Home : Wild West Shows :Will Rogers
Beginning in the last part of the nineteenth century, audiences in the tame East paid large sums of money to be entertained by ropers, riders, marksmen, and Indians from the Wild West. Buffalo Bill and Pawnee Bill and a dozen other celebrities from the frontier organized what they called Wild West shows and traveled the settled areas of the East and even overseas to carry some of the West's glamor to a world that had only read about the frontier and wanted to share its excitement. The most successful cowboy showman of all was a quarter-breed Cherokee named Will Rogers, who became a kind of homespun philosopher-spokesman for the nation during the 1920s and 1930s. Will was born on November 4, 1879, near Coffeeville, Kansas, on the lands of the Cherokee Nation in what is now Oklahoma. His father was a prosperous farmer and cattle rancher. Will had his own pony on his fifth birthday; when he was nine he was working as a cowboy at the roundup. Most important for his career, he became friendly with a black cowboy named Dan Walker who was a wizard with a lariat. Will practiced hours daily under Walker's supervision till, as he put it in later years, he could "lasso a prairie dog." He went to several schools but was a poor student. At the Scarritt Collegiate Institute in Neosho, Missouri, the headmaster warned him several times to quit fooling around with a rope and get down to business. When he lassoed the headmaster's colt and the frightened colt and its mother ran off, the headmaster gave Will a ticket home. In 1893, he went to the Chicago World's Fair. He attended Buffalo Bill's Wild West Show and was entranced by the rope work of Vincente Oropeza of Puebla, Mexico, probably the greatest rope artist who ever lived. The charro (as the Mexican gentleman-cowboy is called) could write his name in the air one letter at a time by twirling his lariat in fancy patterns. From that moment, the lariat became Will's obsession. He reported to Kemper Military School at Boonville, Missouri, dressed in a stage cowboy outfit and carrying in his luggage an assortment of lariats. His school work did not improve, except that he discovered a liking for American history and a skill at public speaking. He could not resist hamming up his most serious recitations to the delight of his fellow students, but to the dismay of serious-minded teachers. When he turned eighteen, he discovered he had so many demerits it would take 150 hours of marching to work them off. Unable to face a month of eight-hour days of walking, a most distasteful job for a cowboy, he left school and took a job as a horse wrangler and ranch hand in Texas. Like a typical cowboy, he rambled the West, working cattle in New Mexico and California. He won his first roping prize at Claremore, Oklahoma, in 1899. Increasingly unhappy with the taming of the Wild West, he decided to go to Argentina where he had heard the cattle frontier still existed. Somehow the ship he took for Argentina wound up in England. Desperately seasick, the young cowboy staggered off the ship and vowed that he would spend the rest of his life as an Englishman unless somebody built a bridge back to the United States. The human mind forgets the worst ordeals, however, and Will recovered his nerve for the sea voyage to Buenos Aires, where he arrived in May, 1902. Nobody was hiring cowboys in Argentina, so Will soon ran out of money and had to sleep in the park. During the day, he wandered about the city and, led by the cowboy's instinct, found himself at the stockyards where workers were trying to load a shipment of mules. The stubborn animals refused to be caught, however, and the Argentine stockyard men were worn out from the chase. As always, Will had a lariat in hand, so he flipped out the loop and roped a mule. The astonished manager offered him a coin for every mule he caught. Will settled down to the work he liked best, roping mules right through the lunch hour and filling his pockets. Because of his reputation as a roper, Will got a job tending cattle on a ship headed for South Africa. In Johannesburg, South Africa, the homesick cowboy discovered a touring company called Texas Jack's Wild West Show. It was a shabby little outfit, but it looked like home to Will who got a job as the "Cherokee Kid, who can lasso the tail off a blowfly." It was his first taste of show business. Going home the long way, he sailed for New Zealand and did his rope act there with a traveling circus. The locals had never seen rope tricks and his act was a huge success. A newspaper said he could lasso "the business end of a flash of lightning." After two years of wanderings, Will came home to Claremore, Oklahoma, on a freight train, ending a 50,000 mile trip around the globe. His brief career as an entertainer had changed his life. After a short rest, he went to the St. Louis World's Fair in 1903 and did his rope act in Colonel Zack Mulhall's Wild West Show. He went with the show to New York City for