Horses

Horses are a recurring presence in the book’s Hollywood and Western worlds, where they are at once working animals, sources of livelihood, instruments of screen action, and a measure of the genre’s changing identity. Their significance is practical as well as cinematic: a trained horse can make a stunt and a career possible, while a horse on a dusty main street can place a story immediately inside the familiar grammar of the Western.

Screen Action and Skilled Horses

Rick Dalton credits William Witney with an early version of a celebrated Western action gag. As he recalls it to Marvin Schwarz, the stunt has Yakima Canutt jump from one horse to another, fall, and pass beneath the horses’ hooves. Rick insists that William Witney staged the action a year before John Ford used it in Stagecoach. The anecdote makes the horse more than scenery: the movement and danger of the animal are central to the stunt, and the director’s skill lies in shaping that movement into screen action.

That history of practical horse work also informs the book’s account of Western production. The genre depended on animals that could perform specialized tasks safely and repeatably. One especially valuable example was the falling horse, trained to go to the ground without being hurt or frightened. In a Hollywood that produced hundreds of Western films and television programs, owning such an animal could mean steady work: the book describes the horse as a small, dependable source of income, comparing its earning potential to a printing press. The comparison gives the animal an economic role within the industry, not merely a place in its imagery.

The value of the falling horse is illustrated through Blue Belle, associated with Ned Glass. The recollection of Blue Belle shows how specific horses could be recognized through the work they did and the people who owned them. A horse able to fall and rise again was a specialized performer, and its usefulness depended on a trained physical capacity that ordinary riding alone could not provide.

Rodeo Work and a Roadside Ride

A separate episode introduces a working horse through a rodeo rider’s journey out of Dallas, Texas. The rider travels in a dirty white 1959 Cadillac Coupe de Ville towing a horse trailer with a dusty brown horse inside. When a young hitchhiker accepts a ride, she asks about the animal; the rider identifies her as Honeychilde. The exchange establishes the horse as part of his life on the road and as a companion carried between rodeos, rather than as a decorative detail in the car’s background.

The rider has just competed at Wild West Weekend in Dallas, where he won nothing and came away banged up. He is heading toward Prescott, his hometown, for another rodeo the following weekend, and hopes not to lose before the home crowd. His plans give Honeychilde a place in a working itinerary: the horse travels with him as he moves from one contest to another. The story also uses the mare’s name in a joking exchange with the hitchhiker, who weighs the cowboy’s appearance and the horse trailer before getting into the car. The animal is thus part of the encounter’s concrete circumstances as well as its humor.

Horses in the Lancer Story

The embedded Western story Lancer opens with six horses pulling a Butterfield Wells Fargo stagecoach into Royo del Oro. Their hooves tear at the dirt street and raise a cloud of dust as the veteran driver, Monty Armbruster, reins them in outside the Hotel Lancaster. The arrival introduces the town through motion and sound: the horses bring the stagecoach, its passengers, and the story’s expected arrivals into the center of the Western setting. Their coordinated stop also makes the familiar stagecoach scene depend on control, harness, and a driver’s practiced handling of a team.

Horses also carry the story’s characters through the town’s conflict. Johnny Lancer rides along Royo del Oro’s main drag and later ties his horse to a hitching post outside the hotel before crossing toward the Gilded Lily. There, a hired gunman blocks his way and threatens him. The horse does not take part in the confrontation, but its presence establishes how Johnny has arrived and leaves him to approach the danger on foot. In this sequence, the animal is part of the practical staging that moves a rider from the open street to a face-to-face challenge.

Another horse carries a much darker history. Mirabella Lancer’s mother broke her neck after being thrown from a beautiful strawberry roan that Murdock Lancer had given her for their third anniversary. After her funeral, Murdock shot the horse. The animal’s appearance in the backstory ties it to a family loss and to Murdock’s response to that loss; it is not just another mount in the ranch’s inventory. In a story populated by horses as transport and working assets, the roan becomes inseparable from a painful memory.

Ranch Life and the Western Image

At George Spahn’s former movie ranch, horses remain after Hollywood has largely moved on. The ranch still offers family trail rides through the Santa Susana Canyons, even as the old Western-town set falls into disrepair and the productions filmed there have changed. This contrast links the horses to two different uses of the same place: the ranch’s history as a filming location and its continuing, more modest role as a destination for riders. They are among the practical remnants of a Western landscape whose commercial heyday has faded.

The book also makes the connection between horses and changing Western conventions explicit when Sam Wanamaker and Rick discuss the series’ gang-testing imagery. Sam compares the young man seeking to join a gang to someone approaching a motorcycle club, and Rick asks whether the horses are almost like motorbikes. Sam agrees that they are the motorbikes of their era. The analogy reframes the horse as a vehicle of speed, status, and group identity, translating a contemporary countercultural image into the period setting of Lancer.

Elsewhere, the cowboy’s identity is compressed into an old saying about riding: Cliff Booth would rather risk driving a car into a brick wall than take on work he does not want, and the narration invokes the idea that cowboys are the people who dislike riding horses. The line is a joke, but it also shows how thoroughly the horse belongs to the cultural shorthand of the Western. Across the book, that shorthand is grounded in actual labor and movement: horses haul stagecoaches, travel to rodeos, perform specialized falls, carry riders through a town, and offer recreation at a declining ranch. Their recurrence connects the work of making Westerns to the lived and commercial worlds those Westerns portray.