Elisabeth Grace Foley

Historical Fiction Author

“This Music Was Not of My Choosing”: The Music of Rio Grande (1950)

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Rio Grande has been my favorite Western movie for as long as I’ve had a favorite. There are plenty of reasons why, but I’m sure one of them is its music—not just the background score, but its wonderful use of vocal music within the story, in scenes that have stuck with me since the first time I saw the movie (colorized—the horror!) on TV as a kid. The soundtrack was one of the first CDs I bought for myself (probably from Barnes & Noble, back in those nostalgic days when I had just made the delighted discovery that they had music CDs on their website and you could actually listen to samples from each track!). I’ve always been a little amazed that a soundtrack album was actually produced, given that it seems to be both an underrated movie and score. According to the Soundtrack Collector website, it looks like the earliest release was an LP in 1981. I wonder who had the impulse to release an obscure soundtrack thirty years after the movie came out, and why? At any rate, I’m glad they did.

With all my fondness for this soundtrack, somehow I’ve never written anything specifically about it before—so for this year’s Legends of Western Cinema Week, a blog event that I never miss, what better than to do some in-depth gushing about the music of Rio Grande?

First up, we have the best piece of music in the movie: the gorgeous, sweeping, heart-stirring main title by Victor Young. I seriously think this is the most underrated main theme in classic film. I’ve always wished that someone would take it into their heads to do a new recording of it—of course it’s great that we have the original soundtrack version, mono sound and slightly blurry quality as it is, but can you imagine how it would sound in stereo and high-quality sound? Paging the City of Prague Philharmonic, or the Boston Pops or the Moscow Symphony…

Appropriately enough considering the distinct Irish-American influence all over Ford’s cavalry trilogy, there is a strong enough similarity between the main theme of Rio Grande and the Irish song “Leaving of Liverpool” that makes me suspect Young may have based his theme on that tune. (I actually succeeded in making a homemade piano arrangement of the theme to Rio Grande by using some of the chords from “Leaving of Liverpool” from my piano songbook of Irish songs.) Oddly enough, and rather regrettably, we never hear this beautiful theme again in the movie after the moving opening scene “Return From Patrol,” except for a tiny fragment of a quotation at 4:28 in the track “Indian Raid / Escape.”

There’s also an interesting example here of a composer re-using bits of his own themes in different scores. Pay attention to the musical phrase at 1:54 of the main title—and then listen to 0:07 of the track “Off to Town / Grafton’s Store” from Young’s score to Shane, three years later. Slightly different rhythm, but almost exactly the same phrase. [Read more…]

English Aristocrats in the Old West

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This is a revised and expanded version of an article I wrote ten years ago for the now-defunct blog The Vintage Reader.

One of the reasons I’ve always been drawn to write about the American West is the way it’s chock-full of colorful characters and fascinating stories. The open spaces and fresh opportunities of the West attracted people of all classes and nationalities in search of fortune, adventure or escape—in fact, you might be surprised to know that even as seemingly unlikely a figure as a titled English aristocrat was by no means a rarity on the plains of Texas or among the mountains of Montana.

In the 1870s and 1880s, with the open-range cattle boom in full swing, many wealthy Englishmen saw the ranching business as an excellent opportunity for investment, and American ranchers welcomed the capital the English could provide. “[English] drawing rooms buzzed with the stories of this last of bonanzas,” wrote John Clay, a Scotsman who eventually became a highly successful ranch manager himself; “staid old gentlemen, who scarcely knew the difference between a steer and a heifer, discussed it over their port and nuts.” By the mid-1880s there were dozens of foreign-owned cattle companies with millions of dollars in assets operating across the West. One example was the XIT Ranch, one of the largest and most famous of its time. At its peak the XIT, which covered more than three million acres in ten Texas counties, employed around 150 cowboys to work 160,000 head of cattle. The American syndicate that ran the ranch was in turn financed by the Capitol Freehold Land and Investment Company, organized in London in 1884, whose wealthy English shareholders included the Earl of Aberdeen and Sir Henry Seton-Karr. (The subject of British economic involvement in the Old West is interestingly explored in Cattle Kingdom by Christopher Knowlton, which I reviewed here.)

