In 1921, Guinan organized her own Texas Guinan Productions and produced and starred in a number of western shorts. “I had twelve real cowboys, a scenario writer (Mildred Sledge), a cameraman, a carload of cartridges, my horse ‘Waco’ from Texas, and went to work. We made a picture a week,” she remembered years later. “We never changed plots, only horses.”  

After doing her own stunts in 300 movies, Guinan moved to New York City in 1924, where she donned female attire, ran speakeasies, and was arrested forty-nine times. Her nightclub attracted a clientele that ran from $100 tippers from Wall Street to cowboys from far away, anxious to meet the vivacious cowgirl. Her nightclub was raided ten times in five years by police and the men she called “Uncle Sammy’s dripping dry boys.”  The most she ever spent in prison for selling liquor was a few hours. Her lawyers always quickly got her out on bail.

The climax of this phase of her life came in April 1929, when she was acquitted in Federal Court in New York of a charge of maintaining a nuisance at her club the Salon Royale. The government insisted she was one of the biggest sellers of liquor in the area. The trial was a sensation. One prohibition agent related that he took his wife a dozen times to the nightclub, paid $20 a quart for liquor, $25 for champagne, and saw waiters slipping bottles wrapped in napkins into the laps of patrons, some of whom had to be helped to the street.

None of the agents, however, linked Texas Guinan directly to any liquor selling and from the witness stand she told the court she never drank liquor nor sold it. The jury believed her and ruled to acquit. 

In 1931, with an expeditionary force of dancing girls, Broadway cowboys and musicians, she embarked on a round-the-world tour. She returned to the Unites States an international star. 

Texas was married three times. With the exception of her first husband, Jack Moynanhan, a newspaper man, whom she married in 1912, she rarely mentioned her ex-husbands.  She died of colitis on November 5, 1933. “When I go,” she once told a friend, “I want my funeral to be the speediest ever given with a cop on a motorcycle ahead, a wake for me in a night club and a bunch of college boys singing college songs loud as they can while they lower my coffin.”The cowgirl actress was laid to rest at the Calvary Cemetery in Queens County, New York. She was forty-nine years old.

Enid was no stranger to the boot making industry. Her father, Herman Joseph Justin founded H. J. Justin and Sons in 1879, selling his sturdy, handcrafted boots to cowhands traveling along the Chisholm Trail. Herman’s seven children learned the trade working beside him at the shop. From purchasing the leather to stitching the boots, the Justin clan were destined to become experts in the field. Born in 1894, Enid was sewing boot tops at the age of twelve. Little did she know then she would one day become the president of her own boot making company. 

Herman Justin’s sons took over the business when their father died in 1918, and for awhile were content to continue running operations in Nocona where the company was established. By 1925, the Justin brothers decided to move the plant to Fort Worth. Enid, who by this time was married and working at the company with her husband, disagreed with the idea to relocate the enterprise. Believing her father would never have wanted the company moved from Nocona, she made up her mind to stay put and open her own shop. She’d been trained by the best and knew everything there was to know about boot making. She borrowed $5,000 to open the business and started out with seven employees. Initially, her focus was strictly on making high grade cowboy and lace boots but by the summer of 1927, she added boys’ cowboy boots to the production. Materials used in her factory came from various states and countries, such as calves from France, kangaroos from Australia, and the American tanned leather from the northern and eastern states.

 Enid hadn’t planned to become one of the leading competitors to H. J. Justin and Sons, but she didn’t shy away from the achievement. It was unusual for a woman to run a major company in the late 1920s, but Enid saw herself as liberated long before the rest of the world knew what the term meant. It was difficult in the beginning. Ranchers and cowhands shied away from dealing with a woman bootmaker. Forced to find other ways to bring in money, Enid took in boarders at her home and cooked and ironed for oil field workers. In time, the Nocona Boot Company brand gained popularity and as sales increased Enid was able to set aside the odd jobs and work solely at the factory. 

