Framing Race in the Arizona Borderlands The Western Ways Apache Scouts and Sells Indian Rodeo Films

In early spring 1940, Charles Herbert’s Tucson-based Western Ways Features Service filmed Last of the Indian Scouts, a valedictory short feature about the eight remaining Apache Scouts at the Buffalo Soldier army post at Fort Huachuca, Arizona. The Western Ways footage was shot on spec for Tucson Trails, which seems to have been an anthology series proposed to Universal.¹ Part of the Western Ways archive housed at the Arizona Historical Society in Tucson, this 35mm nitrate footage offers an early, mid-century view of the multicultural and militarized US–Mexican borderlands nearly a decade before the desegregation of the US military and only fifteen years after Native Americans were granted citizenship. The film captures the Honor Guard ceremony, intercut with reenactments of General John “Black Jack” Pershing’s 1916 Punitive Expedition into Revolution-era Mexico in pursuit of Pancho Villa. The footage, which survives without a sound track, is remarkable enough for its 1916/1940 then-and-now depiction of this multicultural borderlands post, but it also includes surprising moments of performed Indianness—a form of auto-ethnic mimicry, of knowing self-parody—that was a routine part of the Scouts’ military service at Fort Huachuca. As such, it reveals Native on-screen agency that differs from the filmed performances of Wild West shows, craft demonstrations, and powwows in its depiction of race as a mediated construct.² Scouts’ performances of indigeneity occurred as part of their regular army service, as a cultural outreach activity of sorts. This film, with its admittedly sentimental title, appealed to contemporary mainstream nostalgia for the idea of the Vanishing (Native) American, a well-established motif in US popular culture dating back at least to James Fenimore Cooper. At the same time, it resists that trope with images of Apache soldiers performing their contemporary duties along the border in 1940.

Also in the Western Ways archives is a second film of an Honor Guard ceremony for Native veterans, this at the 1945 Papago Rodeo in Sells, Arizona. The two films serve as a kind of bookends, shot on either side of US involvement in World War II and depicting notably different aspects of Native representation in the pre- and postwar eras. These two films are separated by five years in time, 130 miles of Arizona terrain, and distinct cultural differences between their subjects. The Apache Scouts film is anchored in (at least) a century’s worth of inherited tropes of Indian performance, displayed with some irony to the camera; the Papago Rodeo film reveals a postwar world in which horseman-ship and military service are foregrounded and ethnicity is present but normative in the visual narrative.³

WESTERN WAYS

The Tucson-based Western Ways Film Service operated from 1936 to 1976, filming a variety of local interest and actuality short films about southern Arizona and northern Mexico and venturing into television production in the early days of the medium. Drawing on a ten-year silent newsreel career with Fox Movietone, owner–operator Charles Herbert brought a newshound’s sensibility and acute skill at in-camera editing to all of his southwestern short subjects. His oeuvre ranged from documenting the transplanting of a twenty-foot saguaro cactus to travel pieces on friendly and accessible Mexico and an ill-fated venture into television serial western production. Based in a downtown adobe building, Charles and Lucile Herbert ran Western Ways as a full-service photo shop, with a photo story and print library, a portrait studio, an aerial photo service, and the moviemaking unit. They hired young men and women as still photographers and writers, giving a start to Charles H. Abbott and Ray Manley, both later of Arizona Highways. The Western Ways 16mm and 35mm moving image output numbers in the hundreds, most of which have been unseen since well before Charles Herbert’s death in 1976. As such, the body of work forms a time capsule of the packaging and promotion of the Arizona borderlands at the dawn of the Sun Belt boom. Western Ways’s visual presentation of ecological and ethnographic subjects served to construct the region’s unique blend of nature and culture for a national and international audience in the mid-twentieth century.

Charles Herbert entered into filmmaking completely by accident. He had hired on as a deckhand for a “semi-scientific” photo expedition to the West Indies in 1923.⁴ When the boat was seized for debts in Mobile, Herbert received a 35mm wooden box Ernemann camera and tripod as partial payoff for his initial investment of six hundred dollars. The captain of the expedition was Carl Pryer, who took young Charles Herbert with him to Florida and began making human-interest films about subjects such as a “pioneer” expedition across the Everglades and alligator farms. This emphasis on topical actuality subjects truly shaped Herbert’s filmmaking career, as did Pryer’s tutelage in techniques for the self-sufficient cameraman who could sequence in his head and edit in-camera.

