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1. The First Movie Stars

“The horse, the horse! The symbol of surging potency and power of movement, of action, in man.”

—D. H. Lawrence, Apocalypse

Abe Edgington and the twelve frames that changed the world.

The first cowboy star, Broncho Billy Anderson, in character with some of his equine cast members in Niles, California, where many of his Westerns were made.

The first movie star was a horse. Equus caballus, that potent symbol of human aspiration, had been capturing the imaginations of painters, poets, songsmiths, and sculptors for centuries when he was finally captured in action by motion pictures on a fine June day in 1878. Before Thomas Edison and D. W. Griffith began their careers as film pioneers, before the first cowboy actor on a trusty steed galloped across a silent screen, before the entire film industry exploded to the sound of thundering hooves, there were a revolutionary series of motion pictures starring a Standardbred harness racer with the unlikely name of Abe Edgington. This equine performer blazed unchartered terrain by virtue of a bet that involved his hoofbeats.

The Horse in Motion

Abe Edgington’s place in history was guaranteed in 1878 when his owner, wealthy railroad magnate and one-time California governor Leland Stanford, hired British-born photographer Eadweard Muybridge to photograph his horses. Stanford hoped to prove that a racing trotter going full speed would, for a split second, be completely airborne. On a June day in Palo Alto, California, Muybridge began by shooting a series of photos of Abe Edgington pulling a sulky. Members of the press witnessed this historic event, which utilized twelve cameras with unique lenses and an electronically controlled mechanism designed to operate special shutters. Wires placed underneath the racetrack at 21-inch intervals triggered the release of the camera shutters as the sulky wheels made contact with the ground.

It took half a second to take the twelve pictures, which clearly showed the high-stepping Abe Edgington’s four legs suspended in midair. Stanford had his proof, and the world had the beginnings of a new art form: motion pictures.

Four days later, Muybridge successfully photographed Stanford’s horse Occident being galloped under saddle. Excited by the results, Stanford—who adored his horses and forbade farmhands to speak harshly to them—funded more of Muybridge’s photographic experiments. Within two weeks, Muybridge had produced six more sequential photographs of Stanford’s horses, depicting them walking, trotting, and galloping. The pictures were published as The Horse in Motion.

This revolutionary series aroused international interest, and the University of Philadelphia commissioned Muybridge to take “moving pictures” of a number of animals, including horses. By the time he had completed this work, Muybridge had shot 20,000 pictures, many featuring randomly chosen horses, named Daisy, Eagle, Elberon, Sharon, Pandora, Billy, Annie G, and Bouquet. Along with Abe Edgington, Occident, and Stanford’s other horses, these animals ranked among the world’s first movie stars.

The train robbers made the mistake of dismounting their getaway horses as they are confronted by posse members in this shot from The Great Train Robbery.

Native Americans and their ponies reenact an encounter with cowboys in Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show, circa 1908.

Edison

In 1894, sixteen years after Muybridge began his unique way of photographing horses, inventor Thomas Alva Edison patented the first motion-picture camera. Edison’s Kinetograph camera and his film-viewing device, the Kinetoscope, had admittedly been inspired by the work of Muybridge, who had invented the first film projector, the Zoopraxiscope, in 1879. Muybridge had shown Edison his invention in 1888 and proposed collaboration, but Edison declined the offer, having his own vision to pursue.

Credited with starting the American motion picture industry, on April 14, 1894, Edison opened a Kinetoscope Parlor in New York City, where awestruck audiences watched his short films. Perhaps again taking his cue from Muybridge, Edison turned to the visual excitement of horses to enliven many early films. A bucking horse, Sunfish, along with Colorado cowboy Lee Martin, starred in the aptly titled 1894 short Bucking Bronco, filmed at Buffalo Bill’s Wild West show. That same year, Edison filmed Buffalo Bill himself putting his beautiful gray horse Isham through his paces while Wild West performers twirled lassos around them. Technically, these two films could be called the first Westerns.

An early Edison melodrama, The Burning Stable (1896), shows a real barn in flames. This nail-biter depicts four eye-catching white horses being led through the billowing smoke. In the sequel, Fighting the Fire (1896), two horses come to the rescue by pulling a fire engine to the burning stable. Perhaps the first film featuring “trick” horses was the Edison-produced Trained Cavalry Horses (1898), which shows Troop F’s mounts lying down and scrambling to their feet on command. Another 1898 Edison film, Elopement on Horseback, featured a bride sneaking out a window to land behind her beloved on the back of a tall but short-tailed bay. The one-scene thriller was photographed by Edwin S. Porter, who was on the verge of making his own mark on cinema history with the first “feature” film, a twelve-minute Western.

