarely parallel to the picture plane; see Kelder, , Stuart Davis, Plate 6.Google Scholar

50. Tashjian, Dickran, William Carlos Williams and the American Scene, 1920–1940 (New York: Whitney Museum of American Art, 1978), figure 11 and p. 24Google Scholar. The cover appeared on transition No. 14 (Fall 1928).Google Scholar

51. See his autobiography, Stuart Davis (New York: American Artists' Group, 1945)Google Scholar, reprinted in Kelder, , Stuart Davis, pp. 26–27Google Scholar, and similar studies of signs attached to American buildings and dated to 1926, pp. 52–53. A real label from a bottle of “Suze” aperitif is collaged to the surface of Picasso's The Bottle of Suze (1913, Washington University, Saint Louis).Google Scholar

52. Jewell, Edward Alden, “When Cobblers Turn from the Last: Issues in the Debate Between Leading Exponents of ‘Abstract’ and ‘Nationalist’ Tendencies – Mr. Benton's Recent Paintings,” New York Times, 04 7, 1935.Google Scholar

53. See, for example, Boswell, Peyton, “Trying to Settle It,” Art Digest, 9 (03 1, 1935), pp. 3–4, 21Google Scholar, and Davis, Stuart, “Davis' Rejoinder,” Art Digest, 9 (04 1, 1935), pp. 12–13, 26–27.Google Scholar

54. Davis, Stuart, “The New York American Scene in Art,” Art Front, 02 1935Google Scholar, reprinted in Kelder, , Stuart Davis, p. 151Google Scholar. For Benton's response, see his interview in Art Front, 1 (04 1935), p. 2.Google Scholar

55. Davis, , “The New York American Scene in Art,” pp. 151–52Google Scholar. The second sentence of the quotation catalogues the themes of Marsh, Burchfield, Wood, Curry, and Benton.

56. Baigell, , Thomas Hart Benton (note 2 above), p. 114Google Scholar and Plate 86, a page from the rotogravure picture section of The New York Times, 01 4, 1931Google Scholar. Benton's remark appears in An American in Art, p. 64Google Scholar. Although nineteenthcentury examples of the vignette illustration are legion, it was a common feature of Harper's Weekly historical travelogues; see, for example, the illustrations drawn by J. O. Davidson for “A Trip on the Atchafalaya River” in the issue of April 14, 1883, p. 237, with its central motif of a steamboat belching out twin columns of soot. Benton's comment refers back to his earlier remarks on the beginning of his interest in history painting, which was prompted by a book he discovered in his Norfolk, Virginia, boarding house during service with the Navy in World War I: “In the parlor there I had found an old-fashioned four-volume [sic] history of the United States by J. A. Spencer, written in the middle of the nineteenth century and plentifully illustrated with engravings in the style of the period. Having nothing to do at night, I read and reread this work and examined its illustrations with increasing interest…. Why could not such subject pictures deeding with the meanings of American history possess aesthetically interesting properties, deliverable along with their meanings?” Benton, , An American in Art, p. 44.Google Scholar

The work in question is Spencer, J. A., The History of the United States, from the Earliest Period to the Present Time, illustrated … from Original Pictures by Leutze, Weir, Powell, Chapman, Vanderlyn … and Other … American Artists, 3 vols. (New York: Martin, Johnson, 1858).Google Scholar

57. For a discussion of advertising in the 1920s, see Stevenson, Elizabeth, The American 1920's: Babbitts and Bohemians (New York: Collier, 1970), pp. 125–27, 150–51.Google Scholar

58. Dennis, , Grant Wood (note 7 above), p. 194Google Scholar, analyzes the political content of this mural.

59. See McLuhan, Marshall, Understanding Media: the Extensions of Man, 2d edition (New York: Signet, 1964), esp. pp. vii–xi.Google Scholar

60. Rae, John B., The American Automobile: A Brief History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1965), Plate 112 and pp. 105–21.Google Scholar

61. Carter, Paul A., Another Part of the Twenties (New York: Columbia University Press, 1977), p. 134Google Scholar. Carter's excellent chapter on “The Folklore of Advertising” acknowledges a debt to Toffler, Alvin, Future Shock (New York: Random House, 1970).Google Scholar

62. Quoted in Carter, , Another Part of the Twenties, p. 126Google Scholar, from Vol. 102 (November 1926).

63. Fenin, George N. and Everson, William K., The Western, from Silents to the Seventies, rev. ed. (New York: Penguin, 1977), pp. 118–19.Google Scholar

64. Rae, , The American Automobile, p. 48Google Scholar, reproduces this ad and notes that it “marked a change of emphasis in automobile advertising from the car itself to the pleasures of automobile travel.”

