Tom Mix

Tom Mix, the cowboy star who helped invent the Hollywood Western and appeared in nearly three hundred films before talkies ended his reign, died in a car crash on an Arizona desert highway on October 12, 1940. He was sixty. He was born Thomas Hezikiah Mix on January 6, 1880, in Mix Run, Pennsylvania, and grew up around horses. He served in the Army during the Spanish-American War era, worked as a cowboy and ranch hand in the West, and drifted into Wild West shows. In 1909 he began making short Westerns for the Selig Polyscope Company in Colorado and later California. With his horse Tony he became one of the first true movie idols, a clean-cut hero who did his own stunts, rode hard and seldom lingered on the darker side of the frontier. At Fox in the 1920s his pictures were among the studio's biggest moneymakers. He made the transition to feature length, toured with circuses when Hollywood cooled, and briefly returned for a string of sound Westerns at Universal. Of his 291 films, all but nine were silent. Children copied his white hat and straight back; a generation of later Western stars, from John Wayne to Gene Autry, cited him as the model. On October 12, 1940, driving his Cord Phaeton north from Tucson toward Florence, Arizona, he overturned in a dry wash. A heavy aluminum suitcase in the convertible's back shelf struck him in the head and killed him. A stone memorial still marks the spot on what is now called the Tom Mix Wash. He was buried in Forest Lawn in Glendale, California, the first great cowboy of the screen laid to rest far from Mix Run.