Throughout the course of the fifty-six years Enid was in business, she met with celebrities and dignitaries around the globe including Presidents Ronald Reagan and George H. Bush, Carol Burnett, Gregory Peck, and Walt Disney. In 1972, she was inducted into the Cowboy Hall of Fame for her contribution to the culture of the West.

In 1981, Enid sold her business to the Justin Boot Company and retired. She passed away on October 14, 1990, at the age of ninety-six. 

The driver and passenger rode through rough country of deep creeks and high ridges. It was 8:30 at night when they came to a creek that was off the beaten trail at which the horses balked crossing. Tall, black mountains loomed before them, and a half-moon emerged from behind a cluster of clouds. Though she didn’t know for sure, Dr. Belcher sensed they were lost, and she wanted to cry from sheer hopelessness. A man’s life depended upon her, and she was anxious to get to the patient.

The wagon hurried along over rocky, winding paths and under dense stands of oak trees. A singular pack of coyotes was standing in an open space at the top of a hill, and it quickly scattered without making a sound as the vehicle approached. After dragging the wagon over a row of tree trunks, the driver brought the horses to a stop. He hopped out of the wagon and hurried ahead of the team on foot. He returned moments later, climbed back into the vehicle, snatched up a whip resting beside his seat, and snapped it at the horses. The wagon jerked forward, and the team proceeded down a steep embankment into a dry streambed, over boulders, and up the opposite bank. The wagon creaked and groaned, and Harriet feared it wouldn’t make it to their destination.

It was just past sunup when the doctor and driver reached the home of the ill man. Dr. Belcher treated the patient and stayed by his side until he was resting comfortably. When it came time to return to her office in Santa Barbara, the doctor informed the driver if the trip back wasn’t any better that she was going to walk home. The driver assured Harriet he would do better traveling by daylight. He was true to his word and had the doctor back at her desk by noon.

House calls in rugged California proved to be dramatically different than those Dr. Belcher had gone on in Rhode Island where she was first employed as a physician. Horse-drawn carriages transported her down cobblestone streets there, and the risk of getting lost in the wilderness was virtually nonexistent. It was, however, for Harriet to tame a location to practice medicine. She wanted to be challenged, and, when the opportunity to go West presented itself, she had quickly taken advantage of the offer. 

Harriet Gilliland Belcher was born in 1842 in Clinton, New Jersey. Her parents were Charles and Caroline Belcher. Charles made and calibrated rulers. Harriet’s mother passed away when Harriet was twenty-one. She heled care for her two brothers and two sisters until they were grown. Shortly after her youngest sister married, Harriet enrolled at the Woman’s Medical School in Pennsylvania. Founded in 1850, the prestigious school was one of the first medical colleges for women in the world. Some family members didn’t approve of Harriet wanting to leave home to study medicine, but she was driven and wouldn’t allow the objections to keep her from pursuing her passion. 

While in school, she exchanged letters with her friend Elizabeth Johnson. In a letter dated October 22, 1875, Harriet shared a list of the courses she would be taking. They included: chemistry, materia medica, physiology, and anatomy. She also attended surgical and obstetrical clinics. “There is quite a large class of students – most of them refined, earnest, cultivated women,” Harriet wrote Elizabeth. “There are some strange looking specimens, certainly, but very few…. The corps of professors is a very pleasant, and, so far as I am able to judge, a very competent one.”

In her second year of college as a resident student, she applied for a position at Boston Hospital. She was accepted and, by early 1878, was assisting in clinics and visiting patients. “This is a specifically hard time for money and work, and we come across some heartrending cases,” Harriet wrote her friend Elizabeth about her time at Boston Hospital. “I am learning many lessons besides the professional ones, and not the least is to be more thankful each day I live for the happy, protected life I have had….”

Harriet received a well-rounded, practical education at the New England hospital. She was rotated to various areas of the facility for training, including the maternity department. “Imagine me with eleven babies on my hands at once, to say nothing of their mothers, and of bringing them into the world,” Harriet wrote on September 23, 1877. “This maternity is the saddest of places to me. Most of the women are unmarried, and except for the respectability of the thing, by far the greater number had better not be – the husbands being brutal wretches who abuse them.”

