Red River (1948) | dual personalities

January 30, 2018

“One clover, and a bee, And revery”*

by chuckofish

Yesterday was the birthday of one of our favorite ancestors, John Wesley Prowers,

the older brother of our great-great grandmother, Mary Prowers Hough. I toasted him and we watched Red River (1948) in his honor.

A more appropriate movie would probably be The Rare Breed (1966) with James Stewart, which is a fictionalized account of the introduction of the Hereford breed in America, but I didn’t feel like it. Red River is a much better movie.

It is, indeed, a fine, fine movie. The first hour is really great. It wanders a bit after that–especially when John Wayne is off stage–and my mind did too. Watching this time, I was struck by several things.

1. Ricky Nelson In Rio Bravo a few years later is really channeling Montgomery Clift hard. He even rubs his nose the same way.

2.Walter Brennan plays a character named Nadine Groot. I wonder if the character Groot in Guardians of the Galaxy (2014) is named after him. If not, he should be.

3. Young Noah Beery reminded me a lot of Nathan Fillion.

Anyway, John Prowers, a bonafide cattle king, died of cancer at age 46 in 1884. He was laid to rest in Las Animas Cemetery in Bent County, Colorado–not on the lone prairie, but in his family plot. Prowers grave.jpg William Bent is buried there as well.Maybe I will make it to Las Animas some day. It is kind of a godforsaken place, but that is not in itself unappealing.

“O bury me not on the lone prairie.”
These words came low and mournfully
From the pallid lips of the youth who lay
On his dying bed at the close of day

He had wasted and pined ’til o’er his brow
Death’s shades were slowly gathering now
He thought of home and loved ones nigh
As the cowboys gathered to see him die

“O bury me not on the lone prairie
Where coyotes howl and the wind blows free
In a narrow grave just six by three—
O bury me not on the lone prairie”

“It matters not, I’ve been told
Where the body lies when the heart grows cold
Yet grant, o grant, this wish to me
O bury me not on the lone prairie.”

“I’ve always wished to be laid when I died
In a little churchyard on the green hillside
By my father’s grave, there let me be
O bury me not on the lone prairie.”

“I wish to lie where a mother’s prayer
And a sister’s tear will mingle there
Where friends can come and weep o’er me
O bury me not on the lone prairie.”

I always liked this song, don’t you? The theme is played throughout Red River and a lot of other great westerns too. Think Stagecoach (1939).

*Emily Dickinson

“To make a prairie it takes a clover and one bee,
One clover, and a bee,
And revery.
The revery alone will do,
If bees are few.”

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February 1, 2016

In a mirror, dimly*

by chuckofish

In flyover news, the Anheuser-Busch Brewing Company announced last week that Mac, the first foal of 2016, was born at Warm Springs Ranch in Boonville, Mo., joining more than 160 other horses in the beer giant’s stable. Hello, Mac!

Over the weekend the OM and I attended the “Elegant Italian Dinner,” an annual fundraising event for the youth mission trip at church. It was, as usual, a jolly good time. What is it about heated up lasagna and a side salad in a dimly lit church hall that always hits the spot?

The next morning I got up and went to the 8 o’clock service at church so that we could go out to breakfast afterwards with the boy and daughter #3 at our favorite diner.

photo from yelp.com

The OM had never been there, but he liked it, I guess, because he ate his slinger and then finished daughter #3’s waffle a la mode.

Anyway, the 8 o’clock service is a shorter service because there is no music (besides the Voluntary at the beginning and end of the service). It appeals to an older crowd and also to the golfers in the congregation. It is not really my cup of tea. I also skipped the 155th Annual Meeting which followed. I forgave myself.

I finished the mystery I was reading by the Danish author Jussi Adler-Olsen, The Keeper of Lost Causes. It is the first in the Department Q series about detective Carl Morck. I thought it was very good–character-driven and darkly humorous. I will definitely read more in this series.

I watched Red River (1948) and really enjoyed it. John Wayne and Montgomery Clift are really pretty great together. Clift never overplays his hand, never tries to upstage John Wayne, but is a real presence in every scene. He appears to be confident and at ease and not bad on horseback. I was impressed. Needless to say, this is no mean feat, because John Wayne is mythic in this part.

SO…

*I Cor. 13: 12 (or “through a glass, darkly” KJV)

2 Comments

January 29, 2016

Born and bred in the heart of the western wilderness

by chuckofish

The title of today’s post refers, of course, to…the Wizard of Oz, who you will remember was from Kansas.

Well, today is the 155th anniversary of the day Kansas was admitted as our 34th state in 1861.

Abolitionist Free-staters from New England and pro-slavery settlers from Missouri had rushed to the territory when it was officially opened to settlement by the U.S. government in 1854 in order to determine whether Kansas would become a free state or a slave state. The area became a hotbed of violence and chaos in its early days as these forces collided, thus earning it the name Bleeding Kansas. The abolitionists eventually prevailed. Kansas entered the Union as a free state and the Civil War followed.

After the Civil War the population of Kansas grew rapidly when waves of immigrants turned the prairie into farmland. It also became the center of what we think of as “the Wild West,” what with cattle drives on the Chisholm Trail moving through the state to railheads there. Cattle towns like Abilene, Wichita and Dodge City, flourished between 1866 and 1890 as railroads reached towns suitable for gathering and shipping cattle. All the famous gunslingers and lawmen like Wild Bill Hickok, Bat Masterson and Wyatt Earp worked on one side of the law or another in Kansas.

Things eventually calmed down in the state and since the turn of the 20th century people have generally regarded it as one of those states where not much happens.

We who live here in flyover country know that is decidedly not true. Kansas is a big, beautiful state where the weather can be quite severe and the sky is large.

“The High Plains” by Thomas Hart Benton, 1958

Lots of famous (and infamous) people have started out life in Kansas. For instance, did you know that Mabel Walker Willebrandt (1889-1963) was from Kansas? She was the U.S. Assistant Attorney General from 1921-1929 and the highest-ranking woman in the federal government at the time and first woman to head the Tax Division.

She vigorously prosecuted bootleggers during Prohibition–in fact, she was the one who came up with the idea that illegally earned income was subject to income tax. That’s how they got Capone, you know. She is one of those amazing women who nobody knows about–probably because she was a Republican and campaigned vigorously for Herbert Hoover.

Anyway, I watched the movie Dodge City (1939) with Errol Flynn and Olivia de Havilland fairly recently, so I will recommend instead watching Red River (1948)–a movie about a cattle drive on the Chisholm Trail which ends dramatically in Abilene, Kansas. It is not one of my favorite westerns, but it is well worth watching for John Wayne, Walter Brennan and Montgomery Clift, who is surprisingly effective as a cowboy.