Tom Mix
Tom Mix
"The Old West is not a certain place in a certain time, it's a state of mind. It's whatever you want it to be."
Birth name:
Thomas Edwin Mix
Born:
6th January 1880, Mix Run, Pennsylvania, USA
Died:
12th October 1940, Florence, Arizona, USA
Years active:
1909 - 1940
Tom Mix – The Myth
To anyone who believed the fantastic stream of biographical details churned out by his publicists, Tom Mix was more superman than mere mortal. Mix himself, in an autobiographical article in the February 1925 of Photoplay, recalled that “my plum first recollection is of my mother using a shotgun in an argument with a mountain lion.” He was, he said, about two-and-a-half or three-years-old. Little Tom was so proud of his father, “a captain in the US cavalry,” who was, in fact, a logger, that he couldn’t quite believe talk that close family friend Buffalo Bill Cody might adopt him.
According to the legends, Mix could converse in four Indian languages, thanks to his mother, who was part Cherokee. At fifteen, he worked as a cowboy on the Texas range. The Spanish-American War broke out while Mix was working as a lumberjack in Pennsylvania, and he immediately tried to enlist in the Navy. Rejected for service, he journeyed to Washington to have a word with the adjutant-general, who found him a place in the army. In Cuba, he fought with Roosevelt’s Rough Riders at Cristabel Hill. So impressed were they, the Riders recruited him as a scout. “I can’t tell you a lot of details about these months of fire and fight,” Mix wrote. “It all blends into one in my mind. But it was great.”
Restless for more action upon his return to the US, he served in the Philippines before galloping over to China to sort out the Boxer Rebellion, where he took part in the siege of Pekin. During this conflict he was scalped by a piece of flying shrapnel, “Just as neat as an Indian chief could have done. It peeled the top off my head and skinned my forehead right down to the skull bone and left my eyebrows hanging over my eyes.” Yikes. Sent back to Washington, Mix could recuperate “while the top of my head grew back on.”
Discouraged from participating in further conflicts, Mix searched for more peaceful pursuits in Denver, where he found a job breaking broncos. His thirst for battle did not remain quenched for long, however. “Pretty soon I got to thinking I’d never been to South Africa, where this little argument with the Boers was in progress, and maybe I’d better go and see what it was all about.” While fighting alongside the Boers, the British captured him and shipped him back to the States.
Mix’s outlandish adventures didn’t end when he returned home. He joined the Miller Brothers' 101 Ranch and sampled the remnants of the Old West: “the cowboy sitting so loosely and gracefully in his saddle, with his bronzed face and keen eyes, his bright handkerchief and big chaps.” He roamed all over the West with the 101 Ranch Wild West Show, exhibition riding and sharp shooting. Teddy Roosevelt, while hunting in Colorado, asked him to be his guide. At this point in his autobiography, Mix appeared to tire of detail and simply listed his various positions as an officer of the law, although he does take the time to describe how he captured the ‘famous desperadoes’ the Shont brothers.
“At different times,” he recalled, “I was sheriff of Montgomery County, western Kansas, of Washington County, Oklahoma, and of Two Buttes, Colorado, city marshal of Dewey, Oklahoma and special enforcement officer in the same state, and I was a marshal in Montana, New Mexico and Arizona and a Texas Ranger.”
Almost all of this lengthy three-instalment autobiography was, of course, complete hogwash. The fan magazines, however, promoted the myth to generate sales—and the public was gullible enough to believe it.
Naturally, the truth was altogether more prosaic, although not without moments of interest—some of which Mix would have been keen to keep secret.
Early years
He was born on 6th January 1880, in Mix Run, Pennsylvania. His family moved to the nearby town of Driftwood when he was four. Four years later, the Mixes moved to Dubois, Pennsylvania, where his father, Ed, had found employment as a coachman. Mix inherited his father’s love for horses, and seeing Buffalo Bill’s Wild West show when it visited the Clearfield County fairgrounds in 1890 sparked his passion for the Old West. After seeing the show, he learned to ride a horse and became adept at lassoing—first hitching posts, then cows and young friends. He also became a crack shot with an old revolver he bought with money earned from tending cows.
On 26th April 1898, Mix, giving his age as twenty-one, enlisted in the 4th Regiment, U.S. Artillery after giving up his job as a labourer and travelling 240 miles to Washington. He didn’t see action, however; his unit was tasked with guarding the DuPont powder works against possible sabotage. He was honourably discharged in March 1901 after achieving the rank of sergeant. However, just one month later, he re-enlisted.
