Gene Autry's *Man of the Frontier* and the Power of Water

 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).

The Sea of Grass (1947) and Myths of the Free Range

In Elia Kazan's The Sea of Grass, Jim Brewton, Spencer Tracy’s character, argues that cattle grazing serves the land better than homestead farming, an argument John H. Lenihan takes at face value when he claims that Brewton “expresses genuine affection for the rich grasslands, which he correctly believes would be ruined by the homesteader’s plow” (100). Lenihan compares the The Sea of Grass to New Deal documentaries with both a conservationist and communal message. In stark contrast, we assert that The Sea of Grass constructs Brewton as a “frontier empire-builder” rather than an agent for community building, so the film, and Lenihan’s reading of it, begs questions. The connection between Pare Lorentz, a major director of New Deal documentaries, and Kazan, the director of The Sea of Grass, however, seems to have influenced Kazan’s attempt at an environmental message, an attempt that we believe falls flat in relation to Brewton’s unlimited drive to conquer the plains and maintain his claim to the range.

Instead of taking Brewton’s claims and the film’s narrative structure at face value, we suggest it invites an ecocritical reading that demystifies the dichotomies on which it rests—that between cattle ranchers and homesteaders in the 1880s Southwest. The film asserts that free-range ranching maintains the plains in their original state, just as did the buffalo and the Indian, and demonstrates that homestead farming destroys the plain, turning it into a dustbowl on screen like that invoked in Pare Lorentz’s The Plow that Broke the Plains (1936). What is missing from the film are the repercussions of unfettered grazing environmental historian Mont H. Saunderson warns about in 1949. Although Brewton sees a clear ecological dichotomy between free-range ranching and homesteading, with free-range ranching benefiting grasslands and homesteading destroying them, research even from the film’s period suggests otherwise. Studies from the 1970s forward demonstrate that free-range ranching contributed more to the loss of range ecology than any other farming method.

Brewton sees himself and other ranchers as the rightful “owners” of the range and denigrates the homesteader who does not build an empire with his own hands but on the backs of those who came before him:

Chamberlain, I have sympathy for the early pioneer who risked his life and his family among the Indians, and I hope I have a little charity for the nester who waited until the land was safe and peaceable before he filed a homestead of someone else who fought for it. But when that nester picks land like my big Vega, a thousand feet above the sea which nature intended for grazing land and always will be grazing land, when he wants to plow it up to support his family when there isn’t enough rain for the crops to grow. When he only kills the grass that will grow when his crops starve for water and he ends up killing my beef and becomes a man without respect for himself and a menace to the territory, then I have neither sympathy nor charity…. Boggs is only a sample of what will happen if others try it.

When the film’s protagonist, Jim Brewton, introduces his new wife, Lutie Cameron (Katharine Hepburn), to his large ranch, Brewton reinforces his belief that free-range ranching best serves the land, again establishing himself as the superior pole in the binary between free-range and fenced ranching. He looks at the land and states, “Well, first of all I guess I hear the buffalo” and when Lutie asks him what else he hears, and he explains his arguments for a free-range approach while looking down on the grass,

I can remember the first time I saw her. We’d come a long way. And nobody was telling us about any surprises. We just came over the hill and there she was, sort of lying there all alone. Nobody wanted her then, except the antelope, the buffalo, and the Indians, so we took her, and we set her up right for cow country. We fought for her. Our blood sunk in every mile. Indian blood, too. I’m not so proud of some of that. My brother’s out there. It’s kind of the way God made it and wants it to stay, and I’ve got a hunch that He wants me to keep it that way.

He has defeated both the native range animal—the buffalo—and the region’s indigenous peoples. Yet he sees himself and his cattle as native rather than imported and hence as making no mark on the landscape of which they are a natural part. He also designates himself as the land’s protector with a manifest destiny to “keep it that way.”He does not acknowledge the irony. He has acquired this land only after destroying its original inhabitants. Instead, he asserts that the land is the same for him and his cattle as it was for the buffalo and American Indians before him. The film reinforces Brewton’s assertions about the dangers of homesteading, first by demonstrating that ranchers and homesteaders cannot coexist because their methods contradict one another, and then by illustrating dire consequences of homesteading—destroying the grass and contributing to long-term drought and dustbowl conditions. What it doesn’t do is show the damage free range ranching did to the sea of grass Brewton fights to preserve.

