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This Chapter is from Emeralds in Tinseltown: The Irish in Hollywood, written by Steve Brennan and Bernadette O'Neill, and published by Appletree Press
The Irish Cowboys - part 4John Ford and Raoul Walsh may have come to typify the Irish tough guys of the Western in Hollywood, but they shared that honour with one of the great hard men of the screen.Irish-American cowboy star Tim McCoy’s career spanned four decades from the 1920s to the 1960s when he appeared in his final great Western Requiem for a Gunfighter in 1965. McCoy, whose parents were both from Ireland, was born in Saginaw, Michigan in 1891 and took his first job as a cowhand when he was a boy. It was a humble beginning that would launch him into a career as soldier, Indian agent, Wild West show star, movie star and television talk show host. But then Timothy John Fitzgerald McCoy was not one to back away from a challenge – something his adventurous Irish father had taught him. McCoy’s father was a Union Army veteran and Fenian who was wounded in a bizarre and abortive Fenian ‘invasion’ of Canada in 1866. McCoy’s early experiences as a cowhand out in Wyoming brought him into contact with the culture, ceremonies, language and sign language of the region’s Native Americans which he learned. ‘Had to,’ he said. ‘They didn’t seem to want to learn my language, so I had to learn theirs.’ This rare knowledge earned him a job as liaison between the tribes and the government’s ‘Indian authority’. (McCoy would later use these skills as an officer in World War II to teach Native American sign language to intelligence officers.) ‘Content with life in Wyoming, McCoy never set out to be an actor. Hollywood, attracted by his legendary knowledge of Indians, came after him and he didn’t resist,’ recounted writer Dennis Hunt in the Los Angeles Times in 1978 in tribute to the then eighty-seven-year-old Western star. ‘In 1923, film-maker Jesse Lasky, inter-ested in authenticity for The Covered Wagon hired McCoy as a technical adviser.’ “They had been using Mexicans and Filipinos as Indians,” McCoy recalled. “I finally got them to use some real Indians and from then on I was always after those film people to treat the Indians with dignity.” McCoy was hired to deliver a live prologue in the movie theatres to The Covered Wagon in which he spoke passionately about Native American lore and society. The former cowhand became so well known for this delivery that Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer’s ‘boy genius,’ Irving Thalberg, asked him to do a screen test. On seeing the footage of himself McCoy snorted, “I wouldn’t pay a dime to go see that guy up there on screen.” But MGM signed him anyway and a remarkable career in the movies was just beginning. Thalberg put McCoy in a series of silent screen Western dramas that were filmed on the Wind River Reservation of Wyoming with hundreds of Arapaho, Sioux and Shosone Native Americans. These films included War Paint, Winners of the Wilderness (with Joan Crawford in an early role), California, The Frontiersman, Wyoming, Sioux Blood and Spoilers of the West. McCoy, unlike so many other silent stars, shifted effortlessly into the era of the talkies when he starred in the first ‘talking serial’ from Universal, The Indians are Coming. He moved to Columbia in the 1930s to make such Westerns as Fighting Marshal, Two-Fisted Law, Texas Cyclone and Riding Tornado. When Monogram Studios began its famous Rough Riders movie serial, McCoy was hired as one of the stars. A passion for politics intervened in his movie career at this point and he resigned from the serial to run unsuccessfully for a Senate seat. Following that brief joust with politics, he toured the U.S. with his own Wild West circus, appeared in his own 1952 Emmy Award-winning television series about Native American history, sign language and customs and even became a prize-winning contestant on the TV game show The $64,000 Challenge. On his death in 1978 in an Army hospital near Nogales, Arizona, the tributes to his life focused almost as much on his proud career as a military man as they did on his life as a movie star, recalling that he had served with such bravery in two World Wars that he was a recipient of the Bronze Star and a citation for meritorious service, achieving the rank of colonel. He was also awarded the French Cross of the Legion of Honour and Medaille de L’Aeronautics for his work in developing French aerial reconnaissance for the Allies.
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