Erik Visits an American Grave, Part 1,482

This is the grave of Tom Mix.

Born in 1880 in Mix Run, Pennsylvania, a tiny town near the New York border, Mix grew up in the town of DuBois, which I know too well unfortunately. His father ran the stables for a rich timber capitalist, so they were of a servant class but a relatively elite servant class. In any case, young Mix had access to horses, which as it turned out would serve him well.

In 1898, Mix enlisted in the Army to go kill some Spaniards in Cuba. Didn’t really work out. He never got to Cuba and he was stuck in the Army. In 1902, he went on furlough to get married and just never returned. He was declared AWOL, but no one really cared and even when he got famous, it didn’t matter. He went through marriages like horses and was a pretty wild young man it seems. But he was indeed good with horses. In 1905, Seth Bullock, the real life man that was the lead character in Deadwood played by Timothy Olyphant, was good buddies with Theodore Roosevelt. Bullock organized a display of really good horsemen for Roosevelt’s inauguration and that included Mix. Our roaming young man ended up down in Oklahoma, working as a bartender, ranch hand, occasional law enforcement, other odd jobs. He competed in horse shows and got to be pretty well known, often winning these competitions.

For the first six decades of film history, westerns were the most popular genre. And in the silent era, you didn’t even really have to act (of course John Wayne demonstrated how limited acting ability wouldn’t hurt these guys in the sound westerns too). But all you needed in the silent era was a good looking guy who could really handle a horse. And since stuntmen were really a thing yet, you really had to do this stuff yourself. So it is not surprising that Mix ended up in the pictures. He started appearing in the extremely minor westerns of the Selig Polyscope Company, which made almost exclusively westerns and filmed primarily in the area around Las Vegas, New Mexico, a landscape later used for other American “classics,” such as Red Dawn. It’s a good area though, old west kind of town, the desert, the piñon-juniper lower slopes, forested mountains at the higher elevation. You can get just about any landscape you could want for a western around there. He made many of these films with Victoria Forde. He then divorced his wife and married Forde and they had a baby, though they would divorce in 1931. Shortly after the marriage, Selig Polyscope went belly up and sold its assets to Fox. Mix and Forde went to Hollywood and continued acting there.

Of course it would be in Hollywood where Mix became the iconic western actor of his day. To me, his work is a lot less interesting than the darker persona and better actor William S. Hart. But if you wanted a man who looked good on a horse, Tom Mix was unquestionably your man. He was in over 160 westerns in the 20s alone. He leaned all in on the persona too. He became buddies with Wyatt Earp. The old thug was now in the full romantic nostalgia phase of his life, living in LA and hanging out with the men portraying him and others in films that made the Old West seem a lot braver and more noble than it was, since the reality was one of rape, murder, theft, and genocide, with very few “good guys.” So Mix loved to hear Earp tell his stories and Earp loved to tell them. When Earp died, Mix was a pallbearer at his funeral.

Mix got rich and he liked to spend money. He bought a huge ranch in Arizona, which today is basically taken over by the developments outside of Prescott. He built his own movie set too, with everything one would want in a western movie town, including saloons and good places for shootouts in the streets. Even when the westerns started to move toward sound, he could always work his rodeo magic in circuses, which he did a lot even when he was the biggest star in Hollywood. It was an easy way to make money. By 1931, he was pulling in $20,000 a week, which means he was basically making a million a month or more in 2023 dollars.

But then came the Great Depression and like lots of these newly rich people, Mix had not really invested very wisely. The 20s was an era of the scheme, the flim-flam, and the sketchy scam. Not the first era of American history and certainly not the last (though of course LoomCoin remains a solid investment today!) when extremely ridiculous greed led to equally ridiculous investment schemes. But it was a bad example of one. Mix did not care for the talkies and his body was starting to break down a bit from all the time on the horses, which of course did lead to accidents even for someone as skilled as Mix. He appeared in a couple, but mostly went back to his circuses. His last film appearance was in the serial The Miracle Rider, in 1935. He got $40,000 for a month of filming, which was still a lot of money although not enough to keep up with his free-spending ways. Mix also had a terrible talking voice. For one thing, he had been thrown from horses and gotten into fights and his nose had been broken so many times that it affected his voice. For another, he had once nearly been shot in the throat and the bullet had indeed grazed him and this also affected it. So he was happy to lend his name to western radio shows in the 30s and make money on that, but he avoided speaking publicly whenever possible and never on the radio.

In 1940, Mix was driving in rural Arizona after visiting his friend. He lost control over his car. It flipped and it killed him. He was 60 years old. I have actually been to the site of his death, which is memorialized on the side of that road (basically it’s the back way from Phoenix to Tucson today) but the sun had set so I was kind of able to read it but not get a picture. Bummer. And I haven’t been to Arizona in years now, which is also a bummer, so I haven’t been back to the site.

Most of Mix’s 291 films do not survive. Only about 30 or so are freely available for viewing. His many films for Fox were all destroyed in the 1937 fire that burned about everything in that studio. I mean, they are mostly about all the same so I am not sure anyone but a scholar of Mix would need or want to watch all 291, but I wish they all still existed in any case.

Tom Mix is buried in Forest Lawn Memorial Park, Glendale, California.

If you would like this series to visit other legends of westerns, you can donate to cover the required expenses here. John Wayne is buried in Corona del Mar, California and Lee Van Cleef is in Hollywood Hills, California. Those would both be so much fun for me. Previous posts in this series are archived here and here.