Two powerful Gene Autry films, Man of the Frontier (1936) and Rovin’ Tumbleweeds (1939) illustrate the environmental impact of controlling water and water rights. In Man of the Frontier, Autry presents us with a clear solution to drought—the lack of water, and in Rovin’ Tumbleweeds provides us with viable solutions to flooding—another consequence of failure to control water usage. Both of these films provide environmentalist readings of water use in the West, blatantly asserting wise use policies that hark back to New Deal programs and the documentaries that promoted them (see The River (1937) and The Plow that Broke the Plains (1934), for example. Autry’s 1936 film, Man of the Frontier, highlights the dustbowl issues foregrounded in The Plow that Broke the Plains within the parameters of an action-packed Western narrative. Man of the Frontier opens with a voiceover warning that introduces the environmental concerns of the film:
Drought: The grim enemy that devastated once prosperous farm and ranch lands. Men have learned that bitter lesson of unpreparedness. Throughout stricken areas today, they are rallying forces to fight back with their only weapon—water.
Water is introduced as a weapon to combat drought, and then the camera pans to images of a dam and the water it holds back, along with a sign reading, “Red River Land and Irrigation Company.” A company formed by area ranchers have pooled their resources to build a dam and canal to irrigate their land. When gate five is blown up, a rancher exclaims, they will “not stop at murder to stop us from finishing the canal,” and the conflict of the film has been established: Steve Conway (Boothe Howard) and the town banker, Hartley Moore (Frank LaRue) are scheming to thwart the ranchers, so that he can take over the water rights for the reservoir and canal and make a profit from the thirsty ranchers. Gene Autry and his sidekick, Frog (Smiley Burnette) intervene and save the dam and canal, but more importantly, they save the rancher’s drought-ridden land.
Autry enters the film as a rancher who volunteers to protect the canal and dam after the previous ditch-rider is killed when gate number five is dynamited. While damage to the gate is repaired, the water is shut off and a whole season’s crops might be lost. Autry’s ditch riding might save the land and the crops and cattle it sustains. The film intertwines mining with cattle ranching and sheep ranching to explain the presence of dynamite, so it comes as no surprise when the banker’s thugs set up gate number nine for another dynamite blast. The plan is to kill Autry when the dynamite goes off, but Autry notices the dynamite and blasts the fuse off with his gun. When he comes back to town, the banker’s hoods go back to retrieve any dynamite left at the site—evidence of their foul play—but Autry and Frog rope one of the men and knock the other into the water. They take them back to town, but the men are set free, since there’s no evidence to convict them.
At this point, Autry does not know who’s behind the dynamite explosions, but he stands behind George Baxter (Sam Flint), who heads the dam project, and his daughter, Mary (Frances Grant). After a series of altercations, including one that ends with Autry dragging the banker’s men back across a desert, Autry saves the dam and canal for the ranchers and the Red River Land and Irrigation Company by retrieving a stolen payroll from Moore and Conway’s henchmen. They celebrate with a song—Red River Valley—but the film’s parting words highlight its environmental message regarding water as weapon: water, held back by a dam and maneuvered through a canal, will “transform the Red River Valley into one of the richest of farm lands.”
As with New Deal documentaries like The Plough that Broke the Plains, drought and the parched infertile farm and ranch land it causes are environmental problems that can be solved with engineering miracles like dams and irrigation canals. These “miracles” were, according to Frederick Turner, a product of the New West, a west he said required “expensive irrigation works, cooperative activity, capital beyond the reach of the small farmer, and vast paternal enterprises of federal reclamation” (quoted in Hundley 6). As Wells A. Hutchins explains, “Water, as well as land, is property. And just as privileges of land use are rights of property, so privileges of water use are recognized as property rights entitled to protection under the due process clause of the federal constitution” (867). Water rights, according to Hutchins, can be categorized in two ways: “The riparian doctrine, based upon ownership of land bordering a natural stream. Such a situation of the land entitles the owner to use water of the stream on his riparian land” (867). And “The appropriation doctrine [which] sanctions the taking of water from a stream for use on or in connection with land, which need not border the stream….Time of beginning the diversion and beneficial use of water gives priority of right” (867).
Autry’s Man of the Frontier draws on New Deal issues like these, but in conjunction with water right issues from the nineteenth century when the Homestead Act and the Desert Land Acts provided opportunities for individuals to stake a claim on lands that provided the only access to water in the region. According to Donald Worster, this “increase in federal authority over western water in collusion with corporate water aggrandizement has produced a tragedy of unparalleled proportions” (quoted in Hundley 15). Bankers and corporate ranchers in the film take advantage of this access, attempting to monopolize water rights for financial gain, no matter whom or what they needed to blow up to control vital resources.
These two figures represent what Worster calls the “emergence and collusion of two groups that constitute the ‘power elite’—agribusiness and government officials, especially those in the Bureau of Reclamation” (quoted in Hundley 15). The conflicts in the film, then, are a product of both a contemporary and old West context. Water as a weapon to combat drought and bring back fecundity to the land, however, makes The Man of the Frontier a blatant environmental Western. The film adds weight to Worster’s claim that “A by-product of this collusion [between agribuisness and government] has been human social costs in evasions of reclamation law and exploitation of field workers, as well as massive environmental despoliation resulting from dams, reservoirs, aqueducts, and economic (especially agricultural) development made possible through modern technology” (quoted in Hundley 15).
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