Harriet was expected to accompany working physicians on their regular appointments at the hospital as well. The experience was both trying and instructional as were the other clinics in which she was required to participate. “Clinics are held every morning except Sunday. One of the head doctors comes, sees all the patients in turn, questions, and then prescribes gratuitously medicine or treatment or both,” she informed her friend Elizabeth on January 20, 1878. “For which they are able, they pay a trifling sum. On two mornings, clinics begin at 8. We often have between 70 and 80 patients. I have charge of a backroom and five mostly uterine examinations and treatment, but also examine hearts, lungs, bandage etc. On two other mornings I make up prescriptions in the clinic room, and on the other two can listen or go out to see patients as I choose.”

  Harriet graduated from medical school in 1879 and was conflicted about what to do afterwards. Some had suggested she move to Burlington, Vermont, because the community needed a woman physician. She also considered entering the mission field and traveling to either China or India to serve as a doctor. She decided to move to Pawtucket, Rhode Island, to practice medicine.

In a February 9, 1880, letter to her friend Elizabeth, Dr. Belcher shared details of a few of the cases she had an opportunity to take part. There was the young girl who was convinced she was suffering from cancer and an elderly lady who had injured her eye so severely Harriet referred her to a specialist, and a woman who needed an operation to extract germ cells.

“Five physicians, all women, opened the abdomen and removed two small ovarian tumors and one of another kind,” she wrote Elizabeth. “Then for three weeks, I remained and took care of [the patient] night and day. I can’t tell you what a mental and physical strain the first few days were, nor the utter thankfulness with which we saw her coming through safely…  Success or failure was so much more to us professionally than it would have been to men.”

Apart from those cases, there weren’t many people for Harriet to see, and the patients she did have could only pay for her services in gratitude. The only hope she had of earning a living in Rhode Island was if one of the female physicians she worked with from time to time would take a job elsewhere and those patients were then sent to Harriet. When that didn’t transpire, Dr. Belcher accepted an invitation to visit Santa Barbara to take the place of a doctor who was retiring. By February 1882, Harriet had moved to the location where the previous woman physician had her practice. It was a single-story home with four rooms. Dr. Belcher used one room as a waiting area, one for storing supplies, one as an examination room and private office, and the smallest room as her sleeping quarters.

In less than a month after setting up her practice in Santa Barbara, Dr. Belcher had seen more patients than she had in her entire time in Rhode Island. The regional newspaper, The Independent, ran a short piece on Harriet’s arrival to the area and elaborated on her work. “Miss Belcher, our new resident physician, is swiftly and surely winning the ears and confidence of the ladies of Santa Barbara,” the article read. “Her success and popularity are unquestioned.”  Harriet shared the report with her friend Elizabeth in a letter dated February 17, 1882. She joked with Elizabeth that she believed the writer of the short piece was so complimentary because she had treated a case of hemorrhoids for him, and he was grateful. 

Not only was Harriet pleased with her business and the diverse cross section of people in the region, but she was also quite taken with the picturesque coastal city. “There is hardly too much said of the beauty of the place, though I think many places I have seen in the East excel it on the whole,” she wrote Elizabeth. “I have seen nothing that is to me as grand or as beautiful as some of the scenery in the White or Green Mountains, but it is different and has a charm of its own. The air is exquisite most of the time; the sunshine seems to flood and permeate everything. The mountains encircle us except toward the south, clear cut against the blue of the sky and melting away in a haze into that of the sea.”

Dr. Belcher’s office hours were 10 A. M. to Noon and 2 P. M. to 4 P. M. six days a week. During the winter, the doctor treated the citizens who lived in the area year-round. From April to October, vacationers visiting the waterfront community or en route to national parks such as Yosemite specifically sought Harriet’s services if they were needed. When she wasn’t working, she attended church gatherings, and enjoyed horseback riding, walks along the beach, and picnics with friends. 

