Hollywood Goes to War: Why Hollywood Cowboy Tim McCoy Went to War Twice

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Speaker 1: And we continue with our American Stories, and it’s time for another Hollywood goes to War’s story from Roger McGrath. Tim McCoy was a major film star, most noted for his roles in American westerns. He was so popular with youngsters as a cowboy star that he appeared on the cover of Wheaty’s Cereal Boxes. Roger McGrath is the author of Gunfighters and Vigilantes, Violence on the Frontier, the US Marine, and former history professor at UCLA. Doctor McGrath has appeared on numerous History Channel documentaries and he’s a regular contributor for US Here in our American Stories. Here’s McGrath with the story of Tim McCoy.

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Speaker 2: From the late nineteen twenties and through the nineteen thirties, Tim McCoy was not only one of the top cowboy actors, he actually was a cowboy. He appeared in his first movie, Heard in nineteen twenty five and his last, Requiem for a Gunfighter in nineteen sixty five. All together, appeared in ninety three movies. In nineteen seventy three, he was inducted into the Western Performers Hall of Fame at the National Cowboy and Western Heritage Museum in Oklahoma City. It was also in nineteen seventy three that he was given a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. What is less known about Tim McCoy is his service in the US Army in both World War One and World War Two. Timothy John McCoy is born in Saginaw, Michigan, in eighteen ninety one. His parents are Gaelic speaking Irish immigrants. At sixteen years old, the father enlists in the Union Army when the Civil War erupts. He survives the Civil War unscathed, only be wounded in the Fenian invasion of Canada in July eighteen sixty six, hoping along with other Fenians to divert Britain’s attention to Canada and allow Ireland to win her independence. The mother, Katherine Fitzpatrick, is described as pretty, with dark auburn hair, a rosy complexion, and an ever present twinkle in her eye. She arrives in America in eighteen seventy as a fifteen year old. Within months, she becomes a McCoy. The couple will have six children. Tim is the last. By the time Tim is growing up, his father is police chief of Saginaw, a lumber down that had experienced a boom in the eighteen sixties and seventies. Ours was a home filled with warmth and affection. Recalled McCoy and my family orientation, as might be expected, was nationalistically, irish and devoutly his boy had years are typical for use of that era in the Upper Midwest, except his dad is the chief of police and the commander of the local chapter of the Union Veterans Organization, the Grand Army of the Republic. Because of police and Civil War veterans participating in parades, McCoy learns to play the drums and the bugle so he can march along with his father. There is also a naval reserve unit in Saginaw, and needing a bugler, McCoy is asked to join, but he’s under age, only thirteen. His case is pleated up the chain of command. Even the Michigan Governor gets involved, and finally the Navy grants McCoy special permission to join. Five days before his fourteenth birthday, he’s enlisted in the Naval Reserve. He drills weekly and goes on summer cruises. He will stay in the reserve unit until he goes off to college. Three years later, at seventeen, McCoy is admitted to Saint Ignatious College in Chicago. He lives off campus with maternal uncles and aunts. His courses are demanding and he has to study like never before. Moreover, many of his classmates are intent on becoming priests and are academically brilliant. It’s not easy time for McCoy, especially because he has no desire to wear a clerical collar. For pleasure, he reads historical fiction about the Old West. Owen Wistards the Virginian is one of his favorites. His interest in the Old West was first peaked years before by reading dime novels and meeting Buffalo Bill Cody. When the Frontiersman, an entertainer, brought his Wild West Showed to Saginaw in eighteen ninety eight, McCoy was captivated by the spec of it all, especially the riding and shooting. Since his father was the police chief, McCoy was able to tag along with his dad to Cody’s tent outside the arena. He said he stood awestruck before Buffalo Bill. During the fall of nineteen eight, the Miller Brothers one oh one Ranch Wild West show comes to Chicago. McCoy slips away from Ignatius to watch the performances. His imagination is again set on fire, as it had been ten years earlier. He makes up his mind to go out west. At the end of the spring semester in nineteen nine, without telling any what, he boards a westward bound train with only a few dollars in his pocket. On the train, he happens to find himself seated next to a horse trader from land Or, Wyoming, who is involved in shipping mustangs to the east. At Grand Island, Nebraska. The horse trader puts McCoy to work with Jim Dollard breaking mustangs for the market. The horse trader tells McCoy that Dollard killed two men and one day in Wyoming. Now look here, the eighteen year old McCoy tells the horse trader. I know I’m a newcomer to the West, but you don’t have to feed me that dime novel stuff. The horse trader laughs and tells McCoy it’s all true, and Dollard has just been released from the penitentiary and is back to breaking horses instead of stones. Sporting a drooping red mustache. Dollard looked me up and down with his sharp green eyes, said McCoy, the coldest eyes I had ever seen. If a look alone could kill, Dollard was capable of disposing of considerably more than two men in a single day.

