Page 6 - carey-bunse_habs_ca2712

) HARRY CAREY RANCH
(Clougherty Ranch)
HABS No. CA-2712 (Page 6)
)
the late 1920s. Like many stars of other genres, the Western stars of the silent era often
had difficulty in adjusting to the requirements of the "talkie" films.
)
The development of Western film production, with actors and directors dedicated to it,
reflects some of the specialized needs associated with the genre. The stars, for example,
were required to ride horses, perform fistfights, and other stunts not normally associated
with other genres. The films also required _unique sets that included a "Western"
topography, as well as a great deal of outdoor filming to capture the stereotypical cowboy
lifestyle of open ranges, ranch complexes, and western towns.
)
In search of settings such as these, filmmakers began to discover the Santa Clarita Valley
in the 1910s, recognizing that it was an advantageous locale for work on Western film.
The valley is only about thirty miles north of downtown Los Angeles, but was sparsely
settled in the early decades of the twentieth century and remained so until recent decades.
C) In fact, access to the valley was quite difficult until the State of California completed the
9
famous "Ridge Route" through the area in the 191 Os. The primary economy of the
valley prior to the arrival of the film industry was cattle ranching and oil production. The
old downtowns of the communities of Newhall and Saugus could almost pass for
Wes tern film sets at the time, dominated as they were by false-fronted wood frame
10
commercial buildings.

The exact date of the first Western filmed in the ar_ea is not known, but Tom Mix and
Harry Carey, Sr. were two of the earliest stars to use the area. When the local newspaper
announced Harry Carey's death in 1947, his obituary noted that Carey had arrived in
Newhall in 1913 or 1914 to film Westerns for the Biograph Company. Mix may have
first come to the area at the same time, reportedly in 1914 as a Selig Company actor. By
191 7, the two actors were hard at work, Mix creating movie set location called
"Mixville" and Carey creating the character Cheyenne Harry in John Ford's Straight
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Shooting, which may have been filmed on the Carey ranch property. "Beale's Cut" was
mother local site, for example, that was well known and provided a dramatic location for
filming near Newhall. The cut had been made in the nineteenth century to facilitate
wagon traffic through the area and was a deep and narrow chasm. John Ford used it as a
() backdrop in Straight Shooting and he would re-use the location in subsequent filmsl. It is
best known from a scene in Ford's 1939 classic, Stagecoach, in which Apaches attack as
the coach passes through the cut, and from a famous scene in the 1923 Three Jumps .
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Ahead, in which a double for Tom Mix jumped a horse across the 90-foot deep chasm.
C)
() 9 The Ridge Route passed through the valley and was functionally the predecessor of the Interstate 5 link between
Los Angeles and Bakersfield, although it followed a much different alignment. Scorza and Wright, eds., Santa
Clarita Valley: A Pictorial History, 22; Bob Pool, "Ridge Route's Scholar," Los Angeles Times (October 13, 1997).
() 10 Worden, Santa Clarita Valley: A Concise Hist01y 1997); Scorza and Wright, eds., Santa Clarita Valley: A
Pictorial History; Henryk Hoffman, "A" Western Filmmakers (Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Company, Inc., 2000),
278-281.
II "Friends Bid Farewell to Harry Carey at Simple Service under the Skies," The Signal (September 25, 1947), 1;
Maurice VanAuken, "Straight Shooting," us.imdb.com (as of January 4, 2001); Hoffman, "A" Western Filmmakers,
() 278-281.
12
Leon Worden, "Movie Trivia from Beale's Cut," The Signal (April 9, 1997).