65. Benton, , An American in Art, p. 191.Google Scholar

66. Benton, , “America's Yesterday” (note 5 above), p. 11Google Scholar. Benton is not altogether sanguine here about the directions in which contemporary America is moving on her “chartless journey” into the future. He indulges in nostalgia, for example, when he goes on to note: “Tradition and the old ways fight still the entrance of the modern world in this country, but in a little while they will break down and the very last of our fathers' America will be gone.” P. 46.

67. See note 8 above.

68. See note 13 above.

69. Baigell, , Thomas Hart Benton (note 2 above), p. 87.Google Scholar

70. Davis, , “The New York American Scene in Art” (note 54 above), p. 153.Google Scholar

71. Tozzi, Romano, Spencer Tracy (New York: Pyramid, 1973), pp. 87, 147Google Scholar, and photographs, p. 88; Thompson, Howard, ed., The New York Times Guide to Movies on TV (Chicago: Quadrangle, 1970), pp. 36, 80Google Scholar; and Earley, Steven, An Introduction to American Movies (New York: Mentor, 1978), p. 241.Google Scholar

72. McLuhan, Marshall and Fiore, Quentin, The Medium Is the Massage: An Inventory of Effects (New York: Bantam, 1967), pp. 74–75Google Scholar. This passage is discussed in relationship to popular Western movies in French, Philip, Westerns: Aspects of a Movie Genre (New York: Oxford Unversity Press, 1977), p. 40.Google Scholar

73. For a backward glance at the second frontier of the 1920s, see Guthrie, Woody, “Boomtown Philosophy in Oklahoma” (1943)Google Scholar, in Bergon, and Papanikolas, , Looking Far West (note 33 above), pp. 384–86.Google Scholar

74. Harte, Bret, “The Luck of Roaring Camp,” in Kreigel, Leonard and Lass, Abraham H., Stories of the American Experience (New York: New American Library, 1973), pp. 56–61Google Scholar. This story was included in Harte's anthology, The Luck of Roaring Camp and Other Sketches (Boston: Fields, Osgood, 1870), pp. 1–15Google Scholar. See also James K. Folsom, entry on Bret Harte in Lamar, Howard R., ed., The Reader's Encyclopedia of the American West (New York: Thomas Y. Crowell, 1977), pp. 488–89.Google Scholar

75. Crane, Stephen, “Nebraska's Bitter Fight for Life,” in Bergon, Frank, ed., The Western Writings of Stephen Crane (New York: New American Library, 1979), p. 181.Google Scholar

76. Clemens, Samuel L.. Roughing It (Hartford, Conn.: American, 1872)Google Scholar, quoted in Bergon, and Papanikolas, , Looking Far West, pp. 268–69Google Scholar. On Twain's trip, see also Smith, Duane A., “Boomtowns” in Lamar, The Reader's Encyclopedia of the American West, pp. 110–11.Google Scholar

77. Haining, Peter, ed., The Fantastic Pulps (New York: Vintage, 1976)Google Scholar, Introduction, pp. 11–13, and introduction to Crane, Stephen, “Manacled,” p. 19.Google Scholar

78. Morris, Richard B., ed., The Encyclopedia of American History, 4th ed. (New York: Harper & Row, 1970), p. 605Google Scholar, lists the following best-sellers published up to 1918: Wister, Owen, The Virginian (1902)Google Scholar; Grey, Zane, The Spirit of the Border (1906)Google Scholar; Fox, John Jr., The Trail of the Lonesome Pine (1908)Google Scholar; Grey, Zane, The Riders of the Purple Sage (1912)Google Scholar; and Grey, Zane, The U.P. Trail (1918).Google Scholar

Carter, , Another Part of the Twenties (note 61 above), pp. 134–35Google Scholar, cites a listing for the 1920s which includes Hough, Emerson's The Covered WagonGoogle Scholar, Mulford, Clarence E.'s Rustler's ValleyGoogle Scholar, and Ferber, Edna's Cimarron.Google Scholar

79. Wister, Owen, The Virginian: A Horseman of the Plains (New York: Pocket Books, 1956)Google Scholar, reprint of 1911 edition, with title page illustration by Charles M. Russell, p. 9.