THE BORDER (OF) HISTORY

The Apache Scouts film portrays Fort Huachuca in both contemporary footage of 1940 and, in the reenactment of its activity on the border during the Mexican Revolution, 1910–22. Established in 1877 as a frontier post during the so-called Indian Wars, Fort Huachuca was an oasis of security for territorial residents and western travelers alike.⁵ Apache Scouts were integral to both the late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century eras of military campaigns in Arizona, serving as cultural interpreters, geographical guides, and—long before the Navajo Code Talkers of World War II—message carriers. This border post garnered media attention early on, positioned as it was on the US–Mexican border at an intersection of Native, Anglo, Mexican, and African American cultures. During Native “pacification” efforts in the nineteenth century and border sovereignty conflicts in the twentieth, Fort Huachuca was a nexus of intercultural activity and thus a focus of public interest and curiosity well before the advent of the moving image. But the spectacle of multiculturalism—certainly conceived as exotic display at the time—drew cameramen to this dusty corner of Arizona as soon as portable movie gear was available. At least three film crews had visited Fort Huachuca prior to the Western Ways shoot in 1940.⁶

Indeed, the Apache Scouts’ arrival in El Paso in April 1916 was an international media event, covered by eastern newspapers, newsreel cameramen, and the proprietary film crews of the several Mexican military factions. Summoned to support the Pershing Expedition’s hunt for Villa, the Scouts’ arrival proved a disappointment to the assembled journalists. The New York Times’s reporter’s description reveals audience assumptions about Native peoples and performance that were fully reified by the end of the nineteenth century. The “battalion of moving picture men here had been awaiting eagerly for a week to catch these newcomers in all the glory of their Navajo blankets and colorful costumes. Instead they arrived in olive drab, the regulation costume of the American soldier, but neither rules nor officers could make them give up their eagle feathers.”⁷ The Times’s reporter evokes nearly every possible stereotype to instill in his eastern readership a primitive image of these uniformed regular soldiers of the Expeditionary Force: red skin, blankets, feathers, and “colorful costumes.” Of course, the Scouts were Apaches, not Navajos, and wore regulation uniforms as befit their status as soldiers, refuting the reporter’s clichés. (Perhaps the misguided notion was that the more indigenous the Scouts, the more affinity they would have with the intended quarry, the mythically savage Pancho Villa.) What is not demeaned or discounted is their tracking ability: the correspondent quotes Captain O. P. M. Hazzard—nicknamed “Hap”—commandant of the Tenth Cavalry post at Fort Apache on the White Mountain Reservation in Arizona, who expresses open admiration for the Scouts:

They are as good at following a man’s trail as they ever were. . . . It’s almost uncanny. . . . They move at a rapid pace, but miss nothing. . . . They seem to know unfalteringly which way a man will logically turn under certain conditions, or illogically. They are a thousand times as certain as bloodhounds. If these men find Villa’s trail, they will find Villa.⁸

The binarism articulated in this newspaper report persisted in representations of the Scouts well into the twentieth century. They were exploited in the media as both soldiers and exotic natives and were asked to perform in both roles for journalists, photographers, and moving picture cameramen. This duality is what makes the Western Ways film so fascinating: thirty years later, the Scouts were still playing Indian while being soldiers.

PERFORMING INDIANNESS

Performance of indigeneity has a history reaching back to point of contact, of course, but the late nineteenth century saw a proliferation of such spectacles, frequently by white players. Following the devastating massacre of Lakota Sioux at Wounded Knee, South Dakota, in December 1890, Frederick Jackson Turner announced the valedictory “closing of the frontier” to his fellow historians during the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago.⁹ At this celebration of the four-hundredth anniversary of European conquest and colonialism, one of the most popular entertainments was Buffalo Bill Cody’s Wild West, an attraction that had been denied official entry in the fair. Cody, himself a former US Army Scout, encamped just west of the fairgrounds and siphoned money and audiences away from the uplifting vistas and exhibits of Burnham and Olmsted’s White City to his own “red” frontier, offering twice daily reenactments of the 1876 Battle of the Little Bighorn, complete with live Native players. Indeed, a decade earlier, Buffalo Bill Cody’s Wild West had toured with Sitting Bull as a headliner; star status afforded him control over his schedule, image sovereignty, and a steady income.

In 1885, as Joy Kasson reports, the Sioux victor of the Little Big Horn negotiated “a salary of fifty dollars a week, with two weeks’ pay in advance and a bonus of $125. . . . He would also retain the right to sell his own photographs and autographs.”¹⁰ While clearly not universal, this example shows that Native agency and control of the image did occur, even in the nineteenth century. Indeed, Sitting Bull’s management of his own celebrity helped to reify “Indianness” as a self-consciously constructed buckskin-and-feathers figure of tame(d) exotica.¹¹ The accuracy of this representation is less at issue than the agency it afforded the Sioux leader. This was well-paid work, of course, and not the sneaky exploitation of naive aboriginals that some would contend. As L. G. Moses compellingly argues, “it would be wrong to see the Show Indians as simply dupes, or pawns, or even victims. It would be better to approach them as persons who earned a fairly good living between the era of the Dawes Act [1887] and the Indian New Deal [1934] playing themselves, re-creating a very small portion of their histories, and enjoying it.”¹² It is worth remembering that Cody’s 1894 Wild West Show was captured on film by Edison cameramen, as Charles Musser has documented, proving that performance of indigeneity was a mediated event early on.¹³