Directed by Porter and released by the Edison Manufacturing Company in 1903, The Great Train Robbery told the story of four bandits in the Wild West. (The film was actually shot in New Jersey.) The train robbers made their getaway on horses, which provided a considerable level of action for the primitive film. The getaway mounts, two grays and two dark horses—it’s difficult to distinguish browns and bays from chestnuts in early black-and-white films—in western bridles and cavalry saddles, don’t appear until the second half of the movie. After the violent stick-up, the robbers leap from the train to mount their waiting horses and gallop into the woods; a posse of six sets off in hot pursuit. Thus Porter staged what would become one of the most enduring elements of cinema—the chase scene.

This crude but exciting Western enthralled naïve audiences, and moviegoers began demanding more narrative films. Movies-only theaters sprang up around the country, and a new form of entertainment was assured its place in American life.

Americans were not the only ones riveted by celluloid horses. France and Australia had their own developing movie industries, and horses played significant roles. The French Lumière brothers made a series of minimalist films in the late nineteenth century. Called “actuality” films, these mini-documentaries were remarkably similar to Edison’s earliest efforts. One such offering, Dragoons Crossing the Saone, consists entirely of eleven shirtless boys riding bareback into a river and swimming their horses to the other side. Another Lumière film, Pack Train on the Chilkoot Pass, filmed in the United States in 1898, shows huge pack mule teams being led by men on horseback through a rugged mountain pass.

In 1906, the Australian brothers John and Nevin Tait produced a full-length feature film, The Story of the Kelly Gang, which employed fifty circus horses and a team of roughriders. The success of the eighty-minute “bushranging” film, the Australian version of the Western, launched a series of wild and woolly Outback features that attracted audiences with authentic—and often dangerous—horse action. In 1912, the New South Wales Police Department banned the films for allegedly making a mockery of the law. The Australians consoled themselves with Westerns imported from America.

A terrified white horse is led to safety in this frame captured from Thomas Edison’s The Burning Stable.

An early Australian movie horse hits the water in The Story of the Kelly Gang (1906).

The Father of Film

Not long after the success of The Great Train Robbery, another player emerged to forever change the fledgling motion picture business. D. W. Griffith, an actor working for a flourishing New York production studio called the Biograph Company, stepped behind the camera for the first time as a director in 1908. Griffith, who would eventually be lionized as “the father of film” for his innovative staging and editing techniques, was primarily interested in human drama. However, he also had an instinct for popular taste and understood the undeniable appeal of horses cavorting on screen. Griffith’s first short for Biograph was The Adventures of Dollie, a gripping tale about a little girl kidnapped and hidden in a barrel by gypsies. In the melodrama’s climactic sequence, the gypsy wagon crosses a river, and the barrel containing little Dollie falls into the drink, headed for nearby rapids. The two horses pulling the gypsy wagon, a flashy dapple-gray and a brown, are essential to the suspenseful action.

In 1908, The Runaway Horse, an immensely successful French film from the Pathé production company, was exported to the United States. This early “foreign film” inspired Griffith to copy its use of reverse motion to great comic effect in The Curtain Pole, which features a horse-drawn carriage as an integral part of the sight gags. While his comic potential was just beginning to be exploited, the horse as sight gag, clown, and “straight man” would become a reliable laugh getter in the years to come.

A more sober subject, Custer’s Last Stand, inspired Griffith’s 1912 action drama The Massacre. Scores of horses stirred up the dust, particularly in scenes involving a “death circle” of Indians on cantering mounts, surrounding their subdued enemies in ever-shrinking circles. This dizzying use of equine action would become a staple of Westerns featuring confrontations between cowboys and Indians.

Another of Griffith’s Biograph Westerns, The Battle at Elderbush Gulch (1913), employed a number of pinto horses, used mostly as mounts for Indian characters. During the climactic battle sequence, a gray horse ridden by an Indian rears and topples over in a stunning backward fall while another pinto horse hits the dirt in the background. This sequence is especially noteworthy as both these animals, as well as a brown horse in a later scene, appear to be trained falling horses.

By the end of 1913, Griffith had left Biograph to concentrate on realizing his dream of directing a full-length epic. While he was undoubtedly out to shake up the world, his landmark film would have an impact far beyond anything he could have imagined.

The 1915 release of The Birth of a Nation created a furor throughout the United States. Originally titled The Clansman, after the book upon which it was based, the controversial film incited charges of racism. In the film’s most thrilling and incendiary sequence, Wagner’s “Flight of the Valkyries” was played to accompany scores of hooded Ku Klux Klansmen, mounted aboard hooded and caped horses, as they gallop four abreast through the countryside and into town to avenge the death of a white girl. Masterfully edited, the sequence is remarkable not only for its shocking emotional impact but also for the preparation that must have been required to accustom the horses to performing in such elaborate gear. The powerful image of a hooded Klansman aboard a caped and hooded horse was used extensively in poster art and publicity photos for the film and undoubtedly fueled the emotional storm that raged around the movie’s release.