Every serious study of the American film and the Western genre pays tribute to the influence of Wister. Of particular interest here are Brownlow, Kevin, The War, the West and the Wilderness (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1979), pp. xiii–xviGoogle Scholar; French, , Westerns, pp. 24–25Google Scholar; and Cawelti, John G., “Savagery, Civilization and the Western Hero,” in Nachbar, Jack, ed., Focus on the Western (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1974), p. 63Google Scholar.

For a contrast between Wister's gentlemanly gunfight and the murderous realities of Wyoming's Johnson County War, see Hallon, W. Eugene, Frontier Violence: Another Look (New York: Oxford University Press, 1974), pp. 161–70Google Scholar. A similar notion is discussed in Calder, Jenni, There Must Be a Lone Ranger: The American West in Film and Reality (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1977), esp. pp. 16–17, 123–24.Google Scholar

80. Wister, , The Virginian, p. ix.Google Scholar

81. Ibid., p. x. The reference to the Virginian's suit appears on p. 360.

82. For the magazine articles upon which the novel is based, see Hassrick, Peter H., Frederic Remington (New York: Harry N. Abrams-New American Library, 1975)Google Scholar, esp. unpaginated note accompanying Plate 27, Remington, 's illustration entitled The Fall of the Cowboy (1895, Amon Carter Museum of Western Art, Fort Worth)Google Scholar, which appeared with Wister, 's “The Evolution of the Cow-Puncher” in Harper's Monthly, No. 91 (09 1895)Google Scholar:

Three things swept him away— the exhausting of the virgin pastures, the coming of the wire fence, and Mr. Armour of Chicago, who set the price to suit himself. But all this may be summed up in the word Progress. When the bankrupt cowpuncher felt Progress dispersing him, he seized whatever plank floated nearest him in the wreck. He went to town for a job; he got a position on the railroad; he set up a saloon; he married, and fenced in his little farm.

This passage is also discussed in Czestochowski, Joseph, The Pioneer: Images of the Frontier (New York: E. P. Button, 1977), unpaginated note accompanying Plate 84.Google Scholar

83. Wister, , The Virginian, p. viiGoogle Scholar. Wister had known Roosevelt since their days at Harvard and in 1885, on medical advice, followed Roosevelt to a ranch near Buffalo, Wyoming; James K. Folsom, entry on Owen Wister in Lamar, , The Reader's Encyclopedia of the American West, p. 1280Google Scholar. Frederic Remington became a close associate of and illustrator for both men in 1887, when he illustrated Roosevelt's account of Western ranching for Century magazine; see Samuels, Peggy and Samuels, Harold, eds., The Collected Writings of Frederic Remington (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1979), pp. xv–xvii, 598Google Scholar. Remington's sense of moving, multiple frontiers endangered by progress is very close to Wister's. Hassrick, , Frederic Remington, p. 13Google Scholar, quotes Remington's reflections in the 1880s on meeting an old wagon freighter who had been born on the frontier of western New York, went west at an early age to the Iowa frontier, and was now on the frontier of the Montana Territory:

“And now,” said he, “there is no more West. In a few years the railroad will come along the Yellowstone and a poor man can not make a living at all.” The old man had closed my very entrancing book at the first chapter. I knew the railroad was coming – I saw men already swarming into the land. I knew the derby hat, the thirty day note were upon us in a restless surge. I knew the wild riders and the vacant land were about to vanish forever.

Benton, , “A Chronology of My Life” (note 1 above), unpaginated entry for 1900–1904Google Scholar, notes that at the 1904 Saint Louis World's Fair, he “saw first Remington pictures.” Hassrick, , Frederic RemingtonGoogle Scholar, unpaginated note accompanying Plate 58, notes that in 1904 a “heroic sized plaster replica” of a sculpture now entitled Coming Through the Rye but then known as Off the Trail was set up on the grounds of the Saint Louis Exposition. It was a nostalgic piece, evoking “the days when the Saturday night frolic of the cowboys who came to town was the chief social institution of the week in border towns.”

