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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 5[Tim McCoy was a cowboy, actor, soldier and would-be politician during a very eventful lifetime. He started out advising on films, then started to act in them - very successfully. ]The deep respect and knowledge of Native American lore that McCoy tried to instill in Hollywood was shared by another Irish-American cowboy star of the day, William S. Hart. ‘Though he was not the first Western actor/film maker nor the last, Hart was surely one of the most important, achieving both commercial success and artistic recognition for his films,’ said a 1978 tribute to Hart in the periodical Terra, a publication of the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County. Hart, whose mother Rose was an immigrant from Ireland, grew up poor, travelling from town to town around the Midwest in the 1870s with his parents. Many times the family’s closest neighbours were Native Americans. His father, a miller by trade, often worked with Native Americans on reservations, milling their corn. Their children were young Hart’s playmates and he learned to speak the Sioux language as a result. He also gained a life-long respect for Native American traditions and their culture. Hart’s early life was a saga of poverty and poorly paid messenger jobs. But he was good looking, a champion athlete and a natural performer and like so many other Irish, theatre seemed to offer an escape. Having paid for acting lessons by selling the trophies he had won as an athlete, he was hired as an actor with the Daniel Bandmann’s theatre company, and spent his meagre wages to support his now-widowed mother and his younger siblings. It was around this time he saw one of the movie industry’s early Westerns and was horrified. “While playing in Cleveland (in 1913) I attended a picture show. I saw a Western picture. It was awful! I talked with the manager of the theatre and he told me it was one of the best Westerns he ever had. None of the impossibilities or libels on the West meant anything to him – it was drawing the crowds… I was so sure that I had made such a big discovery that I was frightened that someone (would) read my mind and find it out. Here were reproductions of the Old West being seriously presented to the public – in almost a burlesque manner – and they were successful. It made me tremble to think of it. I was an actor and I knew the West… the opportunity that I had been waiting for years to come was knocking at my door… Rise or fall, sink or swim, I had to bend every endeavour to get a chance to make Western motion pictures,” Hart told in his autobiography My Life East and West published in 1929.
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