Three years later, Griffith released a less controversial extravaganza, Intolerance, a film that wove together four different stories of man’s inhumanity throughout history. In the final crosscut race sequence, horses and chariots storm through ancient Babylon. While perhaps not as electrifying as the Klan sequence in The Birth of a Nation, this sequence is nevertheless an impressive example of early equine film action requiring sophisticated staging.

Ku Klux Klansmen gallop down a road in The Birth of a Nation (1915); among the actors is future Western director John Ford.

The frightening image of the hooded Klansman and horse drew audiences to see The Birth of a Nation.

The First Movie Cowboy

The Great Train Robbery did more than establish the popularity of the Western. It also launched the career of an unlikely movie cowboy, Gilbert Max Anderson (née Aronson), who came to be known as Broncho (later “Bronco”) Billy Anderson.

A former janitor at Edison’s New Jersey studio, Anderson began his movie cowboy career with a lie. When asked by director Edwin S. Porter if he could ride, Anderson reportedly replied, “I was born in the saddle.” The Arkansas-born Anderson had never been on a horse in his life and quickly proved it by falling off the mount he had been assigned for the shoot. The ambitious Anderson managed to convince Porter to cast him in several nonriding roles instead. Since close-ups were rare in early films, variously costumed actors could easily play multiple parts.

The financial success of The Great Train Robbery, rather than any great desire to work with horses, motivated Anderson to continue his career as a screen cowboy. Horses were merely a necessary part of the business of making Westerns, and he clearly understood their value in adding bankable excitement to a scene.

In 1907, Anderson and a partner started the Chicago-based Essanay Studios and began producing Westerns. The company eventually moved to California to capitalize on the scenic locations and agreeable weather. Pioneering the portrayal of a complex hero, both good and bad, Anderson starred in his own films as Broncho Billy. Although he created a considerable career for himself on horseback, the heavy-set actor never developed great riding skills and never became affiliated with a particular horse. He also had no illusions about his equestrian expertise—or that of his fellow thespians—and was the first actor to employ stunt doubles for the hard falls.

One spring day in 1911, a real cowboy, Jack Montgomery, stumbled upon a Broncho Billy production in northern California’s rugged Niles Canyon. Montgomery, along with fourteen other cowhands looking for work, rode over a ridge to watch Anderson shooting a Western in the valley below. Recognizing a great opportunity for capturing genuine horse action, Anderson offered Montgomery and his saddle pals a good day’s pay for riding in the action sequences. Montgomery rode his own ranch horse, a blue roan gelding named Cowboy, in a number of shots until Anderson explained that he needed a stuntman to double an actor in a scene of a horse and rider falling. An excellent horseman, the unsuspecting Montgomery was selected for the honor.

Montgomery quickly discovered Anderson’s attitude toward movie horses. Anderson’s crew rigged a big bay with a crude version of the tripping device known as a Running W, a contraption designed to pull the horse’s front feet out from under him at a full gallop. Piano wire attached to leather hobbles on the horse’s fetlocks was threaded through a ring on his cinch and staked to a buried post. Montgomery was instructed to bail off the horse a split second before the animal was yanked to the ground. Both horse and rider miraculously endured the brutal incident without apparent injury, but Montgomery, who went on to become a top Hollywood stuntman and double for the great cowboy star Tom Mix, found the horse’s treatment disturbing.

In his later films, Anderson continued to use horses as dramatic elements, increasing his popularity with movie audiences who expected ever greater thrills. His flamboyant theatrics are typified in his 1919 Western The Son-of-a-Gun. In one outrageous sequence, he pulls his horse, a rangy sorrel, into a rear before charging into a saloon, guns blazing. Having made his grand entrance, the chunky cowboy dismounts and, with a hearty slap on the rump, sends his trusty steed back out through the barroom doors. Eventually copied to the point of becoming a movie cliché, this wild entrance was new in 1919; such novel theatrics were essential to Broncho Billy’s appeal.

After contributing five hundred films to the Western genre, Anderson turned his businesslike eye to comedies, working with Charlie Chaplin and Laurel and Hardy in subsequent productions. His on-screen persona of Broncho Billy eventually earned Anderson a special Academy Award for being the first cowboy star. More important, Broncho Billy blazed the trail for future cowboy stars—and their horses.

The first real cowboy to become a stuntman, Jack Montgomery is aboard his Mexican horse Chapo in this photo from 1925, the year Rudolph Valentino rode the same horse in The Eagle.