{"id":34214,"date":"2016-05-04T11:17:00","date_gmt":"2016-05-04T18:17:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/library.josephy.org\/2016\/05\/westerner\/"},"modified":"2016-05-04T11:17:00","modified_gmt":"2016-05-04T18:17:00","slug":"westerner","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/library.josephy.org\/2016\/05\/westerner\/","title":{"rendered":"Westerner"},"content":{"rendered":"\n\n\n\n
<\/a><\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
Walter Brennan and Gary Cooper in \u201cThe Westerner\u201d<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n<\/tbody>\n<\/table>\n

We celebrated the life and work of actor Walter Brennan this weekend at the Josephy Center. Grandpa McCoy of TV\u2019s \u201cReal McCoys\u201d bought a ranch in Wallowa County in 1940, long before he played on television, but well into an acting career that stretched from the silents to \u201cRio Bravo,\u201d \u201cThe Westerner\u201d to \u201cThe Over the Hill Gang.\u201d Brennan was a political conservative who admired the Actors Guild, and a WW I vet who\u2019d suffered mustard gas (and said later that if offered the chance to volunteer again he would decline). He built and owned a motel and movie theater in Joseph, was in on the founding of a rodeo named Chief Joseph Days, and walked Main Street, ate at the Gold Room, and in general saw himself as another resident of Wallowa County. <\/p>\n

Some local wags have it that he came to Wallowa County as a friend of silent film star Eugene Pallette, a notorious right winger who feared apocalypse and built a heavily armed and provisioned retreat far up the Imnaha River. Pallette, it is said, planned to blow the Imnaha Canyon shut if the bad guys\u2014communists, Asians, whoever\u2014came to get him.<\/p>\n

In contrast, Brennan bought a working ranch, and worked it. He moved here because son Mike\u2019s North Hollywood agriculture teacher (yes, Hollywood had ag teachers and the Brennans had chickens in the yard) had taught in Enterprise, and when Walter said he was looking for a ranch and thinking about Jackson Hole, the teacher steered him to Wallowa County.<\/p>\n

Son Mike carried on the ranching and farming, and grandchildren and great grandchildren still live and work here. A gaggle of heirs\u2014some of them coming from California for the event, joined biographer Carl Rollyson and actor Kevin Cahill for our three-day celebration, which included watching \u201cThe Westerner\u201d and a one-man play of the \u201cOld Character,\u201d crafted by Rollyson from Brennan\u2019s own words and played by La Grande teacher and actor Kevin Cahill.<\/p>\n

What did we learn? That Brennan started in New England, didn\u2019t much like school, worked hard at many things, volunteered for service in WW I, where he saw heavy action, was gassed, and from which he later suffered from what we now call PTSD. After the War he worked for a time in a bank, which he hated, and married Ruth, a local sweetheart, quit the bank, and headed West. In California, Brennan made a fortune in real estate\u2014then lost it. He had done some acting in the East, and in California found work as a stuntman and extra, finally finding speaking roles in \u201cBarbary Coast\u201d and \u201cFury,\u201d and soon winning three Oscars for best supporting actor. He is thought of as the quintessential character actor, a man who worked at his craft, his accents and his appearance (\u201cdo you want me with teeth or without,\u201d he would ask directors). In all, Brennan appeared in over 200 motion pictures and scores of TV shows.<\/p>\n

Why did he buy a ranch? \u201cDoesn\u2019t everybody want to be a cowboy?\u201d<\/p>\n

And here he could be a kind of cowboy, shoot squirrels, eat lunch, and promote Chief Joseph Days with cowboy neighbors. I suspect that some of Walter\u2019s Wallowa County friends shared his right wing political views, but when he was here being a local attending to local things seemed more important. It\u2019s also worth noting that he named his motel The Indian Lodge to honor, he said, Chief Joseph and the Nez Perce Indians who were wrongly kicked out of the Wallowas.<\/p>\n

I guess for white folks the West has always been a place to create and recreate the self. And movies have been vehicles to review history and human story\u2014and to explore the issues of the day.<\/p>\n

Or, as writer friend Molly Gloss would say, of telling and retelling the same story\u2014stranger comes to town to resolve some kind of dispute and save the schoolmarm or barroom floozy. <\/p>\n

But the nature of the disputes is interesting. We watched \u201cThe Westerner,\u201d in which Brennan plays Hanging Judge Roy Bean and Gary Cooper is the stranger who comes to town to resolve the dispute between cattlemen and sodbusters and ends up with the sodbuster\u2019s daughter. What an interesting reminder that all of agriculture was not\u2014and is not today\u2014on the same side of an issue.<\/p>\n

My thought is that, in time, Walter Brennan realized that sodbusters and cattlemen were all operating on land that had been lived on and with by Indians for millennia. \u201cThe Westerner\u201d did not address the issue\u2014not an Indian to be seen in that version of post Civil War Texas. It was years before \u201cLittle Big Man\u201d and \u201cDances With Wolves\u201d took Indians seriously\u2026<\/p>\n

but decades after Walter Brennan had become a Westerner, found the Wallowa Country, and named his motel The Indian Lodge.<\/p>\n

# # #<\/p>\n

<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Walter Brennan and Gary Cooper in \u201cThe Westerner\u201d We celebrated the life and work of actor Walter Brennan this weekend at the Josephy Center. Grandpa McCoy of TV\u2019s \u201cReal McCoys\u201d bought a ranch in Wallowa County in 1940, long before he played on television, but well into an acting career that stretched from the silents […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":16,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[720,719,721,431,430,717,342,343,718],"tags":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/library.josephy.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/34214"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/library.josephy.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/library.josephy.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/library.josephy.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/16"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/library.josephy.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=34214"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/library.josephy.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/34214\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/library.josephy.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=34214"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/library.josephy.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=34214"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/library.josephy.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=34214"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}