After the Columbian Exposition, the participation of Native people in spectacle and pageant became a popular aspect of Gilded Age attractions.¹⁴ Beyond mere passive display in “lifelike” Indian village settings, world’s fair performance events foregrounded Native actors, sometimes even by name, as with Sitting Bull and, later, Geronimo at the 1904 St. Louis World’s Fair. The 1915 Panama-California Exposition in San Diego showcased the Hopi potter Nampeyo, who had been living and working in another performative venue: the Fred Harvey–owned Hopi House concession on the south rim of the Grand Canyon. Unlike the retired warriors, Nampeyo’s fame derived from her skilled revival of ancient Anasazi pottery forms. Her performance of indigeneity was as an artist making pottery in the moment rather than as reenactor of a past historical or iconic moment in the mainstream popular imagination.¹⁵ All of these examples point to the fact that performance of Indianness was often an intentional and remunerative act for Native participants, increasingly so as the century progressed.¹⁶

The issue of the gaze—who is looking, who or what is being looked at, and why—is a highly contested one in cinema studies. Beginning with Jean-Paul Sartre’s description of becoming strange to oneself through the experience of being viewed as an object by others, thinkers about filmic representation have grappled with issues of gender and race as factors in the looking and the “being looked-at-ness” that is the effect of moving and still image capture.¹⁷ Although most cinema discussions center on fiction film, the same basic premises present useful parameters for thinking about actuality and reportage footage as well. Women and people of color traditionally have been understood to be objects of the gaze, because the cameramen were nearly all men and nearly all white. This position is somewhat reductive, however, presuming universally held, simplistic views of people from that white, male group: a view nearly as essentializing as that of all Native people being alike and interchangeable, all feathers and blankets.

A film like Last of the Indian Scouts presents an interesting double mediation, as it captures a preestablished performance designed for visual consumption wholly apart from movie cameras. The to-be-looked-at-ness was already in place, constructed by the Apache Scouts in their dual roles as Indian soldiers for the army and show Indians for the fort’s Army Day events. This is a complicated position to occupy, and the Scouts clearly both adopt and challenge contemporary models of Indian identity. At the same time that Native peoples were making a fairly good living performing Indianness at world’s fairs and the tribe of professional “Hollywood Indians” was growing with the fiction film industry,¹⁸ so the Apache Scouts were leading a complex binary existence on the border, acting as both soldiers and agents of Native spectacle as the occasion demanded.

LAST OF THE INDIAN SCOUTS (1940)

This Western Ways film is broken into four sequences, each edited in-camera: a historical reenactment of the Scouts in Pershing’s campaign carrying messages between base camp and infantry marching across the rugged Garden Canyon terrain (00:00–05:25); scenes of the post in 1940 (05:27–06:21); the Spear and Shield ceremony (06:22–07:57); and final, romanticized shots of contemporary borderlands Scouts (07:58–10:30). The black-and-white nitrate film stock offers the image density, richness of contrast, and grayscale characteristic of that organic film material. The footage follows the kind of story logic established by cameramen in the early newsreel days, a tried-and-true formula that Charles Herbert imported directly from his Fox work into his Western Ways productions.

Although it is not the primary subject of this film, Herbert presents the topography of southeastern Arizona and the US–Mexican borderlands as integral to the visual narrative. The landscape surrounding Fort Huachuca is historically multilayered: as preconquest Apache territory, as a setting for westward expansion and Anglo incursion into the West, as the northernmost killing fields of the Mexican Revolution, and as a twentieth-century locus of constantly negotiated racial and cultural coexistence. The Huachuca Mountains and Garden Canyon have sustained centuries of occupation by Native, Hispanic, Anglo, and African Americans, all of whom marked and were marked by the terrain.¹⁹ As the landscape on which Native, African American, Mexican, and Anglo struggles for power and control have played out for more than four hundred years, this high desert terrain is a palimpsest of habitation as well as habituation. Southeastern Arizona, then, serves both as cinematic backdrop and topos or locus of reified meaning. Lonely, awe-inspiring, seeming to have or be a character unto itself, this landscape exercises a kind of topographical imperative in the Apache Scouts film, subtly organizing the film narrative around itself, as would a charismatic person.²⁰ Unlike the western landscape of Hollywood cinema, which was firmly established in the popular imagination by John Ford’s 1939 Stagecoach, the Huachuca setting does not contain stately saguaros or sandstone buttes (nor the incongruous two together in the same shot). This is the real West—rugged, thorny, windswept, unrelenting. Yet Herbert does not pay overt attention: the landscape is a given, as are the African American soldiers. There is no condescension in the depiction of either subject, which is remarkable indeed given the time period and relative exotica of both the place and the people in the pre–World War II social context of the United States.