84. Wister, , The Virginian, p. vii.Google Scholar

85. Etulian, Richard W., “Cultural Origins of the Western”Google Scholar in Nachbar, , Focus on the Western, pp. 21–22Google Scholar, reprinted from The Journal of Popular Culture, 5 (Spring 1972), 799–805.Google Scholar

86. Brownlow, , The War, the West and the Wilderness, p. xvi.Google Scholar

87. Nash, Roderick, ed., The Call of the Wild 1900–1916 (New York: George Braziller, 1970), p. 79Google Scholar, quoting Roosevelt's 1899 address to a Chicago men's club on “The Strenuous Life.” See also Levine, Lawrence W., “Progress and Nostalgia: The Self-image of the 1920s,” in Levine, Lawrence W. and Middlekauff, Robert, eds., The National Temper: Readings in American Culture and Society, 2d ed. (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1972), pp. 289–302.Google Scholar

88. Etulian, , “Cultural Origins of the Western,” pp. 22–23.Google Scholar

89. Ibid., p. 22, quoting Nash, Roderick, The Nervous Generation: American Thought, 1917–1930 (Chicago: Rand McNally, 1970)Google Scholar. See also Nash, Roderick, Wilderness and the American Mind (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1967), p. 145.Google Scholar

90. Nye, , The Unembarrassed Muse (note 34 above), pp. 293–94.Google Scholar

91. James K. Folsom, entry on Grey, Zane in Lamar, , The Reader's Encyclopedia of the American West, p. 468.Google Scholar

92. Nye, , The Unembarrassed Muse, p. 296.Google Scholar

93. Rosen, Marjorie, Popcorn Venus: Women, Movies and the American Dream (New York: Avon, 1973), pp. 64–77.Google Scholar

94. Carter, , Another Part of the Twenties (note 61 above), pp. 57–60Google Scholar, treats Grey, 's Wanderer of the Wasteland (1923)Google Scholar as a religious tract and discusses his growing hostility to civilization. The novel is set in Death Valley, the last barren, untouched remnant of the West, and proposes a philosophy of doing nothing —a kind of Zen satori—as an alternative to the philosophy of the go-getter. The hero, named Adam, flees the civilized Eden of urban America to roam the wilderness and seek an inner regeneration deliberately contrasted with the success ethic of the 1920s.

95. Grey, Zane, The UP. Trail (New York: McKinlay, Stone & Mackenzie, 1918), pp. 1–3Google Scholar, sketches in a vague temporal and geographic setting for the Union Pacific's push through [Fort?] Benton, the climactic episode of the novel. The area as it appeared a decade or so later is well described and mapped in Renner, Frederic G., Charles M. Russell (New York: Harry N. Abrams-New American Library, 1975), pp. 11–13, 121, and map, p. 15.Google Scholar

96. Grey, , The UP. Trail, p. 406.Google Scholar

97. Benton, Thomas Hart, “Passage to India,” from Discourse of Mr. Benton of Missouri, before the Boston, Mercantile Library Association, on the Physical Geography of the Country between the States of Missouri and California …December 20, 1854 (Washington, D.C.: J. T. & Lem Towers, 1854), pp. 20–21.Google Scholar

98. Grey, , The U.P. Trail, pp. 157–59.Google Scholar

99. Hassrick, , The Way West (note 19 above), p. 232.Google Scholar

100. For Benton's friendships in the Lincoln Square Arcade circle, see Benton, , An American in Art (note 1 above), p. 29Google Scholar, and An Artist in America (note 2 above), p. 37Google Scholar. For Ingram's biography, see Koszarski, Richard, ed., Hollywood Directors, 1914–1940 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1976), p. 83Google Scholar, and Sadoul, Georges, Dictionary of Film Makers, trans, and ed., Morris, Peter (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1972), p. 124.Google Scholar

101. Koszarski, , Hollywood Directors, p. 90Google Scholar footnote, is skeptical of the artistic background to which Ingram referred in later life. But Ingram, 's “Directing the Picture,” in Opportunities in the Motion Picture Industry (Los Angeles: Photoplay Research Society, 1922)Google Scholar, reprinted in Koszarski, , p. 86Google Scholar, makes reference to his training in “1913, when I was studying drawing and sculpture at the Yale School of Fine Arts.” The relationship with Lawrie is also corroborated by a portrait sketch of the sculptor published in Morris, Joseph L., ed., Lee Lawrie (Atlanta: University of Georgia Press in collaboration with National Sculpture Society, 1955), p. 60.Google Scholar