On furlough after re-enlisting, he met schoolteacher Grace Allen. A year later, they were married during another of his furloughs. However, Grace soon became restless as the wife of a professional soldier, which is possibly why he deserted in November 1902. Ironically, Mix—or, more likely, his publicist—briefly mentioned in his Photoplay autobiography that, “some of the boys had left the United States army without stopping to say good-by to Uncle Sam.” Whatever his reasons, the army never pursued him.
Mix and Grace moved to Guthrie, Oklahoma, where she worked as a schoolteacher and he served drinks at the Blue Belle Saloon when he wasn’t teaching Physical Education classes. However, Grace’s father, learning of his son-in-law’s desertion, had the marriage annulled.
In 1904, while attending the St. Louis World’s Fair as the Oklahoma Cavalry Band’s drum major, Mix met Will Rogers, then working as a rodeo clown, and the men became lifelong friends. Rogers introduced Mix to 14-year-old Olive Stokes, who in 1909 would become his third wife. In 1905, Colonel Joe Miller offered Mix a job with the Miller Brothers 101 Ranch near Bliss, Oklahoma. There he broke horses and handled livestock for $15 a month plus room and board. After landing the job, he married his fiancée, Kitty Jewel Perrine. The marriage was short-lived, however; Kitty objected both to Mix’s additional duties as a peace officer at a cement plant labour camp and life at the 101 Ranch. Mix also briefly worked as a deputy sheriff and night marshal in Dewey, Oklahoma.
Tom Mix and Bessie Eyton in Colin Campbell's In the Days of the Thundering Herd (1914)
These extracurricular activities didn’t seem to impair Mix’s performance for the 101 Ranch; in 1908, he was made the 101 Ranch Champion All-Around Cowboy, or King of the Cowboys. Shortly after marrying Olive Stokes in January 1909, the couple joined the Widerman Wild West Show in Amarillo. When Widerman refused him a raise, Mix left to start his own show, recruiting a troop of 60 actors and performers.
Movie career
Shortly after, Will A. Dickey, owner of the Circle D Ranch Wild West Show, invited Mix to make western movies in Fleming, Missouri. Mix was hired to handle stock and act as safety man for the film Ranch Life in the Great Southwest (1910) but asked director Francis Boggs if he could appear in the picture. Boggs featured him as a bronco buster. Mix signed a contract with Selig Polyscope in 1910 and made around a dozen films for the studio, but the studio declined to renew his contract at the end of its term.
It’s possible that the activity of the Edison Trust prevented Selig from renewing because Selig re-signed Mix in 1911. Much of their filming at that time took place in Canon City, Colorado, where they used residents as extras. Although Mix’s films were successful, Selig continued signing him only on a yearly basis. In 1914, he also started directing his own movies. He shot most of his films during this period at Selig’s Diamond S Ranch in Prescott, Arizona, although the unit moved to Las Vegas in July 1915. Back then, Vegas was a rough Western town far removed from the glitzy gambling mecca it would become post-WWII. In 1915, Mix’s films were the third highest-earning in the United States.
Mix left Selig in 1917 when the studio demanded he dismiss members of his unit because of financial difficulties. Around the same time, he divorced Olive Stokes. In 1918, he married his frequent co-star Victoria Forde. For a while, Mix paid his crew members’ wages while hunting for a suitable producer. That man proved to be William Fox, and Mix and his crew moved once again, this time to Hollywood, California.
Mix’s association with Fox transformed his career, sending him on an upward trajectory that ended with him proclaimed as the screen’s King of the Cowboys. The man he deposed was William S. Hart, a movie veteran known for the gritty, realistic tone of his pictures. Mix was the complete antithesis of everything Hart stood for: he was a showbiz cowboy, complete with a flashy white outfit, ten-gallon hat, and Tony, his trained horse. Hart was noted for playing ‘good bad’ characters, flawed men who needed a moral dilemma of some kind to bring out their good side; Mix’s characters were clean-cut heroes with a strict moral code.
From 1918, Mix abandoned short movies in favour of features, and by 1921 he was one of the USA’s major box-office attractions. The following year, Victoria Forde, whom Mix married in 1918, presented him with a daughter, Thomasina. His popularity endured throughout the 1920s: in 1926, only Colleen Moore’s movies earned more at the box office, and the following year the two stars switched positions. In December that year, Mix and his faithful horse, Tony, were honoured by having their names, handprints, footprints, and hoof prints embedded in the cement outside Grauman’s Chinese Theater.
