This Day in Film History (John Ford’s Silent ‘Iron Horse’ Makes Loud Noise at Box Offices)

August 28, 1924— John Ford might have exhibited contempt for studio bosses, but they just had to grin and bear it—especially when they saw the results for his silent western The Iron Horse, which premiered in New York City on this day.

Over the next four decades, whenever the western as a genre looked licked with audiences or critics, Ford came riding to the rescue, like one of his pistol-packing heroes. It even happened a mere 20 years after American cinema, for all intents and purposes, began with The Great Train Robbery, as audiences were already beginning to tire of the form.

Critics were turning up their noses at innumerable William Hart and Tom Mix shoot-‘em-ups when Paramount’s The Covered Wagon (1923) took a different tone: patriotic, focused on the nation’s Manifest Destiny. Fox Film Corp. decided to one-up its rival with a movie about the transcontinental railroad, to be made by its rising in-house filmmaker.

The Iron Horse not only was the movie that effectively made Ford an A-list director by virtue of making the top-grossing film of the year, but also the one that established his template for the rest of his career: dragging cast and crew hundreds of miles from studio bean-counters and nay-sayers, out on location, where he could act as a combination of general and summer camp director.

The 29-year-old was already carving out a niche as a cranky, go-my-own way helmsman, having been called back to a movie he’d been removed from, Straight Shooting (1917), after Universal head Carl Laemmle realized that, even with his penchant for breaking rules, Ford was a talented moviemaker.

Over the next six years, Ford would make for Universal and the studio he then moved to, Fox, more than 30 movies.

But Ford was entrusted with an especially heavy responsibility at the end of that period with this new assignment. This, he understood, was going to be an epic, 2½ hours long.

The first thing he did was haul the 300 cast and crew members on circus trains out to Dodge, Nevada, more than 270 miles from Los Angeles. The location shooting would not only lend a greater sense of realism but, more important from Ford’s perspective, remove him from day-to-day scrutiny from Fox.

Not that the studio didn’t try. At one point, Ford read a message from Fox, urging him to shoot faster to stay within the budget. By way of a response, he held the message aloft and asked a sharpshooter to shoot a hole in it, sending the note back where it came from.

By starting location shooting right after the new year, Ford and his army of film professionals were also going to get some sense of the privation that 19^th-century pioneers had experienced.

“There was real suffering on that picture,” property man Lefty Hough recalled. “It was hard, tough, awfully primitive conditions. Christ, it was cold.”

They arrived just as a “baby blizzard” blew in. Temperatures dropped so low that crew members slept in the warm army uniforms the studio provided. (That didn’t prevent a dining car steward from dying from pneumonia he had contracted three weeks into shooting.)

(See Linda Laban's article this week in The Guardian for more details on the harrowing shoot.)

One morning, everyone awoke to find a fresh snowfall had blown in overnight. The shooting schedule had called for the ground to be barren of snow, so everyone set to work, successfully shoveling out within an hour.

What could have made matters worse was that there was no finished script as shooting began. That, in a way, suited Ford just fine: It made everybody on set even more dependent on him to finish the picture.

While the cameras were rolling, Ford could be crusty, even bullying and abusive. When they stopped for the day, he acted more like a benevolent dictator.  In the evenings, the small temporary city he had set up enjoyed dancing, songs (often featuring the mariachi musicians he loved), and even a bootlegger.

(Ben Mankiewicz's recent multi-episode entry in his "The Plot Thickens" podcast has great details on the fun after-hours set on this and other movies directed by "Pappy" Ford.)

The film’s young star, George O’Brien, would epitomize another aspect of Ford’s career: tapping a character actor with just a few credits for a career-making turn. Fifteen years later, Ford would do the same, with more lasting results, for John Wayne in Stagecoach.

But O’Brien shared some traits with Ford that The Duke couldn’t, including Irish-American ancestry and fierce pride in his naval service. Even when O’Brien’s career faded after WWII, Ford made room for him in his “stock company” of actors, including Fort Apache (1948) and the director’s last Western, Cheyenne Autumn (1964).

(More than a half-century after O’Brien and Ford worked together on The Iron Horse, the actor’s son Darcy O’Brien gave a starring role to his father and a supporting one to “Pappy” in his roman a clef about growing up a prince of Hollywood, A Way of Life, Like Any Other.)

When Ford was finished, he had miraculously brought The Iron Horse in under the $280,000 budget set by Fox (which itself was a bargain compared with the $500,000 allotted by Paramount for The Covered Wagon). It grossed $1.5 million, propelling him to the forefront of American filmmakers.

Ironically, of his four Oscar victories for Best Director, not one came from any of the 56 westerns he made throughout his career as Hollywood’s most honored filmmaker.

This Day in Western History (Transcontinental RR Completed)

May 10, 1869—A two-generation dream to bind America together by rail became a reality, as the “Golden Spike” was driven at Promontory, Utah, joining the Union and Central Pacific Railroads in a vast 1,800-mile network through some of the most desolate, even harrowing regions of the U.S.

No other occupant of the Oval Office has had virtually his entire Presidency defined by war as did Abraham Lincoln. I often wonder how his domestic policy might have turned out if the Civil War hadn’t interfered with his plans. I think that the First Transcontinental Railroad provides one clue.

Remember that Lincoln’s political hero as a young man was Henry Clay, a fellow Kentuckian who hoped to tie together the young republic through his “American System” of canals, roads and other internal improvements. As a former railroad lawyer himself (and the father of a future railroad executive, Robert Todd Lincoln), the President saw the Iron Horse as a natural adjunct of Clay’s schema.