102. Benton, . An American in Art, p. 34.Google Scholar

103. Silver, Charles, The Western Film (New York: Pyramid, 1976), pp. 12–18Google Scholar. Nachbar, , Focus on the Western (note 79 above), p. 4Google Scholar, attributes the founding of Hollywood to the popularity of the Western movie. See also Batman, Dale, “The Founding of the Motion Picture Industry,” Journal of the West, 10, No. 4 (10 1961), 609–23.Google Scholar

104. Benton, , An American in Art, p. 40Google Scholar; Benton, , “A Chronology of My Life” (note 1 above), unpaginated entry for 1913–1916Google Scholar; and Benton, , An Artist in America, pp. 38 and 304Google Scholar. Ingram's service career is outlined in Brownlow, , The War, the West and the Wilderness (note 79 above), p. 178.Google Scholar

105. Benton, , An Artist in America, p. 48Google Scholar. Among his “star” acquaintances he also lists Warner Olin [sic] and Stuart Holmes, along with director [J.] Gordon Edwards; see “A Chronology of My Life,” unpaginated entry for 1913–1916Google Scholar. Warner Oland played the cowboy hero in a number of Western serials of the silent era; see Fenin, and Everson, , The Western (note 63 above), p. 230Google Scholar. Baigell, , Thomas Hart Benton, p. 26Google Scholar, does not illustrate these works, if indeed they survive, but he does venture to describe them as “traditional as his other portraits of the time.”

106. Benton, , An American in Art, pp. 34–35.Google Scholar

107. Baigell, , Thomas Hart Benton (note 2 above), p. 26Google Scholar, stresses the Forum Exhibition of March 1916 over the movie work coincident in time with the show. See also Levin, , Synchromism and American Color Abstraction (note 14 above), pp. 31–33Google Scholar, and Benton, , statement in The Forum Exhibition of Modern American Painters, catalogue of Anderson Gallery show (New York: Hugh Kennedy, 1916)Google Scholar, reprinted in Baigell, , A Thomas Hart Benton Miscellany (note 6 above), pp. 4–7.Google Scholar

108. Benton, , An American in Art, p. 67Google Scholar, and idem. The Arts of Life in America, statement accompanying murals (New York: Whitney Museum of American Art, 1932)Google Scholar, in Baigell, , A Thomas Hart Benton Miscellany, pp. 22–23Google Scholar, which also mentions “Cooper, Buffalo Bill, and the dime novels.”

109. Benton mentions Edwards only in “A Chronology of My Life,” unpaginated entry for 1913–1916Google Scholar. For Edwards, see Everson, , American Silent Film (note 11 above), p. 115Google Scholar, and Koszarski, Richard, ed., The Rivals of D. W. Griffith, Alternate Auteurs, 1913–1918 (Minneapolis: Walker Art Center, 1976), p. 53Google Scholar, comments on “Lost Films,” including Edwards, 's Cleopatra (1918)Google Scholar, starring Theda Bara, of which a 45-second fragment survives.

110. Benton, , An American in Art, p. 34Google Scholar, and idem, “A Chronology of My Life,” unpaginated entry for 1913–1916.Google Scholar

111. Benton, , An Artist in America, p. 37.Google Scholar

112. There were, of course, silent films that used elaborate and highly detailed sets: the Babylonian sequence of Griffith, D. W.'s Intolerance (1916)Google Scholar is one example. But extravagant standing sets were more typical of Hollywood productions, and Westerns that broke the pattern of scenic austerity were more generally shot on location in the West. Maurice Tourneur, working at Fort Lee, sometimes created vast spatial illusions and an aura of realism by “glass shots,” or backgrounds and framing wings painted on glass through which actors were filmed; see the pictorial survey of silent film direction in Everson, , American Silent Film, plates following p. 246Google Scholar, and especially scenes from Tourneur, 's Last of the Mohicans (1920)Google Scholar, a poetic reshaping of a Western.

113. See note 105 above.

114. Benton, , An Artist in America, p. 38.Google Scholar

115. Benton, , “A Chronology of My Life,” unpaginated entry for 1937–1938Google Scholar, and idem. An Artist in America, p. 276Google Scholar. In the latter text, Benton says he met Joan Bennett and Hildegarde.