Most of the cases Dr. Belcher had from day to day were necessary but unexciting. She successfully treated many individuals and was well respected. Harriet didn’t remember those that benefitted from her work as well the one patient who died in her care ten months after she began treating people in California. It happened on Christmas Day in 1882. It was a “sad and fatiguing experience” she confessed to Elizabeth. “At noon, I lost the only case which I have lost here, when the patient has been under my hands all through…a very bad one of gastritis and diphtheria combined,” she wrote. “I spent the night with her and the day with the most intimate friend I have made here, who had a few days before received news of the sudden death of her only sister and had become insane. She is now improving so that I have strong hopes of her ultimate recovery.”

Dr. Belcher treated patients’ physical problems and helped them emotionally. It wasn’t unusual for residents to seek out her advice for everything from how to treat an ear infection to how to handle marital issues. “The study of human nature as seen from the standpoint of a physician grows more and more interesting to me,” Harriet confided in a letter to Elizabeth dated September 16, 1883. “Most of us act, more or less unconsciously, to the world in general, but there come times when, for the physician, all disguises are stripped off, and I am sometimes almost appalled at the knowledge I have of the inner lives of those who come to me, often far more than they are in the least aware of, much of it painful beyond expression, and yet, as one of the other doctors said not long since, ‘No one knows so well as we how much of good there is in humanity.’”  

Not long after Harriet had arrived in Santa Barbara, the doctor noticed issues with her own health. She complained of being cold much of the time and of feeling tired and listless. She worried about the condition so much so at times her friends and neighbors feared she would suffer a nervous breakdown. A fellow physician diagnosed her as suffering from malaria. To help aid in her recovery, she took a trip to Ojai, California, forty-eight miles east of Santa Barbara. She spent a great deal of time horseback riding through lush hillsides and in the mountains. She ate plenty of fruits and vegetables and daydreamed about the new home and office she would have built when she was doing better.

Dr. Belcher’s patients were anxiously waiting to see her when she returned. Her health was restored enough to go back to work, but she wasn’t completely better. She hoped in time she would be. In October 1885, she explained to her friend Elizabeth how busy her practice had been and the toll it had taken. The letter also included details of the lifesaving medical procedure she had performed on a young woman. “I have had a fatiguing summer on the whole not only rather more business than usual at this season, but several cases which have caused me a good deal of anxiety and none the less that they have been of a kind to occasion rather a furor among the gossips, of which we have the number proverbial in small towns,” Harriet wrote.

“One was a case where I took off a breast for cancer, though two other physicians here had not considered that disease. I proved right, however, and my patient has recovered despite a feeling among some of her friends that she would die because I had operated. Another was the worst case of hysteria that I have ever had on hand – and fifteen miles out in the county, too, and I can assure you it is not the easiest thing in the world to take a thirty-mile drive sometimes several days in succession. I had eight weeks of that, and finally married her off and sent her to a cold climate, where at last accounts she is thriving.

“Hardly had I sent her off when one of the homeopathic physicians came and asked me to take a case of puerperal insanity off of his hands, and though I have no doubt of her ultimate recovery, it may not be for months, and both she and her baby were in a wretched state and gave me no end of anxiety at first.  I am glad on the whole that I am in a small place where I cannot have a really extensive practice, for I think that I shall never break myself of taking every case to heart and worry over it as if it were all perfectly new to me….”

A construction crew broke ground on the building of Dr. Belcher’s new home and office in mid-July 1886. Harriet hired the carpenters herself. She wanted a sturdy house that could withstand the test of time and was “very prettily finished inside.”  By September, Harriet was living and working out of her new location. “The house is perfectly satisfactory in price and all,” she later noted in a letter to Elizabeth, “and my lot has already more than doubled in value since I bought it.”  The doctor had acquired a loan to build her home office and believed that as her practice grew, and if she were able to keep well, she’d be able to pay off the debt in time.