REENACTMENT

Last of the Indian Scouts begins with a medium long shot of a communications tent pitched alongside a dirt trail in high desert foothills. Peaks and a bright sky with winter clouds mark the horizon. African American soldiers in doughboy uniforms appear mid-frame, while two Apache men in tribal regalia sit cross-legged in the right foreground (Figure 1). The scene is thus established as historical—although not overtly fictional—owing to the costumes and props. A mounted Apache wears a Plains-style war bonnet as he sits in profile, looking out of frame right and into the landscape. A soldier hands a message to a second Apache, who mounts up and rides off-screen left. Between the seated figures and the horsemen, all action is framed by the foreground Apache figures. The shot list for this sequence contains Charles Herbert’s content note in his distinctive voice: “roll 9 indian scouts receive messages at message center and ride hell bent to scene of advance in re*enactment of former campaigns in which the indians rendered invaluable help.”²¹ Herbert’s editorializing is a way of alerting his story writers to include details of the event or context. His script notes and story outlines frequently contain the clichés of the day, such as “hell bent.” In addition to having an ear for turns of phrase, Charles Herbert also knew to flavor his story cues with phrases and expressions that would evoke period and narrative tone in his audience. “Hell bent” evokes the Pony Express, trail rides, and other equine feats of genre westerns. Herbert’s use of the generic “Indian” aptly, if unintentionally, reflects the hybrid or pan-Indian costuming of the Apaches on-screen. This assemblage of clichés affords the Scouts both publicity and privacy.

Figure 1.

Reenactment command post. Last of the Indian Scouts, Western Ways film collection, Arizona Historical Society.

The next image is a closer shot of the rider mounting up, seen behind the two seated figures, whose regalia—arrows, drum, spear, eagle feather headdresses, fringed buckskin tunics, face paint—is prominent in the image. A rudimentary shot list, typed on Bisbee Copper Queen Hotel stationery (“On U.S. 80/Broadway of America/The All Year National Highway”), notes, “C.U. Indians talking. This Indian scout is the oldest in the service.”²² That man is not identified in the shot list or production notes. The close-up is notable because the subject is oblivious to the camera, not a common effect in actuality filmmaking. Moreover, the Apache figures in the foreground are consciously posed to frame the spectator’s gaze, directing focal attention to the horse and rider in middle ground. Thus they appear on-screen as figures in the landscape rather than engaging with the audience directly. None of the Apaches looks directly at the camera; indeed, it is clear from body language of all participants that they were instructed not to do so, perhaps in an attempt to maintain fictional historicity.

Figure 2.

Sinew Riley, “Hell bent to scene of advance.” Last of the Indian Scouts, Western Ways film collection, Arizona Historical Society.

The rider, wearing a loincloth over tunic and leggings, rides across the hills in a series of low-angle, left-to-right pan shots through dense chaparral, past live oak and manzanita. Again, this is not the terrain of the classical Hollywood western. The horseman, whom we can identify from later post photos as Sergeant Sinew Riley, crests a hill and rides into center frame, with fast-moving and dramatic winter clouds at his back (Figure 2). This is the “hell bent” activity that the shot list mentions. The next sequence shows low hills with infantrymen marching cross country diagonally toward the camera, evoking one of the oldest tropes of cinema composition, while others lead pack mules along a rough path. Close-ups reveal the mules to be carrying ammunition and barrels and pulling machine guns on artillery limbers. Herbert positions the camera at near worm’s-eye position on a rocky turn in the trail to capture dramatic shots of human and equine progress through this forbidding landscape. (This camera position also has the advantage of keeping curious soldiers’ heads and faces out of frame. Despite evident instructions not to look at the camera, clearly not all the men could resist.) The camera’s distance from the action and the compositional tension between men and landscape create a visual narrative of drama and urgency.

Figure 3.

Scout and command. Last of the Indian Scouts, Western Ways film collection, Arizona Historical Society.

The scene shifts to the field communication post, as a mounted Apache is framed in low angle by the arm and field glasses of the white officer in charge (Figure 3). Herbert was a firm believer in foreground framing for scale and visual interest. In this case, the visual relation between the white officer’s surrounding arm and the vignetted image of the Apache Scout creates a visual metaphor of the historic dynamic between the Scouts and their white commanders.

Sergeant Riley rides into frame from the chaparral sequence and up the steep hill, past what appears to be a man using a Signal Corps wireless. The shot list, in Charles Herbert’s distinctive syntax, directs: “Commanding officer at observation post takes message and gives directions to advancing troops. Through the ‘Walkie Talkie’ a portable one man radio phone six mile radius.”²³ The observation post, briefly visible in the background of one of the early shots of troop movement, sits atop a steep, rocky outcropping that overlooks the ravines leading to Garden Canyon. The extent of this reenactment is quite impressive, with several hundred men marching and at least three separate camera setups for this sequence alone. It seems highly unlikely that fort personnel were doing routine training maneuvers in period costume. Moreover, the fact that the Scouts are wearing their Indian costumes underscores the fact that this film is not simple actuality reportage but an intentionally constructed “historical” representation.

Clearly not an ethnographic sequence, then, this reenactment footage presents a curious example of costumed performance of ethnicity by both the Scouts and the African American infantrymen, although the Apaches are clearly the focus of the visual narrative. As Native men performing for the camera in costume, rather than in uniform, they are not naive objects of the spectatorial gaze. They obviously participate in and perhaps even control the construction of the image.