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Speaker 1: And you’re listening to Roger McGrath tell the story of Tim McCoy as a part of our Hollywood Goes to War series. We’ve done stories on Clark Cable, Jimmy Stewart, and so many more. Go to our American Stories dot com and search for our Hollywood Goes to War series. When we come back, more of Tim McCoy’s story here on our American Stories. Liehibibe here the host of our American Stories. Every day on this show, we’re bringing inspiring stories from across this great country, stories from our big cities and small towns. But we truly can’t do the show without you. Our stories are free to listen to, but they’re not free to make. If you love what you hear, go to Olamericanstories dot com and click the donate button. Give a little, give a lot. Go to Alamerican Stories dot com and give And we continue with our American Stories and with Roger McGrath as he continues his storytelling in our Hollywood Goes to War series. Now let’s continue with Tim McCoy’s story. Here again is McGrath.

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Speaker 2: After several days breaking horses with Dollard, McCoy boards a train with the horse Trader and begins to run to Lander in west central Wyoming, just south of the Wind River Reservation. The line to Lander was completed only two years earlier, and the town gained the motto where the Rails end and the Trails begin. The horse Trader takes McCoy to an inexpensive boarding house and then leaves for his own quarters, dropping his gear in his room. The cooy steps out of the boarding house and onto the wooden sidewalks of Land Main Street, which appropriately is dirt. Cowboys stroll into and out of saloons. Music comes from a dance hall. Horses are tied to hitch racks. A few Indians stand about the quious thrill by his first night in Lander, it’s everything he dreamed the West to be. He treats himself to a steak dinner with all the trimmings and pie in ice cream for dessert. It costs him fifty cents. He retires to his room and lies on his bed, listening to the sounds of raucous cowboy laughter, honky tonk piano, and the clump of high heeled boots on the wooden sidewalks accented by jingling spurs. The next morning, reality strikes. He’s in the West, still somewhat the old West, but he needs a job. Fortunately, the Double Diamond Ranch fifty miles to the north needs a few men to work. He McCoy won’t be a cowboy, but it’s a start. For the next two months, he harvests and stacks hey on the Double Diamond. The foreman likes McCoy’s work, and when the fall round up begins, he puts the eighteen year old green Horn on a horse. McCoy is elated and rushes down the lander to buy all the trappings of a cowboy. Meanwhile, McCoy writes his father saying he doesn’t want to be a college man but instead a cowboy and is now in Wyoming. Well Son replies his father, it’s your own grave you’re digging. I just hope you aren’t going to be a horse’s ass all your life. During these years, he also comes to know the Indians, well, especially the Arapaho, are romantic by nature. McCoy is fascinated by the stories the older Indians tell of the days before the reservation, when they followed buffalo herds and fought their enemies, mostly other Indians and only occasionally white men. McCoy learns Therapoi language as well as the sign language common to the Indians of the high Plains. He becomes friends with several Arapa, including some who had fought at the Little Bighorn. Chief goes in lodge makes him a tribal brother. There are still cattle rustlers in Wyoming, and ranchers still pay hired guns to track them down. The most feared hired gun in McCoy’s day is Sam Barry. McCoy says Berry’s arrival in any particular area usually puts a stop to wrestling without Berry having to fire a shot. Whenever he does kill a wrestler, Berry slices off one of the wrestler’s ears as evidence of a job completed. When McCoy goes to town at south Thelander, east to Thermopolis, or north to Cody, a town which features buffalo bill irma hotel, the old Showman can usually be found at the thirty foot long polished mahogany bar in the hotel’s saloon. Cody drinks prodigious quantities of whiskey and cap devates McCoy and all others standing at Irma’s bar with stories of daring dew in the Old West. By nineteen fifteen, McCoy files for a six hundred and forty acre homestead on Owl Creek to the west of Thermopolis. He pays twenty seven dollars and fifty cents for the property. During the winter of nineteen seventeen, the talk of America’s possible entry into what is called the European War dominates many a conversation. McCoy’s interest is especially piquked by a Theodore Roosevelt newspaper article tr proposes an American force that he would lead that would feature a cavalry similar to the rough writers of Spanish American War fame. Roosevelt theorizes the cavalry could break through the German front and wreak havoc, operating as raiders behind the enemy’s lines. At the time I read that article, said McCoy, I was twenty six years old, bursting with energy enjoying good health and filled with that roving spirit which is always constituted a substantial part of my makeup. And like many young people, I have the brashness or spunk that comes when you’ve passed most of your time on life’s hills rather than down in the valleys. As soon as he finishes reading Roosevelt’s article, McCoy begins writing a letter to the former president. McCoy says he will recruit a force of four hundred cowboys from Wyoming and Montana for Roosevelt. McCoy addresses the envelope to the Honorable Theodore Roosevelt, New York City, New York, reckoning the post office will get the letter to tr Two weeks later, a writer dispatched from Thermopolis gallops up to McCoy in a handsome telegram. It’s a reply from the former President, bully for you, do proceed. Article and telegram in hand, McCoy spends the next several weeks recruiting. In less than two months, he has four hundred men signed up with Wyoming Montana. Under a deep blanket of snow and little to do, everyone is waring to go, anticipating a grand adventure in Europe. No one is more excited than McCoy, who sends word of his success to Roosevelt. In late March, McCoy receives another telegram from Roosevelt. President Wilson will not approve the plan. Wilson gives several excuses, but the real reason is his fear that Roosevelt would once again be catapulted into the presidency. A week after Wilson scuttles Roosevelt’s plan, Congress declares war. McCoy’s immediately on a train for Cheyenne, where he gets a letter recommendation from the governor, and then on to Fort Logan near Denver. After several twists of fate, he’s sent to OCS at Fort Snelling near Saint Paul, Minnesota. He excels an officer’s school, and then even more so in cavalry school, where is promoted to captain upon graduation. The promotion is an unusual distinction, normally bestowed only upon veteran lieutenants. Before he leaves for posting at Fort Riley, Kansas, he marries his girlfriend from Wyoming, Agnes Miller. Suddenly McCoy is a captain of cavalry in the US army and a married man. At Fort Riley, McCoy becomes part of the officer Corps, tasked with turning recruits into cavalrymen. His life is made easier only when he’s allowed to make cowboys non coms to eat. In the training morales high all are preparing for the day when they will be making thunderous and glorious saber wielding dashes on the backs of galloping steeds through enemy lines. Realists, rather than romnics, win the day, though, the use of modern machine guns and artillery pieces on the front in Europe is making it clear the days of cavalry charges are over and where it comes to Fort Riley that the bulk of the cavalry forces will be converted to field artillery.