The antebellum period witnessed not only a deadlock over slavery, but also over which route the proposed transcontinental railroad would take. The departure of the South after Fort Sumter left a Republican majority in Congress that assured that the route would not go through slave territory.

The day of the Golden Spike was a giddy one, remembered Alexander Toponce, who was furnishing meat under contract to construction camps associated with the grand enterprise. Liberal amounts of alcohol were consumed, not just by the common laborers whose imbibing was frequently derided by nativists, but also by the more well-heeled.

The capitalist who financed the railroad and pushed (and bribed) to get it built went a long way toward dividing their workers into opposing ethnic camps, but they did give them, at long last, something in common. As Leland Stanford of the Union Pacific and Thomas Durant of the Central Pacific wielded the sledge, each missed the spike on their first tries, eliciting unbridled cries of delight from their Irish, Chinese and Mexican workers.

In an essay in Under an Open Sky: Rethinking America's Western Past (ed: William Cronon, George Miles, and Jay Gitlin, 1992), Sarah Deutsch summed up the changes wrought on racial and ethnic relations in the West:

“It was the railroad—symbolized by the completion of the transcontinental line in 1869—rather than the military that tipped the balance of power….The railroad, linking city to city, coast to coast, countryside to markets, symbolized national capitalism’s triumph over local autonomy. The railroad also revolutionized the demography and altered the pattern of opportunity in the West. And the two changes were intertwined.”

From now on, blacks, European immigrants, and Mexican and Chinese laborers could push to the farthest corners of the West in search of better wages, Deutsch explained. That, in turn, presaged the end of the Native American as the dominant force on the frontier.

This Day in Congressional History (Jefferson Davis Wins OK to Buy Camels for Army in Southwest)

March 3, 1855—In one of the most visionary or oddest (take your pick) actions in its history, Congress appropriated $30,000 at the request of Secretary of War Jefferson Davis to purchase and import Egyptian camels for military use in the deserts of the Southwest.

One thought went through my mind as I pondered why Congress might not “walk a mile for a camel” (as the old TV cigarette commercial put it) but would pay a heckuva lot for a batch of these. How did Davis get monetary approval for this, at a time when a) the South was disinclined to fund even internal improvement projects, and b) like now, Congress was better at creating projects than appropriating money to keep them going? (Take a look at Yellowstone National Park, which Congress created in 1872 without bothering to fork up the necessary maintenance funds.)

Given the ultimate fate of the sides they chose in the Civil War, most Americans today would be surprised to learn that in 1861, many ancestors thought more highly of the executive abilities of newly elected Confederate President Jefferson Davis than of the North’s Abraham Lincoln.

It wasn’t only that Davis had become a leading Senator while Lincoln had served only one largely unnoticed term in the House of Representatives, or even that Davis’ military glory in the Mexican War contrasted starkly with Lincoln’s almost comic-opera service in the Black Hawk War of 1832.

Like his predecessor as the South’s spokesman for states’ rights, John C. Calhoun, Davis really left his mark as one of the ablest Secretaries of War in this country’s history—something admitted by even some of his worst enemies. (One of whom was Senate colleague Sam Houston, who termed Davis "as ambitious as Lucifer and cold as a lizard.”) 

All of this occurred, of course, before the faults as politician and administrator that helped doom his leadership of the Confederacy came to the fore, including lack of flexibility, inability to work with others, and, of course, a rather large moral blindspot in regard to slavery.

Halfway through his term as Secretary of War under President Franklin Pierce, Davis had come a long way toward his goal of modernizing the Army. On March 2, he had gotten Congress to create two regiments each for the infantry and cavalry, reorganizing the latter as a separate army branch. 

(Many of the officers he installed in this crack new unit went on to gain renown for the Confederacy, including Robert E. Lee, Jeb Stuart, Joseph E. and Albert S. Johnston, and John Bell Hood.)

A supporter of a railroad stretching from the Mississippi to the Pacific, Davis hoped to build the new route through the South. In reports to President Pierce concerning explorations and surveys in 1853 and 1854, he took notice of the use of camels in the Mideast, and, believing they could also be effectively used to open up commerce in the vast Southwest desert, suggested that a small number be purchased for use here. Congress adopted his suggestion

With no camels in the U.S., Davis had to bring them from abroad. This required sending a combined army-navy force to the Eastern Mediterranean on two separate trips to buy a total of 77 bactrian (two-hump) and dromedary (one-hump) camels; enlisting the help of six Arabs and a Turk to help pick them; transporting the 70-plus beasts of burden back to Indianola, Texas a year later; and having a short, cheerful camel-driver named Hadji-Ali (nicknamed “Hi Jolly” by the Americans) teach his art to Western mule-skinners.

In 1857, Edward F. Beale used 25 of these camels to help survey a wagon road from Fort Defiance in New Mexico to eastern California. His subsequent report praised their abilities as pack animals (they could haul 600 pounds for 30 miles in desert conditions), with one significant caveat: they smelled so badly and were so mean that neither horses nor men wanted to get near them.

Davis’ successor at the War Department, John B. Floyd, was encouraged enough by the experiment to request Congress for a thousand of them. By this time, though, sectional tensions were so high that Congress wanted no more part of it, and the Camel Corps came to an abrupt end.

The “Camel Corps” -- and with it, an early American encounter with the mostly unknown Middle East -- ended, largely unnoticed, in 1866. By that time, the remaining camels were shipped to Benicia Arsenal in California, where they were auctioned to the public. Some were used to haul freight to Nevada mining camps while others were turned loose in the Southwest desert, where they popped up from time to time to scare the crap out of unwary travelers.

Today, the Benicia Historical Museum at the Camel Barns commemorates this most unusual period in American military history.