THE FORT IN 1940

The contemporary footage begins with a building sign serving as an intertitle: “Headquarters Fort Huachuca and 25th Infantry.” Herbert then cuts directly to a bugler preparing to sound a call into a very large megaphone.²⁴ The successive shots of the bugler, who appears to be playing Assembly, are some of the very few close-ups in the film. Given Charles Herbert’s interest in people and his much-touted photographic affinity for faces, this shot is notable. The African American bugler wears a distinctive waxed and curled moustache, and one can almost make out the tune from his precision bugling. The next shot is aimed through the megaphone, which frames a diagonal view of the parade ground and barracks in a porthole or iris effect (Figure 4). This framing device, like the use of a foreground element, was a key element of Charles Herbert’s visual vocabulary. He used on-screen frames to establish depth of field and to create a picturesque and sometimes metaphorical relationship between the frame and its content. In this case, the vignetting of the Huachuca parade ground and barracks by the mega-phone rim links the site to its function and the message to its medium. The bugler calls the troops to assemble for the Honor Guard ceremony.

Figure 4.

Fort Huachuca Parade Ground through megaphone. Last of the Indian Scouts, Western Ways film collection, Arizona Historical Society.

At this point, Herbert breaks away to a characteristic establishing shot, a high-angle panorama of the post and parade ground framed by a century plant in the left foreground (Figure 5). The winter light is crisp, and the desert grasslands are sere. The vista is 180 degrees from the Garden Canyon site of the reenactment, with the Whetstone Mountains in the distant northeastern background. Shot from a hill above the post, this image gives us the lay of the land in more ways than one. The post is displayed with Officers’ Row in the foreground and barracks mid-frame, with the diagonal grid of the post delineated by roads and walkways. In the far distance the bony spine of a mountain range separates the land and sky. The composition displays a perfect horizontal balance of fore-, mid-, and background, with the strong upright of the agave tying the three planes together. In a newsreel, this shot would introduce the film setting; that it comes six minutes into the footage suggests that the story is being shot for a less ephemeral purpose.

SPEAR AND SHIELD

The next two minutes document the Honor Guard ceremony. Unlike the reenactment footage, this sequence eschews historicity for present-day (1940) documentation. As such, it differs in intent from the reenactment and casts the performance of ethnicity by the Scouts as at least nominally “real.” While the African American soldiers and white officers wear contemporary uniforms, the Apaches appear in the same fancy-dress costumes seen in the reenactment sequence.

Figure 5.

Fort Huachucain 1940. Last of the Indian Scouts, Western Ways film collection, Arizona Historical Society.

As the Spear and Shield ceremony on the parade ground begins, the Scouts arrive on horseback in two groupings, join, and approach the officers’ stand, seven abreast (Figure 6). An extreme long shot from a second-story overlook shows troops arrayed at parade attention on three sides of the field. Herbert shoots from a respectful distance, capturing the display. In medium long shot, and at ground level, the next sequence shows the Apache riders rounding the centrally placed color guard and “Myrtle,” the Twenty-fifth Infantry’s mule mascot. African American soldiers in dress uniform watch from the left, framing the action. As the Scouts approach the review platform, we see that two of the seven riders are wearing full-feather Hollywood-style war bonnets. Sergeant Riley, in faux regalia, dismounts and approaches the white officers and accepts a shield and spear, symbols of Apache valor. The next shot is of the commanding officer and staff, and a final close-up shows Colonel Lee D. Davis returning salute.²⁵ The ceremony is clearly scripted, paced, and costumed: no one looks at the camera. Interestingly, no newsreel-style pan of the soldiers appears here, and close-ups are rare. This may have been due to the Scouts’ natural modesty, for Charles Herbert would not accidentally miss an opportunity to show faces, one of his favorite pieces of advice to amateur photographers. Indeed, the shot list prescribes shots 16 and 17 as “Close up Indian Scouts” and 18 as “Full close ups Indian Scouts.” These frames do not exist in the extant footage. Interestingly, the absence of close-ups throughout this film shifts attention from individuals to actions and interactions among the three races on post.

Figure 6.

Scouts in regalia for Spear and Shield ceremony. Last of the Indian Scouts, Western Ways film collection, Arizona Historical Society.

With the costumes, war bonnets, and careful staging, these kinds of performances of indigeneity establish tacitly knowing agreements between the actors and spectators. As Guy Debord argues, “the spectacle is not a collection of images; rather, it is a social relationship between people that is mediated by images.”²⁶ However brief, the social contract forged among actors and spectators during the event produces meaning—although rarely a single, shared meaning. For the actors, meaning is predicated on self-conscious representation of ethnicity for display and profit. For spectators, meaning is tied up with a desire for authenticity that is always dependent on a suspension of disbelief that can erase the fact that the performance is a performance, a fictional re-creation of an idea of reality. These two understandings exist in tension, without an overarching definition of the event. Such is the nature of spectacle that it dazzles and distracts us from the conditions of its making, offering instead a consumable, as Leah Dilworth contends: “southwestern Indian life circulated as a spectacle for middle-class consumption in museum displays, books, magazines, and galleries, and as tourist attractions.”²⁷ The Apache Scouts’ performances fully participated in this exchange. Indeed, the Arizona Republic of April 6, 1938, reported on Army Day on post:

One of the colorful events of the afternoon program was the appearance of the Apache Scout Indians in a simulated attack on a covered wagon train. The Apaches were clad in colorful ceremonial costumes and remained on the field for about a quarter of an hour to pose for literally hundreds of candid camera fans and amateur movie directors.²⁸