00:16:55
Speaker 1: And you’re listening to Roger McGrath tell the story of Tim McCoy, and you can’t make it up. Make you writing a former president known for putting forces together, known for swashbuckling, and get a response, and then put together four hundred folks to go ahead and fight a foreign war. It sounds crazy, except it really happened, and so many things like it happened back then, And my goodness, look at his life, Michigan boy. His father’s a police chief, fought in the Civil War, and what does he decide to do? Tell dad, I’m not a college boy anymore. I met this guy named Buffalo Bill, and I’ve got other ideas. And so with love, he said to his dad, I disagree with the way you and I are going to live our lives. And hopefully our fathers, well, they don’t just say, you know, well what his dad said, which was wishing him actually not good things. When we come back, we’re going to cover more of this remarkable American story, Tim McCoy’s story here on our American Stories, and we continue with our American stories and the story of Tim McCoy. My goodness a part of the Hollywood Walk of Fame and the Western Performers Hall of Fame, both in the same year in nineteen seventy three, one of the iconic actors in American life in his day the cover of Wheaty’s, which tells you everything that’s more than just an iconic actor. When you get to the cover of Wheaty’s, you’re sort of an iconic brand. At that point. Let’s return to Roger McGrath to the rest of Tim McCoy’s.

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Speaker 2: Story, McCoy is sent to West Point, Kentucky, where he leads a funeral march of hundreds of cavalry troops, all wearing black armbands with heads bowed while a band plays a dirge. In the center of the procession is a casson with a black draped casket in the words United States Cavalry died nineteen eighteen, rests in Peace. McCoy is now assigned to Fort Sill, Oklahoma, for Officers Artillery School. Upon graduation, he’s put in command of an artillery battery. Now a lieutenant colonel, McCoy is champion at the bit for deployment to France, but the armisie is declared and he musters out of the army. He isn’t home for lawng before the new governor, Bob Carey, an old friend from McCoy’s first roundup, offers McCoy the job of Adjutant General of Wyoming. McCoy accepts immediately and is now a brigadier general at the age of twenty eight. McCoy’s headquarters are in the state Capitol building at Cheyenne. The Arapahoe are especially impressed with their young friend, who is now a mighty chief with a star on his shoulder. They decide he needs a new name. In a ceremony conducted by the medicine man Yellow Calf, McCoy is Christen Banny Natschaw, meaning Soldier Chief. During the next several years, McCoy buys another fifteen hundred acres of land and leases an additional twenty five hundred from the federal government. His Owl Creek ranch now spreads over five thousand acres. McCoy and his wife now have three children, two boys and a girl. In the fall of nineteen twenty two, into McCoy’s office in the Capitol Building comes a small, natalie dressed man with an alligator skin briefcase. The man says this Hollywood Motion Picture company is making a Western. The covered wagon and five hundred Indian extras are needed. The man says it’s proving impossible to get the Indians, and with the movie behind schedule and over budget, financial disaster is near. The man is Jesse Laski, one of the pioneer movie makers. He offers McCoy big Bucks and McCoy can provide the needed Indians and rescue the movie McCoy signs a contract for nominally providing the Indians, but also for serving as technical advisor for the movie. McCoy also ensures contractually that the Indians will be well paid. Within weeks, McCoy has five hundred rappa host shoshonean bannock and the necessary horses at the filming location in Utah. In two months, the location shoot is completed, McCoy is a hero, and Laski now wants him in Hollywood to stand on stage with some of his Indian buddies to introduce the movie before each of its showing at Gramman’s Egyptian Theater. Laski offers to pay the Indians and cover all their expenses contract of one