Animal Rights and Interdependence in Cinderella

Cinderella interacts closely with the natural world in Disney’s Cinderella (1950). As the daughter again of a wicked stepmother, Cinderella’s outsider role suggests she has rejected human-centered culture in favor of a more interdependent relationship with nonhuman nature. When her father dies, the stepsisters (Anastasia and Drizella) abuse Cinderella with their mother’s approval and help. Cinderella maintains her good temperament in spite of this treatment because she accommodates nature, and nature accommodates her. She can talk to the birds who wake her up. She sings “A Dream is a Wish Your Heart Makes,” as she awakens, and other birds come to listen and respond with only a whistle now and then. Mice come out of bed to listen, wearing shirts, hats, and dresses. Birds fill a sponge with water and shower her. They prepare her clothes and dress her in a frock, shoes, and apron. 

When they tie back her hair and tell her there is a new mouse in the house—a visitor in a trap, her connection with them becomes clearer. She serves them, too. She gets a mouse shirt out of a drawer to take to him and frees him, naming him Octavius or Gus for short, and tells the others not to forget to warn him about the cat. Cinderella interacts on a human level with all the animals in the house and yard. She puts Bruno the dog outside when Lucifer tricks him into barking. Cinderella feeds the cat milk and then feeds the chickens corn while the mice steal some food and frighten her stepsisters.

Lucifer the cat, the stepsisters, and their mother are the only negative characters in the film. Since they represent both the animal and human worlds, neither world is completely denigrated. In fact, Disney added a sequence to the filmic adaptation of the Perrault fairy tale: “a conflict between Cinderella’s pets/allies, the mice, and the stepmother’s pet, the cat” which, according to Naomi Wood, “metaphorically recapitulates the cat-and-mouse struggle between Cinderella and her stepmother and accentuates the life-and-death competition that motivates their actions” (26). The sequence also emphasizes Cinderella’s connection with the natural world.

When Cinderella overhears the decree that all eligible maidens must attend a ball for the prince, her relationship with the animal world again assists her. She is an eligible maid, and the stepmother says she can go if she finishes all of her work and prepares herself. The mice and birds hear the proclamation and help her fix up a gown from her mother, again connecting her with the animal world. They sing “We can do it,” as they sew. Jaq and Gus, two integral parts of the Cinderella romance plot, acquire cloth and beads from the floor where Lucifer sits in a comic scene, which ends with Lucifer getting caught in a shirtsleeve. According to Wood, “Jaq, the planner, is the picture of self-containment. Always thinking, he is instrumental in developing and carrying out schemes on behalf of Cinderella. Gus is his opposite: foolishly confident about his ability to deal with Lucifer, always one beat behind everyone else, and continually jeopardizing his own and others’ safety by his inability to control himself” (40). The other mice also exhibit such human qualities, singing as they refurbish the gown. According to Bosley Crowther’s New York Times review, “it is when they are joined with Cinderella in advancing her undismayed career—singing and busy about business—that the picture has real and flowing joy” (“The Screen: Six Newcomers” 33).

Although Cinderella’s stepmother tricks her daughters into tearing their discarded items from the gown, leaving her in tatters, both her animal friends and a supernatural fairy godmother intervene. The godmother sings “Bibbidi Bobbidi Boo” as she animates nature, transforming a pumpkin into a carriage, mice into four white horses, Gus, the horse, into a coachman, and the dog into a footman. Cinderella is transformed, as well, and is now dressed in a white gown and glass slippers, so the prince falls in love with her. The familiar story of the glass slipper ensures Cinderella’s happiness, but, in a final act of interdependence, she takes her animals with her to the castle, sealing the interconnected view of animal welfare and environmentalism with festive birds and mice waving farewell as the film ends.