The sheer surreality of US Army Scouts dressing up to simulate a Native ambush of a wagon train bears examination. The Scouts in costume have effectively switched sides in the history of westward expansion, now playing the very threat that the army encamped to contain—with the help of Indian Scouts. If the Republic’s account is accurate, this incongruity bothered none of the Army Day visitors, who enjoyed the performance and wanted to capture it with their own media devices. A crowd-pleaser since Buffalo Bill Cody’s very first Wild West in 1883, the “Attack on the Deadwood Mail Coach” had become by 1940 a standard of Native performance programs, when space and horses were available.²⁹ Clearly the influence of Hollywood westerns played a role in the demand for and commodification of this “simulated” Indian attack as well. Michelle H. Raheja calls this kind of knowing spectacle in Hollywood fiction film “redfacing”:

Redfacing describes a series of acts performed by Native Americans that draw upon Indigenous performance contexts and spiritual traditions but are staged under conditions controlled, more often than not, by white filmmakers using new technologies and often in conflict with Indigenous self-representations.³⁰

The Apache Scouts do participate in such a performance of representation in this film, but it is important to remember that Charles Herbert—and the legions of “candid camera fans and amateur movie directors”—only capture on film a practice that was long established at Fort Huachuca. Thus the redfacing here is not (primarily) in service of filmic production; the film simply captures an habitual exercise of a particular notion of Indianness, created and controlled by the Apache Scouts, facilitated by their seamstress wives, and performed under patronage of the military.

LAST OF THE SCOUTS

The fourth and final sequence of the film shows Scouts in their actual military roles. These men are identified by name in the production notes, as the costumed figures in the reenactment sequences are not, adding to the aesthetic and representational opposition between these parts of the film. With these Apache Scouts’ names, we are able to redress the anonymity of the men on-screen and fill out what Janna Jones has called the “biography of the film.”³¹ This small act, as Jones has explained, changes the very text of the film, as the Scouts are “no longer nameless and placeless [Indians] captured on a white man’s . . . film”;³² rather, they are real men in real time.

Figure 7.

Privates William Major and Andrew Paxon. Last of the Indian Scouts, Western Ways film collection, Arizona Historical Society.

As the final sequence begins, Privates William Major and Andrew Paxon ride across a rocky hilltop into frame from the right, and the camera pans left with them until they reach an overlook. The men wear their military gear, including snakebite gaiters and Bowie knives. They are framed against a stunning backdrop of the Huachuca Mountains behind the post. From this viewpoint one can see south into Mexico, a visual reminder of the early-twentieth-century history of the Scouts’ activities. Herbert repositions the camera below this overlook and shoots upward at the men riding into frame. The low-angle shot connotes the valedictory and iconic image of the Indian rider as a symbol of the vanishing West (Figure 7). Yet these men are regular army soldiers on border patrol in 1940, on the brink of the US entry into World War II. There is no hint of the vanishing Indian here; indeed, these men are very much present and in the present. A few shots of Sinew Riley on his horse, pointing screen left (south) to the border, lead into a sequence in which William Major rides up the craggy hillside to join Sergeant Riley at the crest. Framed by dry yucca stalks, they turn and ride over a hill and out of frame, again shot from a low angle to frame the men against the sky. It would be easy to dismiss these images as Last of the Mohicans–style sentiment, but Herbert resists the binary of the timeless Indian and the modern soldier. Rather than ending with the image of the noble savage, Herbert ennobles the Indian soldier with the visual tropes of timelessness (the horizon, the figure outlined against the sky), while anchoring him in the present (military uniform, border patrol). Although Herbert was not above using a sentimental cliché for effect, his own World War I experience may have led him to privilege the military men over the performing Indians.

This film lacks a voice-over or sound track, but from the visual narrative alone, we can determine that this was more than a curiosity story about performing Indians. The story is more nuanced, and the footage is composed to convey dignity and respect in all frames. The closing shots countermand the impulse to perceive these soldiers as mere costumed clichés. If there is any cliché invoked here, it is that of the timeless soldier poised to defend and protect. Less than a year before Pearl Harbor, this is a powerful message, indeed.

RETURN AND REMEMBRANCE: SELLS INDIAN RODEO (1945)

The Western Ways Features Service was well established by the time the United States entered World War II, but most of its contract photographers were drafted or volunteered after Pearl Harbor, and Charles Herbert himself enlisted, at age forty-five, for his second stint in a world war.³³ Western Ways effectively shut down for the duration. After being wounded while filming for the Signal Corps at Anzio, Charles returned to Tucson, and he and Lucile picked up where they had left off, with their negative library, story files, and a small lab in their guesthouse in northwest Tucson. One of the first postwar events they filmed was the 1945 Sells Indian Rodeo on the (then) Papago Indian Reservation west of Tucson.