116. Although it is conceivable that Benton concocted this background scene, which shows a burning city and what seem to be survivors in small boats on Michigan, Lake, In Old ChicagoGoogle Scholar, a dramatization of the Chicago Fire of 1871, was being filmed at this time. See Trent, Paul, Those Fabulous Movie Years: the 30s (Barre, Mass.: Barre-Vineyard, 1975), pp. 142–43Google Scholar. The other great movie fire of those years, the burning of Atlanta for Gone with the Wind (1939)Google Scholar, was not filmed until December 10, 1938; see Flamini, Roland, Scarlett, Rhett and a Cast of Thousands (New York: Collier Macmillan, 1975), p. 149.Google Scholar

117. Dennis, , Grant Wood (note 7 above), pp. 109–11Google Scholar, discusses three of Wood's 1923 decorative drawings entitled East Coast View of the West (Collection Mr. and Mrs. Park Rinard, Falls Church, Va.) as cinematic spoofs: “And for the finale Wood provided the inevitable chase with a Hollywood cowboy brandishing a bone in hot pursuit of a fat, blanketed Indian clutching a doll baby.”

118. Dennis, , Grant Wood, pp. 130–31Google Scholar. See also “The ‘Long Voyage Home’ as Seen and Painted by Nine American Artists,” American Artist, 4 (09 1940), pp. 4–14Google Scholar, and Garwood, Darrell, Artist in Iowa: A Life of Grant Wood (New York: W. W. Norton, 1944), p. 233Google Scholar. The idea of replicating a scene from a dramatic performance interested Benton. Poker Night of 1948, formerly in the collection of the play's producer, Irene Mayer Selznick (now Collection of Mr. and Mrs. Sheldon Shapiro, Saint Louis), is based on scene 3 of Williams, Tennessee's A Streetcar Named DesireGoogle Scholar, which opened at New York's Barrymore Theatre on December 3, 1947, and was directed by Elia Kazan. The distinctive set and most of the cast appeared in Kazan's 1951 movie version of the play, and it is easy to recognize Marlon Brando (Stanley Kowalski), Kim Hunter (Stella) and Karl Maiden (Mitch) in Benton's painting; see Williams, Tennessee, A Streetcar Named Desire (New York: New American Library, n.d.)Google Scholar, cover and cover notes. For the John Ford-John Wayne partnership, see the comprehensive filmography in Bogdanovich, Peter, John Ford, rev. ed. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1978), pp. 113–49.Google Scholar

119. For an extended discussion of this Disney project, see note 18 above.

120. Maltin, , The Disney Films (note 18 above), pp. 38, 45.Google Scholar

121. See, for example, Panofsky, Erwin, “Style and Medium in the Motion Picture,” originally published in Critique, Vol. 1, No. 3, 1947Google Scholar, and reprinted in Weitz, Morris et al. , Problems in Aesthetics (New York: Macmillan, 1959), esp. pp. 534–35 and note 1.Google Scholar

122. In a chapter devoted to Fantasia, the critical debate over the film is summarized by Schickel, Richard, The Disney Version: The Life, Times, Art and Commerce of Walt Disney (New York: Avon-Discus, 1968), pp. 201–10Google Scholar. Schickel calls the Beethoven segment of Fantasia “the weirdest blend of classicism and Americanism ever observed in a nation too long devoted to the feckless enterprise of reconciling these irreconcilable impulses.” This is precisely the merger Benton attempted in three large oils and a mural: Susannah and the Elders (1938, California Palace of the Legion of Honor, San Francisco)Google Scholar, Persephone (1938–1939, Collection of Rita Benton)Google Scholar, The Apple of Discord (ca. 1948, Collection of Rita Benton)Google Scholar, and the mural entitled Achelous and Hercules (1947Google Scholar, Harzfeld's, Inc., Kansas City).

Disney's repudiation by the intellectuals, which may have contributed as much as gloomy financial projections to the abandonment of the Crockett project, did not include every serious critic. For the exception, see Chariot, Jean, “But Is It Art? A Disney Disquisition,” The American Scholar, 8, No. 3 (Summer 1939), 261–70.Google Scholar

123. Quoted in Schickel, , The Disney Version, p. 208.Google Scholar

124. Sandler, Irving, The Triumph of American Painting: A History of Abstract Expressionism (New York: Praeger, 1970), pp. 102–3, 113.Google Scholar

125. Baigell, , Thomas Hart Benton (note 2 above), p. 87.Google Scholar

126. Tuska, Jon, “The American Western Cinema: 1903–Present,”Google Scholar in Nachbar, , Focus on the Western (note 79 above), p. 28Google Scholar, and Everson, , American Silent Film (note 11 above), p. 4.Google Scholar