Unfortunately, Dr. Belcher’s health continued to deteriorate, and, in the spring of 1887, she required two different surgeries to treat chronic regional enteritis. In what would be one of the last letters sent to her lifelong friend Elizabeth, she explained her diagnosis after the procedure. “It is still exceedingly doubtful whether I shall recover as before, and be able to lead an active life, or whether I shall be more or less of a chronic invalid, with probability of sudden death, which, I earnestly hope, in such a case would come quickly.”

According to those closest to Dr. Belcher, the stubborn physician was in control of her own case. She remained lucid throughout the post-surgical care and instructed attending nurses what to do. She fully realized she would soon die and wasn’t intimidated by the prospect. She made all the preparations for her death and burial and continued to be loving and kind to all in those last days.

“I don’t expect to hold a pencil again, as I have not been able to for several days, for my wish is granted, and I am dying in the midst of my life and work, and though there are plenty [of people] to write to you, I wanted to say goodbye myself,” Harriet wrote her brother Stephen on May 16, 1887.  “I wish I could see some of my own – it is about the only wish I have left except that the end should come quickly, and it is likely to; my affairs are pretty straight, and all provided for….”

Dr. Harriet Belcher passed away on May 30, 1887, at the age of forty-five. The May 31, 1887, edition of the Morning Press reported that the doctor “came to this city about five years ago and from the start enjoyed a large practice in her profession, in which she stood high.”  

Dr. Belcher was laid to rest at the Santa Barbara Cemetery. The tombstone at her gravesite reads, “Much Beloved.”  

“I want to be a cowboy’s sweetheart,” she sang. “I want to learn to rope and to ride. I want to ride o’er the plains and the desert, out west of the great divide. I want to hear the coyotes howlin’ while the sun sets in the West.
I want to be a cowboy’s sweetheart that’s the life that I love best.”

Patsy Montana, known as the Yodeling Cowgirl, was the first female singer in country-music history to cut a million-selling record.  She did so with the song she sung in Colorado Sunset entitled “I Want to be a Cowboy’s Sweetheart.”

Accompanied by the band the Prairie Ramblers, Patsy entered ARC’s Chicago studio on August 16, 1935, and, with the label’s British-born talent scout, Art Satherley at the helm, recorded the catchy tune that she had penned herself. A superb showcase for her supple, fluid yodeling, it proved one of the biggest hillbilly hits of the Thirties.

Five years earlier, Rubye Blevins, as she was then still known, had arrived in Los Angeles with one of her ten brothers, in the hope of pursuing a musical career. She enrolled at the University of the West (now UCLA) and began performing locally, eventually winning a talent contest with a couple of songs written by Jimmie Rodgers, who was an important country star at the time.  She rapidly built up a regional following, and for a while worked with a now-forgotten rodeo star and sometime silver screen cowboy named Monte Montana. 

Patsy Montana joined the Prairie Ramblers in 1934 and they made a number of records for a variety of labels including ARC, Melotone, Decca and Victor. Among their hits were “I’m an Old Cowhand” and “Goodnight Soldier.”

By the mid-Forties Patsy Montana was hosting her own nationally syndicated radio show and appearing regularly on television.  In 1993, she became one of only two women – the other being Dale Evans – to receive the Western Music Association’s Living Legends of Western Music award.  

Patsy passed away on May 10, 1996, at the age of eighty-one. 

Katherine Derre, whose stage name was Kitty Wilkes, was born on July 15, 1899.  She had a natural talent for breaking horses and parlayed that skill into bronc riding in public showings.  Not only did she have a way with wild horses, but she was also an exceptional trick and fancy rider.  Owners of relay strings were eager to gain her services.  

