Peter B. Kyne, The Three Godfathers (1913)

Illustration by Maynard Dixon, 1913

This Christmas story by Peter B. Kyne (1880-1957) is about as sentimental as they get. Three robbers (not three wise men, as the author points out) head off on foot across the California deserts after a failed bank job. Near a dried up waterhole, they find a pregnant young woman in an abandoned wagon. She’s in the final hours before giving birth.

The new mother dies, after leaving her infant son to the care of the three robbers. They promise her to be his godfathers and to bring him up right. With help from a book they find on baby care, the robbers bathe the newborn baby in olive oil and feed him from several cans of condensed milk.

After burying the woman’s body, they start on a 45-mile trek to a mining camp called New Jerusalem. With a dwindling supply of water, they are aware that only the youngest of them has a chance of surviving the trip.

Traveling by night, the man who was wounded in the robbery carries the baby first. The other older robber takes him second. Then the youngest carries on alone, covering the last miles under the desert sun with hungry coyotes dogging his steps. It is Christmas Eve.

Illustration by Maynard Dixon, 1913

Getting religion. The nakedly religious message of this story is unusual for western fiction. Men on the open range were not believers in much of anything beyond the material world. They held values based on a sense of fairness and human decency, but there was no turn-the-other-cheek morality. The code of the West was only a remote equivalent of the Ten Commandments.

It was a man’s world, and religion and morality were more a women’s affair. This feminine association is recalled as one of the robbers has memories of being taken to church by his mother. There, he remembers, was a picture of Mary and the baby Jesus, illuminated with light from a stained glass window.

When preachers appear in western fiction, they are the proverbial boar with tits and are often held up to scorn for that reason. The Virginian, for example, makes a fool of an itinerant minister by pretending to experience a midnight conversion. Still, if we can believe the folklore, cowboys were not atheists. They wouldn’t deny the existence of a Creator – or Satan, for that matter. They just didn’t live in fear of them.

Wild Horse (1931)

You can’t watch this film with Hoot Gibson (1892-1962) and not have mixed feelings. It is a window into the past that shows a lot more than you really care to see.

Born in Nebraska in 1892, Gibson reportedly left home at the age of 13 to join the circus. By 16, he had worked as a cowboy and as a performer in Wild West rodeo shows. In his early twenties, he began in movies as a stuntman and double. After returning from service in WWI, he had a career as a film star that ranked him for a while among the likes of Tom Mix.

In 1931, when Wild Horse was made, he was pushing 40 and a new army of younger talent was taking over the western – such as singing cowboy Gene Autry. With his own ranch and his own movie pals, Hoot kept on making movies, though he never really survived the transition to talkies.

Appearing along with Hoot in this film is the far more authentic cowboy-actor Skeeter Bill Robbins. More cowboy than actor, Robbins was the manager of Gibson’s ranch in Saugus, California. A head taller than Gibson and skinny as a pipe cleaner, Robbins looks even thinner next to the well-fed Gibson.

Poster for King of the Rodeo (1929)

The plot. Wild Horse is set at a ranch rodeo, with Hoot as a bronc rider. The wild horse of the title is a magnificent stallion called Devil worth $1000 to anyone who captures him. Gibson and Skeeter Bill do the capturing, but a jealous competitor, Gil Davis, steals the horse after killing Skeeter, and wins the money.

A bank robber figures into the story as witness to the murder. But when the sheriff arrives the evidence points, unfortunately, to Hoot, and he gets arrested for the death of his partner. “The best pal I ever had,” he says.

Out of jail again, he is trampled by the now-captured wild horse and hospitalized. After recovering, he successfully rides the horse before a cheering crowd. Then he captures the killer, who makes a confession when he is confronted with the truth by the robber, who has now been captured, too.