127. MacDonald is quoted in French, , Westerns (note 72 above), p. 6Google Scholar. For Wilson, see Stevenson, , The American 1920s (note 57 above), p. 146Google Scholar. See also Wilson, Edmund, The Twenties (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1975)Google Scholar, ed. and intro. by Edel, Leon, pp. 153–54 and 158–60Google Scholar, on Chaplin. Wilson was not alone in his receptivity to the movies: See Lindsay, Vachel, The Art of the Moving Picture (New York: Liveright, 1970Google Scholar, reissue of 1922 rev. ed.). The original edition of this book was published by the Macmillan Company in 1915, and the subtitle reads in part: “An appeal to our whole critical and literary world, and to our creators of sculpture, architecture, painting, and the American cities they are building.”

128. Ingram, , “Directing the Picture,”Google Scholar in Koszarski, , Hollywood Directors (note 100 above), p. 84.Google Scholar

129. Ibid., pp. 86–87. Chaplin, Charles. “Can Art Be Popular?” The Ladies Home Journal, 10 1924Google Scholar, reprinted in Koszarski, , ed., Hollywood Directors, pp. 102, 105–6Google Scholar. takes up the issue of content in the film:

It is in its subject matter that art—or that which is acclaimed as art — must find acceptance and accord, if it is to be popular.…A great many persons, when they come to a discussion of the films, will be quite positive that there is no art in them, for the very nature of the business with its thousands of theaters to supply necessitates that the films must be liked by a great many people. In other words, a film must have popular appeal, and in order that the greatest numbers may like it, it must be obvious. This may be true, but it does not follow that, because the thing is liked by a great many people, it is either viciously obvious or inartistic. There may be little art in films, but it is due to reasons other than their popularity or their attempt to be popular.

130. Earley, , Introduction to American Movies (note 71 above), p. 5Google Scholar, and French, , Westerns, p. 100.Google Scholar

131. Everson, , in American Silent Film, p. 36Google Scholar, quotes and disputes this general opinion, the source of which he does not state.

132. Sklar, Robert, Movie-made America: A Cultural History of American Movies (New York: Vintage, 1976), pp. 26–27.Google Scholar

133. Ibid., p. 55.

134. These shots and their sequence are discussed in Fenin, and Everson, , The Western (note 63 above), pp. 47–53.Google Scholar

135. Trimmer, Joseph F., “Three Treks West,” in Peary, Gerald and Shatzkin, Roger, eds., The Classic American Novel and the Movies (New York: Frederick Ungar, 1977), pp. 176–91Google Scholar, reviews three film versions of The Virginian, for example. Silent versions were also made in 1914 and 1923.

136. Zane Grey formed his own production company to film his stories as he wrote them, an arrangement that continued until the early 1920s, when Paramount assumed the task. See Everson, , American Silent Film, pp. 257–58.Google Scholar

137. Brownlow, , The War, the West and the Wilderness (note 79 above), p. 233.Google Scholar

138. Everson, , American Silent Film, pp. 222–23.Google Scholar

139. Brownlow, , The War, the West and the Wilderness, pp. 281–83Google Scholar, and Silver, , The Western Film (note 103 above), p. 15.Google Scholar

140. Fenin, and Everson, , The Western, pp. 75–76Google Scholar, and Brownlow, , The War, the West and the Wilderness, p. 269.Google Scholar

141. Hart, William S., My Life, East and West (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1929), frontispiece.Google Scholar

142. The issue of assigning sole directorial credit for Hart's major films is controversial. Hart worked for Thomas Ince and his Triangle Films. Ince disliked the star and was well known for assuming the title of director on studio products regardless of which employee of Triangle may have performed in that capacity. Given the popularity of “auteur” criticism, film historians have recently begun to assume pro- or anti-Hart positions in regard to the finest of his films, Hell's Hinges (filmed in 1915; released in 1916). Everson, William K., “Hell's Hinges”Google Scholar in Koszarski, , The Rivals of D. W. Griffith (note 109 above), p. 21Google Scholar, gives the film to Hart, although Charles Swickard's name appears on the credits. Brownlow, , The War, the West and the Wilderness, p. 270Google Scholar, gives the film to Swickard and argues that Hart was actually replaced as director, citing an article in Moving Picture World, 10 2, 1915, p. 87Google Scholar. He also asserts that the fire scene, which has given the movie its reputation, was directed by Ince. In a sense, the quarrel is academic. Hart films betray enough internal similarities to suggest that the “auteur” theory may have little bearing on their appearance, and Hart's personal quest for “authenticity” is well established. Like John Ford's Westerns, Hart's seem to have been a company or group project, in which his ideas figured prominently regardless of screen credits.