an appearance in Madison Square Garden. During a performance before a packed house, a longhorn steer leaped from the arena into the stands, scattering frightened customers like a covey of quail. The steer thrashed about looking for an escape and threatened to impale some luckless customer on his rack of horns. Will's rope snaked out and looped around the brute's neck. Holding the animal steady, Will soothed it and coaxed it back to the ring. The newspapers made exciting copy out of the Oklahoma Indian who had saved innumerable lives by his cowboy skill in subduing a raging beast. Will probably smiled to himself over the heated prose of the news stories, for he had roped and handled ten thousand longhorns on the range where nobody so much as raised an eyebrow over his skill. But he was a smart enough showman to encourage the publicity. Because of the publicity about the runaway longhorn, he got a job in the rooftop show at the Victoria Music Hall in New York, the biggest showplace in North America at the time. His biggest problem was getting his horse into the elevator before and after every show. His roommate during this period, incidentally, was a young cowboy who later became the nation's top western movie star as Tom Mix. Constantly improving his act, Will worked out a three-rope cast, one loop catching the running horse's neck, one the horse's body, and the third the rider. Then he developed a figure eight single-rope throw that flipped one loop over the horse's neck, the other over the rider. His act was a huge success in the United States and later in Paris, Berlin, and London. He organized a Wild West Show and suffered a bad financial loss. A theater manager asked him why he fooled around with a big herd of horses, a troop of performers, and all the paraphernalia of a traveling circus when the audience wanted to watch only the star roper. He rid himself of the show and returned to solo appearances. He began cracking jokes while he twirled his rope and discovered his audiences were tickled by his simple cowboy humor, so much so that his patter became more important to his act than his rope. He injured his right arm in a diving accident, so he added more jokes while he did a reduced number of tricks with his left hand. Will tired of his own hick jokes, so he began to make funny comments about the news of the day. He coined a line that became his trademark. "Well, all I know is what I read in the newspapers," he would say while he twirled his lariat, and even his fellow performers would gather in the wings to hear what was his line of patter for the day. Will did a show for a club of society ladies; it was a flop. He did the same show for the prisoners at Sing Sing Penitentiary; it was a great success. Will figured it out. The society ladies rarely read the newspapers and had no idea what he was joking about; the prisoners read every line they could get their hands on. Incidentally, before speaking at dinners he stopped at a diner to fill up on cowboy fare of chili con carne and enchiladas to avoid eating the usual canned peas and fried chicken. In the mid-1920s, he traveled in Europe and sent back articles pretending to be from a diplomat reporting to the president. He started sending daily telegrams of comment on the news to American newspapers and for the rest of his life wrote that daily dispatch no matter where he was or what he was doing - making a movie on a desert location, crossing the Atlantic on a steamer, hobnobbing with the leaders of Europe. On his return from abroad in 1926, he chatted with Franklin D. Roosevelt, who was later to become one of the most illustrious presidents of American history. That shrewd politician and student of foreign affairs said of the Oklahoma Indian, "Will Rogers' analysis of affairs abroad was not only more interesting but proved to be more accurate than any other I had heard." Will had come a long way from a trick roper in a Wild West show. For his act, Will joked about his fear of flying. "Here I was thousands of feet up in the air when you can't even get me to ride a tall horse." In fact, he was an early enthusiast for aviation. "I always told you we have the aviators," he wrote. "Just give them the planes. I have flown in the past year with at least a dozen boys whom I wouldn't be afraid to start to Siberia with." (That last statement was grimly prophetic, for Will's last flight was en route to Siberia.) He became obsessed with aviation and complained that European countries were outstripping the United States at the very art two Americans had invented. To fly about the country before the days of airlines, he had to take mail planes, paying postage on himself as though he was a parcel post package. Because he had sent his daily telegram from Chicago with a Cleveland dateline, he insisted on flying to Cleveland through a terrible blizzard. His pilot on that dangerous trip, incidentally, was one of the first female commercial pilots. So faithful was Will to his daily telegram