Between the rodeo in Montana in the summer of 1916 and the Pendleton Roundup in Pendleton, Oregon, in early fall of 1916, Kitty honed her bronc riding talent at ranches and rodeos throughout the West.  She insisted on using the orneriest animals for training.  Outlaw horses were blindfolded and saddled for her to ride.  One encounter resulted in the horse bucking Kitty off and bruising her ribs.  She wouldn’t allow the horse to beat her, however.  She swung back into the saddle, refusing to leave it until the animal finally broke.  

Kitty’s nickname was Diamond Girl because she had a diamond set in her front tooth.  When needed, she would remove the diamond and pawn it for the entry fees to rodeo contests.  

Her performance at the Pendleton Roundup in 1916 resulted in her being named the All-Around Champion Cowgirl.  Among the many people she met during the roundup was Yakima Canutt.  Canutt, who also competed at the rodeo, would go on to become one of Hollywood’s leading stuntmen.  Kitty and Yakima fell in love and were married in Kalispell, Montana, in 1917.  

Kitty was a fierce athlete who hated to lose.  It was not uncommon for her to challenge women who outrode her, and she believed cheated, to a fistfight.  In September 1918, she was disqualified from participating in a rodeo in Washington because she hit a rider in the mouth with a piece of wood.  

Not content with being the top female bronc rider in the country, she aspired to be the top female relay racer as well.  Rodeo fans loved to watch the petite woman fly past the grandstands on her horse, hurrying to meet the next mount waiting to be saddled and ridden to the next point.  More than once Kitty would be finishing part of the race standing on the stirrups trying to get into the saddle.  Her grit and resolve often paid off with a win.  

The rodeo stars Kitty often competed against were Mabel Strickland, Bonnie McCarroll, and Prairie Rose Henderson.  

Kitty Wilkes was eighty-eight years old when she died on June 3, 1988.  

Born on November 8, 1910, in Plant City, Florida, she joined a traveling carnival straight out of high school and got her first screen credit in the short film The Campus Vamp in 1928. Her stunts in films included diving, crashing cars, parachuting and flying planes.

Off the screen Wiggins was a dainty, feminine person. But on the job she thought nothing of diving 80 feet from a cliff into five feet of water, parachuting from planes and walking on their wings, crashing cars through flaming walls, or driving motorcycles through brick buildings. “It’s just the way I happened to pick to earn a living,” she said once. “I guess I like thrills.

Before joining the Women Air Force Service Pilots in 1943, Wiggins was in great demand because her figure closely resembled that of many screen beauties. Doubling for Loretta Young in the film Call of the Wild, Wiggins once dived into turbulent rapids in water 15 degrees below zero. The next day she let herself be dragged down an icy bank by a team of runaway sled dogs. In The Bride Came C.O.D. she bailed out of a plane flying upside down. 

When she left to report for duty as a WASP to fly as a ferry pilot for the army, she was the highest-paid stuntwoman in Hollywood. When she was discharged she used her savings to go into the furniture business with a friend. She lost all her money in the venture and was unable to find regular work in her former profession. 

Despondent over her financial situation, Wiggins decided to take her own life. The dark-eyed daredevil who performed hundreds of perilous feats for high-priced stars without a scratch, was found in the backyard of her home, a bullet from a .25 caliber automatic through her head.

She was thirty-five-years-old when she died on December 19, 1945. 

To learn more about daring stuntwomen like Mary Wiggins read Cowboys, Creatures and Classics: The Story of Republic Pictures. Visit www.chrisenss.com to enter to win a copy of the book.

A versatile, radio-trained character actress with a strong resonant voice, McCambridge specialized in playing forceful, domineering characters on screen. Many film critics believed she outshined Crawford in Johnny Guitar. Crawford wanted Claire Trevor for the part of Emma in the film, but she wasn’t available. McCambridge had a way of commanding a scene and audience attention – less performance, more of a presence. Crawford immediately resented the kudos afforded McCambridge by the crew and consistently referred to her as ‘an actress who hadn’t worked in ten years – an excellent example of a rabble-rouser.’ 