This footage nicely pairs with the Apache Scouts film in that it, too, shows an Honor Guard ceremony for Native soldiers. The context is utterly different, however, as the rodeo was an on-reservation, homogeneous event. Although open to all comers, it was not staged for tourists or visitors but rather for the tribal community. At half the run time of Last of the Indian Scouts, Sells Indian Rodeo omits overtly historical representations in favor of images of modern Indian cowboys and veterans at a hometown event. Unlike in the Apache film, the on-screen subjects are not performing for the camera; if anything, they practice what Mary Lawlor calls “displayed withholding,”³⁴ showing only what they want to show. Lawlor contends that such a practice has emerged to maintain privacy in the era of Native self-representation in on-reservation cultural displays. For the O’odham, in the past thirty years, such representation has included powwows, casinos, a cultural center, and a museum—all growing out of the rodeo. And displayed withholding has been central to the Tohono O’odham aesthetic of self-representation from point of contact forward.

The 1945 Sells Indian Rodeo, fittingly scheduled on Armistice Day weekend, provided an opportunity for recognition of military veterans by members of the Papago (now Tohono O’odham) Nation and their southern Arizona neighbors.³⁵ The program contains the following dedication:

Our young men have begun to return from Italy and Germany, from the South Pacific and the Philippines. To those who have come back to us, and to the 17 men of our Tribe who will never return, we dedicate our first post-war rodeo.

The Herbert footage is recorded on a Universal Newsreel dope sheet as well as on a typed shot list. The film contains fairly standard wide shots of the rodeo grounds; medium shots of calf roping, team tying, and bronc and bull riding; and human-interest wide and close-up shots of the crowd, as one might find in newsreel coverage of any seasonal community festival. Yet there are distinctive Herbert touches amid the predictable newsfilm imagery.

As Allison Fuss Mellis and Peter Iverson have argued, rodeo emerged as an alternate expression of Indian identity in the period of the boarding schools and Wild West shows in the late nineteenth century. By the mid-twentieth century, rodeo, like powwow, had taken on a status as a pan-Indian event, run by and for tribal peoples.³⁶ Rodeo culture grew out of ranching culture, and Iverson notes that the Tohono O’odham were particularly well positioned on their historic lands to succeed at ranching. Rodeo was a way to demonstrate an Indian identity that was implicitly and explicitly tied to heritage lands, and without the show Indian aspects that the Apache Scouts film illustrated. As Jan Penrose points out, “in the context of an all-Indian rodeo, identities that have been constructed as mutually exclusive in mainstream society have been subverted; in this context, it is possible to be both a cowboy and an Indian at the same time and without contradiction.”³⁷

The film sequence begins in the staging area near the arena, with a bull rider being dressed for the event in elaborately embroidered chaps that bear the name “Jackson.” This young man is the only rider with chaps at all, and the only rider with any identifier.³⁸ Another man helps to strap and adjust the chaps, not unlike the robing ritual for the traje de luces of the Andalusian bullfighter. This sequence lasts less than thirty seconds, but in that short time, it evokes the Spanish and Mexican history of taurean contest, with the Native adoption of the pursuit layered on. The camera is close to the men and waist high, giving “Jackson” a slightly elevated position in frame. Despite its proximity, the young men are oblivious to the camera and focused on their tasks—a matter of safety and professionalism. As the heats begin, a series of calf riders emerge from the gate, each getting thrown in less than five seconds. Jackson emerges on a fully grown bull and stays on for at least nine seconds before the camera cuts away. None of this is trick-performance, and the camera is incidental to the activities taking place in the arena. The riders are represented as athletes, their ethnicity less relevant than their prowess in the arena.

Figure 8.

Honoring service persons at Sells Indian Rodeo. Sells Indian Rodeo, Western Ways film collection, Arizona Historical Society.

The most significant sequence in light of the Apache Scouts film is the rodeo’s victory processional. A color guard bearing the US, Arizona, and Papago Nation flags leads the procession from the grandstand to the field (Figure 8). There, the field and the rodeo are dedicated to the seventeen men who did not return. Most of the veterans wear civilian clothes, with a smaller percentage in uniform. The group notably contains two women and is saluted by a uniformed soldier off to the right. There is no “Indian” regalia and no performance beyond the V-shaped alignment in front of the grandstands. The rodeo contestants form a respectful line on horseback across the rear of the field. The procession is brief, simple, and dignified and no doubt indistinguishable from similar ceremonies that took place across the United States at county fairs, rodeos, and community festivals in late 1945. In the far background the Baboquivari Mountains anchor the traditional O’odham lands. This is an example of Herbert’s evocative landscape shots, as with the bird’s-eye view of the Huachuca parade ground in Last of the Indian Scouts. Here he maintains a respectful camera distance, the wide shot from the grandstand capturing these veterans in the context of what they were fighting for: the land and people of their nation. This seemingly standard wide shot thus attains complex layers of meaning with the inclusion of the several elements of landscape, rodeo grounds, and the people tied to both.

Figure 9.

Papago veteran cowboy. Sells Indian Rodeo, Western Ways film collection, Arizona Historical Society.