143. Fenin, and Everson, , The Western, pp. 83–90Google Scholar, provides a detailed plot summary, extensive quotations from the subtitles, and a montage of still shots from important points in the action.

144. Everson, , “Hell's Hinges,” p. 22.Google Scholar

145. See note 11 above.

146. Nachbar, , Focus on the Western (note 79 above), “Introduction,” pp. 3–4.Google Scholar

147. News dispatch in Picture and Picturegoer, 07 7–14, 1917, p. 75Google Scholar. The Hidden Spring is discussed in Brownlow, , The War, the West and the Wilderness, pp. 243–44Google Scholar, and photograph, p. 242. Hopper also used Jerome as the location for The Red Woman (1916)Google Scholar, and the town did become a ghost town after its brief boom. It is worth noting here that Arizona only achieved statehood in 1913.

148. Quoted in Fenin, and Everson, , The Western, unnumbered page following p. xviiiGoogle Scholar. Also see Andrew Sarris's comments on the style of Ford in McBride, Joseph and Wilmington, Michael, John Ford (New York: Da Capo Press, 1975), p. 24Google Scholar, and Sinclair, Andrew, John Ford: A Biography (New York: Dial Press-James Wade, 1979)Google Scholar, on Stagecoach (1939), pp. 79–86Google Scholar, and Three Bad Men (1926), pp. 40–42.Google Scholar

149. French, , Westerns (note 72 above), p. 24.Google Scholar

150. Nachbar, , Focus on the Western, pp. 3–4.Google Scholar

151. Cawelti, , “Savagery, Civilization and the Western Hero,”Google Scholar in ibid., p. 57. Nachbar assembles a broad range of critical opinion on the Western formula-myth and its relationship to Turner: See Kitses, Jim, “The Western: Ideology and Archetype,” p. 65Google Scholar, and Folsom, James K., “Westerns as Social and Political Alternatives,” pp. 81–82Google Scholar. For a structuralist approach to the Western, see Wright, Will, Six Guns and Society (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1977), esp. pp. 29–123.Google Scholar

152. French, , Westerns, p. 156Google Scholar, quotes Horace Gregory's “Guns of the Roaring West,” an attack on the commercial and political exploitation of the Western that confuses historical reality with the ever contemporary quality of cinematic reality:

More than anything else the cult expresses the desire to dramatise a brightly surfaced and thin layer of American history, one that can be read at a glance with the mind untroubled by the need of serious understanding or research. It is a pictorial short-cut back to feeling very much at home in the United States.

153. Bogdanovich, , John Ford (note 118 above), pp. 44–46, 124.Google Scholar

154. Cawelti, , “Savagery, Civilization and the Western Hero” (note 79 above), pp. 58–59.Google Scholar

155. Everson, , American Silent Film (note 11 above), p. 254Google Scholar, and The Covered Wagon, promotional booklet (New York: Famous Players-Lasky, 1923)Google Scholar, unpaginated section entitled “Facts About The Covered Wagon.”

156. Lasky, Jesse L. with Weldon, Don, I Blow My Own Horn (London: Gollancz, 1957), p. 160.Google Scholar

157. Mitchell, George J., “Ford on Ford,” Films in Review, 06–07, 1964, p. 328Google Scholar; also cited in Brownlow, , The War, the West and the Wilderness, p. 386.Google Scholar

158. Brownlow, , The War, the West and the Wilderness, p. 386Google Scholar. I am grateful to the Cedar Theatre, Minneapolis, for allowing me to screen a complete print of Ford, 's The Iron Horse in 07 1979Google Scholar.

Central to an understanding of Ford, Hart, Disney, Ingram, and Cruze within a cultural matrix closer in time to their creative epoch is the pioneering study by Lewis Jacobs, originally published in 1939: Jacobs, Lewis, The Rise of American Film: A Critical History (New York: Teachers College Press, Columbia University, 1967).Google Scholar