Cowboy Stuntman: From Olympic Gold to the Silver Screen

Chapter 10. John Wayne at the Alamo

Chapter 10 John Wayne at the Alamo T he Alamo was going to be shot in South Texas near Brackettville in the late summer and fall of 1959. I left California for Texas toward the end of August, driving to Ruidoso, New Mexico, where I spent the night with Dale Robertson, who kept an apartment there because he raced quarter horses at the track nearby. From the high country I drove home to Breckenridge, where I stayed for a few days with Mama. Not only was I going to be in the movie, but I had also gotten my cousin, Don Smith, a job with the Alamo production company working as an extra. He was living on the old home place near Ivan that belonged to Uncle King. When we left Stephens County, Don followed me in his car, but he only stayed about a month because his parents, who were getting up in years, needed his help on their ranch. John Wayne and Dean on the set of The Alamo, 1959. 112 Cowboy Stuntman Most everyone involved in the movie, 340-plus people, would be staying at old Fort Clark, a longtime cavalry post across Las Moras Creek from Brackettville 140 miles southwest of San Antonio. The army abandoned the fort after World War II, and the government sold the property for a song to a subsidiary of Brown and Root, which turned it into a first-class guest ranch. The same group that operated the Driskill Hotel in Austin ran Fort Clark. When Don and I got to Brackettville we turned off US Highway 90 and crossed the creek onto the fort to check in. Wayne’s production company had set up its office in the old headquarters building in the middle of the parade ground, a two-story frame and limestone building. The stone first floor was more than a hundred years old. Al Ybarra, Wayne’s art director and set builder, had been working in Texas for more than a year before the cast and crew started showing up. Starting in the fall of 1957, he had supervised the building of a threequarter -scale replica of the Alamo along with the town of San Antonio de Bexar out at James T. “Happy” Shahan’s 22,000-acre ranch, located about eight miles north of Brackettville. Some of the fancy-looking features were carved from Styrofoam and painted to look authentic, but Al also used a million or so adobe bricks they made there on the ranch. Happy got a lot of people from Mexico, Del Rio, and Eagle Pass to work on the set, which for Hollywood was an amazingly accurate representation of what the Alamo and early-day San Antonio had looked like at the time of the battle. One thing they did differently, for reasons of visual appeal, was build the movie Alamo facing east. The real Alamo faces west. I was one of thirty-one stuntmen hired to work on the film. The men I had the most dealings with were Bad Chuck Roberson (in addition to doubling Duke he played one of Davy Crockett’s Tennesseans), Good Chuck Hayward, Billy Shannon, LeRoy Johnson, Bill Williams (he doubled Richard Widmark), John “Bear” Hudkins, brothers Joe and Tapedero “Tap” Canutt (their dad Yakima had doubled Wayne early in his career; Tap doubled Laurence Harvey in The Alamo), Ted White, Jackie Williams, Ed Juaregui, Jim Burk, Boyd “Red” Morgan, Tom Hennesey, Wally Rose, Gil Perkins, and Rudy Robbins. My boss was Cliff Lyons. We called him “Mother” Lyons, but he was a hard-boiled man in his late fifties who’d been in the business for a long John Wayne at the Alamo 113 time. One thing I learned about him: he really liked drinking margaritas and eating the Portuguese tortillas they served at one of the restaurants at the fort. Bill Jones was head wrangler. He had overall responsibility for 600 head they kept in a corral on the side of the hill above where the mission replica stood. They had acquired some damn good horses for us to use. For all my horseback scenes, I rode a buckskin gelding that belonged to Chuck Roberson. It had a black stripe on its back and was a fine animal. Besides all the horses, Jones had to tend a herd of longhorns on loan from Bill Daniel. Bill’s brother, Price Daniel, was...