Unlike the Apache Scouts film, which contained only one close-up, Sells Indian Rodeo offers the kind of portraits that Western Ways was known for in magazines around the English-speaking world.³⁹ Herbert includes a cute baby image—a universal pleaser—and a pan of the bleachers that reveals Papago bobby-soxers eating caramel apples and white servicemen in uniform taking pictures of the bronc riding. Audience members look coolly back at the camera, and in one case a Native soldier in uniform leans into frame. There is no mugging or waving at the camera; these people simply confront the gaze and return it. But the real focus is on the horsemen at the event. The image of a young man sitting below the parade stand, probably on horseback, shows his khaki shirt with service ribbons over his left pocket (Figure 9). The forty-eight-star US flag and his cowboy hat shape a portrait of a citizen–soldier. The composition and contrast of light and dark are classic mid-century portrait techniques. The man is unfazed by the camera and does nothing to construct himself as an object of spectacle. As oblivious to the camera as were the costumed Apache Scouts, this man refuses rather than invites the gaze. He appears on-screen as a veteran and a rodeo man rather than a representative “Indian.”

Figure 10.

Rodeo Arena and Baboquivari Peak. Sells Indian Rodeo, Western Ways film collection, Arizona Historical Society.

Much of the film consists of scenes of bull and bronc riding, which can seem quite repetitive to the uninitiated. The gates open, the animal and rider burst into the arena, the rider is thrown, and it all happens again with a new rider and animal. There is one remarkable calf’s point-of-view sequence of roping that lends dramatic tension to the piece. Yet, with characteristic awareness of context, Herbert positions the camera for this sequence over and next to the gates that contain the animals. In addition to affording a rump-level view of the intensive action, the shot setup includes in the far distance Baboquivari Peak, the O’odham sacred mountain and place of emergence. The presence of what Griffiths would call an “allochronic” element in frame with the fast-paced activities of this postwar Indian rodeo does have a then-and-now implication. But the mountain, unlike the Pershing reenactment in the Scouts film, is not just a historical referent; it is a vital reminder of O’odham presence on the land. As we have seen in the Last of the Indian Scouts footage of Fort Huachuca, this synchronic attention to fore-, mid-, and background—to deep focus—places action within a historical and geographical context (Figure 10). Here the visual message is that mid-twentieth-century Papagos return to and reengage with their landscape, their history, and their place in the world. The image belies the struggle that many veterans—and many, many Native veterans—encountered in coming home, but gritty realism was not the Western Ways aesthetic. Charles and Lucile Herbert saw film as a celebratory medium and painted with light in every sense.

Mirroring the valedictory images at the end of Last of the Indian Scouts, Herbert ends the film with an image of Papago cowboys on a fence, against the autumn sky. Yet there is a significant difference, five years and a world war later. These young men, while of an age with the seventeen who did not return, appear here as figures of normality. Postwar activity returns, seasonal events such as the rodeo recur. If there is a timelessness to the imagery, it is that of the West and its ranching traditions. Arrayed in profile against the sky, these are not figures of valediction but of promise. The framing and composition of the shot suggest a Native Mount Rushmore—a monument completed in October 1941—with all the loaded implications that inference carries. Western Ways was not above such a sly reference, as their postwar work would show. These closing images of the short film resemble LIFE pictorials more than the cinema tropes of Last of the Indian Scouts. On the other side of a second world war, sentimental and nostalgic representation of indigeneity has no place in reportage.

In her work on twenty-first-century Native casinos, museums, and powwows, Mary Lawlor invokes Mary Louise Pratt’s now famous notion of “contact zones” where indigenous and non-Native people meet over economic, power, and cultural transactions.⁴⁰ The Western Ways films under discussion here also function, I would suggest, as contact zones, mediated by the visual conventions of indigenous representation, newsreel imagery, and audience expectations shaped by the Hollywood western. They display a complex array of performances for and in spite of the camera and resist, however gently, accepted readings of colonialist gaze and exploitation.

Charles and Lucile Herbert would continue to put the unique landscape, people, and culture of the Arizona–Sonora borderlands to use as subjects of still and moving image feature stories for another twenty-five years. Under the Western Ways brand, the Herberts’ nonfiction promotional, tourism, and curiosity films captured the Southwest borderlands on the brink of Sun Belt development and documented the emerging southwestern chronotope in the public consciousness. As the country recovered from wartime, the Western Ways motion picture division developed short features on such southwestern subjects as historic Tombstone, the Spanish mission system in northern Mexico and southern Arizona, the discovery of tree-ring dating by archaeologists working at the Anasazi ruins of northern Arizona, the moving of a giant saguaro cactus from the open desert to a seasonal visitor’s mansion, a cowboy ranch school, and University of Arizona botany classes in the desert. In all of these films, the Herberts’ perennial optimism celebrated the presence of (plural) culture within nature, eschewing an easy binary for imagery that can both adopt and refute the tropes of the time. Although clearly products of their historical moment, the Western Ways films do merit attention as examples of mid-century independent filmmaking. They preserve images of a world that is largely known to the present cultural imagination only through cinema and television archetypes. The twenty-first-century Southwest is nothing if not a contact zone of daily negotiation among cultures, representations, and image construction: the Western Ways films invite and demand that negotiation.