thousand dollars a week for McCoy. McCoy resigns as Wyoming’s Adjutant General and is off to Hollywood. After a four month wildly successful run at Gramman’s, it’s off to London for six more months of the same. In the meantime, the Covered Wagon is released nationwide in the US and the movie is a spectacular success. Back in Hollywood from London, McCoy goes to work as a technical advisor on the second movie The Thundering Herd. When his work is finished, McCoy is hired to introduce John Ford’s The Iron Horse in the same manner he had introduced The Covered Wagon. His Indian friends are making more money than they have ever dreamed of, and so too is Tim McCoy. The Indians are calling him by a new name, High Eagle, because he seems so powerful and wise, soaring high and observing at all. McCoy now formerly names his al Creek Ranch Eagle’s Nest. Irving Thalberg of MGM thinks McCoy has the makings of a cowboy star. McCoy is a six foot, handsome, blue eyed blonde who can ride and rope, shoot and fight, and sign and track like an Indian studio publicity agents won’t have to invent a matinee idol. In reality, McCoy is a cowboy and a rapa blood brother, a rancher, and a cavalry officer. From nineteen twenty six to nineteen twenty nine, McCoy stars in sixteen MGM movies, mostly westerns. He even writes the script for one movie. When Thalberg grows upset with the staff writers, McCoy makes the studio gobs of money and gobs for himself. McCoy is away from home nearly all the time, and his marriage is suffering. He tries to strike a new deal with MGM that will give him more time off, but when Louis Mayer stalls and equivocates, McCoy says goodbye. In nineteen thirty one, McCoy signs with Columbia Pictures. Instead of slowing down, the pace picks up, and over the next four years he makes thirty two movies. During this time that Hollywood begins timing Western stars on their quick draws by counting the number of frames on film from hand movement to smoke from the gun barrel. McCoy is a frameer too faster than anyone else. His success in Hollywood, though, destroys his home life, and Agnes and E are divorced. McCoy leaves Columbia and makes movies with production companies that allow him to tour with the Ringling Brothers circus and with his own Wild West show. In the late nineteen thirties and into the early nineteen forties, McCoy stars in twenty seven more Westerns. Then comes the Japanese sneak attack, on Pearl Harbor. McCoy is fifty years old and he’s a cowboy star, but he turns his back on Hollywood and joins the Army Air Corps as a lieutenant colonel. He’s sent to Europe, serving in intelligence and in operations, and occasionally is at the front. In August nineteen forty four, is in Paris for the liberation of the city. By the time the war is over, McCoy has been promoted to colonel. He returns to Hollywood, but he’s now in his mid fifties and his career as a star of westerns is over. He appears in only four more movies, and only in minor roles. He does have a highly successful TV show, though, in which he tells stories about the Old West, gives lessons in Indian sign language, and interviews old timers about life in the mining camps and on the cattle ranges. His old Indian battels make frequent appearances. In nineteen fifty three, McCoy’s show is awarded an Emmy. In the meantime, McCoy remarries and has two more children. He dies in nineteen seventy eight at age eighty six. Tim McCoy lived one of the fullest, most varied, most adventurous, and most accomplished lives imaginable, including proudly serving his country in two World Wars. He wasn’t an invention of Hollywood. He was the real McCoy.

00:26:50
Speaker 1: Indeed in great production work is always by Greg Engler, and a special thanks to Roger McGrath as always for telling these terrific stories about America’s past, reminding us of who we were and of course who we can always be. Hollywood goes to war, and my goodness, here he is at the peak of his powers, wealth beyond any measure, and at fifty years old, fifty years old, volunteers to give up his craft and go represent his country, and of course leaves a full bird Colonel. The story of Tim McCoy here on our American Stories