The Silent Spirit (A Wind River Reservation Myste)
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Tim McCoy was the genuine article—a real cowboy who became a cowboy movie star with a career that spanned three decades and included more than a hundred movies. It was McCoy’s name on the marquees and McCoy’s likeness on the posters—white Stetson on his head, revolver in his hand—that brought audiences to the moving picture palaces. Read the fine print near the bottom of some of those posters and you’ll find the words with John Wayne. McCoy was a star when no one had heard of Roy Rogers or Gene Autry, and it was the popularity of singing cowboys like them who stopped the action to sing a song that gradually shoved McCoy off the main stage. Real cowboys didn’t let the bad guys get away while they warbled songs and strummed guitars.
It was McCoy who single-handedly brought Arapahos and Shoshones into the movies. He had spent years working the ranchlands near the Wind River Reservation and had befriended many of the people. After rising to the rank of colonel in the army cavalry during World War I, he returned to Wyoming as the state’s adjutant general where he was at work the day in 1922 that the man from Famous Players-Lasky walked in and said the studio needed five hundred “real” Indians for the moving picture they were about to make. McCoy agreed to talk to his Indian friends, but he wanted assurances: Indians were to be treated like everyone else (an almost outrageous condition in the 1920s), they were to receive the same pay as other extras, plus meals, and were to get extra money for their horses and tipis.
The deal was struck, and McCoy and five hundred Arapahos and Shoshones began movie careers in the first western epic, The Covered Wagon. McCoy was the technical adviser on that film, but after that, he became an actor and before long, a movie star. Arapahos and Shoshones went on to appear in other silent movies, including Spoilers of the West and End of the Trail.
McCoy remained friends with the Arapahos, visiting the reservation into the 1970s and often stopping by to see his friend, Father John Kil loren, S.J., pastor of St. Stephen’s Mission (the actual mission upon which St. Francis Mission is based).
In the story, Father John and Vicky are the ones who must learn the truth behind Charlie Wallowingbull’s disappearance in Hollywood in 1923. But I have no doubt that if an Arapaho had actually gone missing in Hollywood, Tim McCoy would have torn the town apart to get the answers. He was that kind of cowboy.