At the height of his popularity in the 1920s, Mix was earning $20,000 per week. In March 1928, his contract with Fox expired, and he moved to the Film Booking Office (FBO), headed by Joseph P. Kennedy, where he made six silent pictures over the next two years. Times were changing, however. Talkies were rapidly making silents obsolete, and Westerns were falling out of favour. The quality of the films he made for FBO was significantly below the standard of those produced at Fox. Then, in October 1929, disaster struck Mix as it did many investors. He saw $1 million wiped off the value of his stocks in the Crash of ’29 and lost his Beverly Hills mansion and his Arizona ranch. In 1930, he was ordered to pay $175,000 in unpaid taxes.
In the crash's wake, Mix took a break from movies and appeared for three seasons as the headline act for the Sells-Floto Circus. In 1932, he launched his screen comeback, signing with Universal to make his first talkies. The films were successful, but he completed only nine of the planned twelve features, possibly because, at fifty-two, he was feeling the physical consequences his roles demanded. While shooting one feature, he suffered injuries when a horse that threw him landed on top of him.
Early in 1932, Victoria Forde, Mix’s wife of fourteen years, won custody of nine-year-old Thomasina after divorcing her husband on the grounds of cruelty. One month later, Mix wed Mabel Ward, whom he’d met while performing for the Sells-Floto Circus. Retired once more from the movies, he allowed Ralston Purina to use his name to promote their children’s radio show, Tom Mix Ralston Straight Shooters. Although Mix never appeared on the show because producers considered his voice unsuitable for radio broadcasting, ran for eighteen years.
Later years
In need of finance for his Tom Mix Circus Show, the fifty-five-year-old Mix returned once more to the movies to make The Miracle Rider (1935), a fifteen-part serial for Nat Levine’s Mascot Pictures. Levine paid him $10,000 per week for a four-week shoot. The serial was well-received, but apart from a cameo appearance in the 10-minute short Rodeo Dough (1940), it was to be the King of the Cowboys’ last appearance before the cameras. The 1930s had seen Westerns relegated to the status of cheap programmers cranked out by Poverty Row studios that cared little about the quality of their output.
For three years, he travelled with the Tom Mix Circus Show until financial difficulties forced him to close it down in 1938. He spent seven months of the year in England, after first being relieved of eight pistols and five rifles intended for his sharp-shooting act because he possessed no licence for them. One newspaper wryly reported that his arrival “must have been the largest armed force that has tried to land on British soil since the last attempt by the Stuarts almost 200 years ago.”
Managing the Tom Mix Circus Show left Mix with debts of $1,000,000, and he returned to Hollywood hoping to find work. However, the Western had moved on; the brand of realism John Ford’s Stagecoach (1939) had introduced to the genre was no more realistic than the stylised heroics of Mix’s movies, but audiences toughened by a decade-long depression found it far more believable.
Tom Mix died on the afternoon of 12th October 1940 near Florence, Arizona, on a trip to visit his former son-in-law, Harry Knight. His Cord roadster, travelling at 80mph, left Highway 89 and overturned as it careered down a valley wall. A metal suitcase on the roadster’s back seat slammed into Mix, breaking his neck and killing him instantly.
Sources: Tom Mix: A Heavily Illustrated Biography of the Western Star, with a Filmography, Paul E. Mix; Western and Frontier Film and Television Credits 1903 - 1995, Harris M. Lentz.
Tom Mix Filmography
Ranch Life in the Great Southwest (1909), [a]; The Cowboy Millionaire (1909), [a]; Briton and Boer (1909), [a]; Up San Juan Hill (1909), [a]; On the Little Big Horn; or, Custer's Last Stand (1909), [a]; An Indian Wife's Devotion (1909), [a]; In the Days of Daring (1909);
Taming Wild Animals (1910), [a]; Pride of the Range (1910), [a]; The Trimming of Paradise Gulch (1910), [a]; The Range Riders (1910), [a];
In Old California When the Gringoes Came (1911), [a]; In the Days of Gold (1911), [a]; The Survival of the Fittest (1911), [a]; Seminole’s Sacrifice (1911), [a]; Rescued by Her Lions (1911), [a]; The Cowboy and the Shrew (1911), [a]; The Man from the East (1911), [a]; The Witch of the Everglade (1911), [a]; Wheels of Justice (1911), [a]; Back to the Primitive (1911), [a]; The Rose of Old St. Augustine (1911), [a]; Captain Kate (1911), [a]; Saved by the Pony Express (1911), [a]; Life on the Border (1911), [a]; Dad's Girls (1911), [a]; Told in Colorado (1911), [a]; Why the Sheriff Is a Bachelor (1911), [a,w,d]; Western Hearts (1911), [a]; The Telltale Knife (1911), [a]; A Romance of the Rio Grande (1911), [a]; The Bully of Bingo Gulch (1911), [a];