Of course, the Apaches were actually played by Navajo. The city of Tonto (near Bisbee) was actually Republic's movie town in Studio City.

        You might have known that, but I'll bet you didn't know John Ford used exactly the same shot of Beale's Cut 22 years earlier — same camera angle and everything — in his 1917 film, Straight Shooting, and again in 1924 in The Iron Horse.

        There were some interesting factoids among the Western volumes assembled by local bookseller Jan Heidt (One for the Books, 259-5595) for the city's huge poetry gathering at Melody Ranch last weekend.

        "Ford is either a very consistent or a very lazy film maker," author Edward Buscombe says about Ford's reuse of Beale's Cut. "But who, shooting a Western in Hollywood (at that time) would suppose that 50 years later every shot would be put under the microscope?"

        Even in his own time, however, Ford had his critics. Big Bill Hart took a crack at the famous director in his autobiography, saying Ford should have made the chase scene more realistic by having the Indians shoot the lead horses pulling the stagecoach. You see, that's just what the Indians are doing in a 1907 Frederic Remington painting that hangs on one of Hart's mansion walls.

        Ford's response? "In actual fact that's probably what did happen, (but) if they had, it would have been the end of the picture, wouldn't it?"

        John Wayne pulled down a whopping $3,700 for his co-leading role opposite Claire Trevor in Stagecoach, one of the biggest Western pictures of all time. It was better than Duke's rock-bottom $2,500-per-picture contract with Monogram in the early 1930s but still less than Trevor and seven other actors were paid for the half-million dollar film, which was shot in 47 days and released two months later. "In those days post-production work was speedy," Buscombe notes.

        Ford wasn't the only one to use Beale's Cut in those early Westerns.

        (We interrupt this story for the obligatory historical aside: Beale's Cut, alternately known as Fremont Pass and Newhall Pass, is the 90-foot-deep, hand-cut gash through the mountain southeast of Sierra Highway and San Fernando Road. General Phineas Banning drove the first stage through the pass in 1854 when it was only 30 feet deep. Troops under the command of General Edward F. Beale, a veteran of the Mexican-American War, deepened it in 1863 to ease travel between Newhall and the pueblo of Los Angeles. In 1910 the roadway was replaced by the nearby Newhall Tunnel, which gave way to modern-day Sierra Highway in 1938.)

        If you've been around town awhile you've probably seen the photo of silent Western star Tom Mix and his wonderhorse Tony supposedly jumping over Beale's Cut. For years, folks have speculated whether it was Mix or a stunt double who made the jump, and whether the jump was actually made at all or if the photo was a composite.

        Robert S. Birchard answers the question in a book called "King Cowboy," an exhaustive anthology of all the old Tom Mix movies.

        The jump sequence appears in the 1923 film, Three Jumps Ahead. Birchard says yes, the still photo was doctored — if you look carefully, you'll see that the horse and rider are twice as small as they should be in proper perspective — but also yes, the jump was really made — not by Mix or his horse Tony, but by their stunt doubles. Earl Simpson, a horse trainer and stunt man with a ranch in Searchlight, Nevada, made the jump on his stunt horse with the help of a wooden ramp they used to gain altitude.*

        Although the footage of the jump survives in a promotional trailer made by Mix in the 1930s, the film itself is lost, as are many of the old Tom Mix movies that were filmed in and around Newhall in the 'Teens and '20s.