John Wayne Saw Them Leading A Horse To Be Put Down In Cheyenne, 1956 — Then He Stepped In
#OldHollywood #VintageHollywood #ClassicHollywood July 1956. Cheyenne, Wyoming. Frontier Days. The biggest outdoor rodeo in the world. In the back pens behind the main arena, away from the crowds, a man named Clyde Rudd is leading a bay gelding down a narrow dirt alley at six-thirty in the morning. The horse's name is Captain. He is seventeen years old. He has a bowed tendon in his left foreleg and a limp that has gotten worse for three days. The man at the far gate has a county veterinarian's authorization. Captain has worked the rodeo circuit for eleven years. Pendleton. Calgary. Cheyenne. He has never once put a rider in a bad position on purpose. The men who worked with him used the same word every time. Honest. His owner, a stock contractor named Walt Briggs, signed the authorization at five in the morning and sent someone else to handle the rest of it because he could not go back and look at the horse's face. Walt's son bought Captain with his first rodeo check in 1947, the week before he shipped out to Korea. He did not come back. Captain was the last thing Walt had from that year. At the end of the alley, leaning against the fence rail with a cup of coffee, a man in a tan Stetson watched Clyde come down with the horse. He asked one question. Then he walked to the contractor's lot and came back eight minutes later with Walt Briggs. Captain spent the rest of his life on a ranch in Encino with three other retired horses and the best farrier in Los Angeles County. He died in the spring of 1961, quietly, in the sun, in the pasture. A letter arrived in Cheyenne the following week. Two sentences on plain paper. Captain died April 4th. He went easy and he was not alone. Walt read it at his kitchen table and folded it and put it in the drawer where he kept the things that mattered. His daughter found it twenty years later. She framed it with the only photograph of Captain that Walt kept his whole life. Bay horse at full gallop. White blaze. Three white stockings. All four hooves off the ground. The frame hangs in her kitchen in Laramie. The afternoon light crosses it every day. Then it moves on. This video is an original dramatic storytelling production. Historical events and dialogue are reconstructed for narrative purposes. #JohnWayne #TheDuke #ClassicHollywood #OldHollywood #VintageHollywood #AmericanLegend #GoldenAgeOfHollywood #JohnWayneStories #CheyenneFrontierDays #RodeoHistory #HorseRescue #WyomingHistory #AmericanWest
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