that as he was being wheeled into surgery for a gallstone operation, he dictated his dispatch for that day and the following day when he would still be groggy from ether. Over one of the first nationwide radio network broadcasts, Will imitated the voice of President Calvin Coolidge. He cracked a lot of jokes not suitable to the dignity of a president. He was so good a mimic that half the listeners thought it was the president speaking and expressed horror at his frivolous conduct. Will apologized to the president; Coolidge, a rather glum man, gave a rare smile and told Will he had enjoyed the show. Will's good show business friend, Fred Stone, was badly hurt just before opening night of his musical Three Cheers in which he was to star. Will cancelled all of his own engagements, at great loss, and took his friend's place. He had never rehearsed the part, so he carried the script in his pocket and pulled it out to consult it whenever he forgot a line. The audience was delighted. He soon abandoned the script and improvised a different show every night, commenting about American politics. Sometimes when he got to rolling smoothly, the show lasted an hour or more longer than scheduled. It was his last stage appearance and it was a triumph. He went to Hollywood, where the invention of talking pictures had made the screen perfectly suited for his wisecracking act. For the rest of his life, he ranked first or, at worst, second, as a box office attraction. In Hollywood style, producers gave their cowboy star an elaborate dressing room with fireplace, couch, private bath, all the fripperies that go with stardom. However, between takes on the set, Rogers could be found, not in his fancy dressing room, but in the backseat of his car banging out his daily articles on a typewriter in his lap. Through the days of worldwide fame and great riches, Will remained a cowboy. He never walked when he could ride a horse. He had a huge California estate, but spent most of his spare time at a corral roping calves. The only sport he learned was polo, because he could play it from horseback. For the sake of his guests, he put in a few holes of golf on his estate, but he never played. Sometimes he would show up on the golf course, galloping a polo pony and driving golf balls back to the players with a polo mallet. Even after he had become the philosopher and spokesman for the American common man and the top-ranking movie star of the world, he was still obsessed with the lariat he had first started to twirl for the black cowboy teacher in the Cherokee Nation. He could not sit still through a whole formal dinner, but would jump up and practice roping while continuing his conversation with startled guests. Occasionally, he would playfully rope a dinner partner. Ed Borein, the western artist, got so tired of being roped at Will's house that he bought him a stuffed calf to work with during his dinner practice sessions, thus sparing the guests. On being invited to go big game hunting in Alaska, Will said he was not a hunter. "I just don't want to be shooting any animal." But he did want to see Alaska. With his friend and fellow Oklahoman, the famed pilot Wiley Post, he planned a trip to Siberia by way of Alaska. Because of all the water along the route, Post installed two heavy pontoon floats on his plane. The outsize rig made the plane dangerously nose-heavy, but Post, an experienced pilot, thought he was good enough to handle the problem. Will packed two cases of chili con carne into the plane and the pair took off for the north. They crossed the vast land of Alaska from the south to the Arctic coast. Lost in a storm, Post found a hole in the clouds and set down on a lagoon. Eskimo fishermen told him where he was and how to find Barrow, the farthest northern town in the United States. Post taxied to the end of the lagoon, revved up, and roared across the water, taking off just before hitting the far shore. The Eskimos watched the plane climb and bank toward Barrow. The motor sputtered and died. Without power, Post could not hold it in the air. The nose-heavy plane, dragged down by its pontoons, plunged like a rock into the lagoon. The word flashed from the little Eskimo town of Barrow to the outside world: America's beloved cowboy-philosopher was dead. The New York Times gave over four full pages to the news. The Columbia Broadcasting System and National Broadcasting Company observed a half-hour of radio silence in his memory. Movie houses closed. In New York a squadron of planes towing long black mourning streamers flew over the city. To this day, many visitors to far-off Barrow trudge across the tundra to see the marker of Oklahoma stone that reads, Will Rogers and Wiley Post ended life's flight here August 15, 1935.
| ||||||||||
| ||||||||||
| Links & Recommended Sites | Oneliners, Stories, etc. |
| Questions? Anything Not Work? Not Look Right? My Policy Is To Blame The Computer. |
| About The Spell Of The West | Link To Us | Site Navigation | Site Map |