When McCambridge delivered a stirring speech to the posse in the film, her performance received a round of applause from the crew. Crawford was watching the scene from a hilltop in the distance, grabbed McCambridge’s costumes out of her dressing room, and strewn them along a nearby road. 

McCambridge was born in Joliet, Illinois, on St. Patrick’s Day in 1916 and grew up on a farm in Blackstone, Illinois, until attending Catholic high school in Chicago. While majoring in English and theatre in Mundelein College in Chicago in 1936, she caught the attention of NBC Radio’s Chicago program director and was signed to a five-year contract. From radio she made the leap to film.

In 1949 she won an Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress for the role of Sadie Burke in the film All the King’s Men. She nominated for the same award for work her work in the film Giant in 1956.  

McCambridge success on screen didn’t translate to her personal life. She struggled desperately with alcoholism. She was married and divorced twice and in 1987, her son, John Lawrence Markle, 45, killed his wife and two daughters, then committed suicide. 

McCambridge passed away on March 2, 2004. She was eighty-seven-years-old. 

To learn more about McCambridge and the movie Johnny Guitar read Cowboys, Creatures and Classics: The Story of Republic Pictures. Visit www.chrisenss.com now to enter to win a copy of the book.

She was born in New York City – movie buffs disagree whether it was 1909 or 1910 – to a Belfast, Ireland-born mother and a strict Paris born father who had a custom tailor shop on Fifth Avenue.

As a child, Trevor dreamed of being a ballerina. But along the way she became involved in church plays and fell in love with the stage. After studying art briefly at Columbia University, she attended the American Academy of Dramatic Arts in New York. She had to drop out after six months, though, because her father’s business failed during the Depression, and he told her that she would have to help out.

“That shocked the hell out of me,” she later recalled. “We weren’t rich, but I never thought of money as being a worry, so it scared me. I thought, ‘What do I know how to do? Acting is the only thing I know how to do, and to get a job in the middle of the Depression in New York was not easy.

After a successful run on Broadway at the age of twenty-one, Trevor made her film debut in the early Western, Life in the Raw, and between 1933 and 1938, starred in over twenty movies including Dante’s Inferno, Dead End and The Amazing Dr. Clitterhouse starring Humphrey Bogart. In 1939, she co-starred with an unknown Wayne in Ford’s classic, Stagecoach, and is one of few stars to have ever received top billing over The Duke.

Trevor appeared in other popular Westerns including Honky Tonk with The King of Hollywood, Clark Gable, and The Desperadoes starring Randolph Scott and Glenn Ford. She became known for her hard-boiled blondes in film noirs, winning her only Oscar for her performance in John Huston’s Key Largo, but her unconventional Western roles popularized the bad girl of the Wild West making her a cornerstone of the genre.

The Oscar winning actress died on April 8, 2000, at the age of ninety.

“If you want an experienced rider, I can’t say that I am one,” Bush wrote to Norman about what would become her leading lady role in The Bull Dogger, a Western that also was Pickett’s first film. “But I have lots of nerve and learn anything quickly. I can row, drive, ride a wheel, sail a boat, dance and do most anything required in pictures.”

Norman was so certain The Bull Dogger and Bush would be hits, he cast her in his next film entitled The Crimson Skull. The plot of the Western kidnap film was unique for the time. To rid the range of a gang of outlaws that are rustling cattle and robbing the banks and stagecoaches, cowhand Bob Calem, working on the gang-leader’s superstitions, dons a skeleton-costume to strike fear into the gang.

Bush was proud of the two films she made with Norman because they went against type. She was tired of seeing Black Americans cast primarily in bumbling comedic roles. She wanted to prove Black Americans were capable of taking on serious, dramatic work. To that end, she founded the Anita Bush Players of Harlem, a famous acting troupe that later became known as the Lafayette Players. 

Not only was she talented on-screen but she proved a tough negotiator, sometimes demanding – and getting – a salary higher that her leading man. And she was undaunted when facing new challenges. 

Anita Bush passed away at her home in New York on February 16, 1974, at the age of ninety-one.