One of the most colorful British figures to grace the cattle-ranching scene was Moreton Frewen, who settled in Wyoming’s Powder River Basin in 1879. Frewen was the third son of a wealthy Sussex family, an adventurer and visionary whose many reckless financial schemes and accompanying failures earned him the nickname “Mortal Ruin.” Having squandered his own inherited fortune, he had to borrow money to set up his Wyoming venture. He bought livestock and built a two-story log house that was the height of luxury for the time and place—it included a solid walnut staircase, a musicians’ gallery in the dining-room and furnishings imported from Chicago and England. It even had a private telephone line that ran 22 miles to Powder River Crossing! The American cowboys dubbed the structure “Castle Frewen.” In 1881 Frewen married New York socialite Clarita “Clara” Jerome (whose sister Jennie became the mother of Winston Churchill), and the couple entertained in style at Castle Frewen, hosting lavish hunting parties for their guests, who included titled English aristocrats and New York society connections. But after becoming ill on one of these expeditions and suffering a miscarriage, Clara went back to New York, never to return to Wyoming. Frewen left Wyoming in 1885, adding another disaster to his resume with his dismissal from the position of manager of the failing Powder River Cattle Company.

Another type of Englishman frequently to be found in the Old West was the “remittance-man.” These were often younger sons of wealthy or aristocratic families who, since they would not inherit a title or fortune like the eldest son, went abroad or were sent abroad by their parents to British colonies such as Australia or South Africa, or to America, to make a fortune of their own—the American cattle business was seen as a good opportunity for these young men to get a start in life. In the meantime they received a monthly allowance or “remittance” from their family on which to live. The term “remittance-man” was often used as one of scorn or jeering, with hard-working Americans viewing them as lazy spongers living off their monthly checks from abroad. Occasionally, actual disgrace did lie behind aristocratic younger sons’ exile—some were dissolute or had gotten into trouble in England, and were packed off to America either as a last hope of reforming them or to keep them from damaging the family reputation any further. [Read more…]

Trails of Thought II: Law and Lenience

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A series of occasional bite-sized musings on the history of the American West.

In the still-evolving picture of the average Westerner’s mindset and values I’ve slowly formed over the years, I’ve noticed that if the West had one peculiar moral flaw or idiosyncrasy, it was…not precisely lawlessness, as in deliberately flouting all law or restraint, but a tendency to draw an arbitrary distinction between “good vs. bad” and “lawful vs. unlawful” which sometimes led to a curious lenience toward certain types of law-breaking. Often you might find a Westerner characterizing somebody as friendly, brave, kind, a good sort of fellow, but oh dear, he has that inconvenient habit of stealing horses or shooting at people! Westerners seemed inclined to overlook or minimize a little law-breaking—so long as it didn’t involve cruelty or taking advantage of a weaker or helpless person—if the lawbreaker fit their definition of “a good man” in possessing some of their most highly valued personal qualities: e.g. physical courage, straightforwardness, determination, loyalty to friends, etc. I remember being struck by this attitude when reading Charles Siringo’s A Cowboy Detective, in which Siringo so often casually noted becoming fast friends with men he was assigned to track down and help convict (usually for robbery of some type) or quite unselfconsciously described one of them as a splendid chap or words to that effect.

I suppose the positive flip side of this failing might be giving short shrift to the man who was technically lawful, but personally corrupt; the supposedly upstanding citizen who is only one outwardly, but is essentially cruel and cowardly or takes advantage of others by legal means. I sense that the type of average Westerner I’ve described would have very little patience with such a one. Well, that’s good. But I can’t help thinking (broadening scope a little here) that the hypocrite type of antagonist has been overdone in fiction generally, or rather consistently mishandled—his wrongdoing persistently blamed on religion or respectability itself, instead of a recognition that his real perfidy lies in wearing the externals of those things as a false veneer.

Getting back on track…this Western moral paradox of “good” versus “lawful” is the one thing I’ve found most puzzling whenever I encounter it. But as I think it out, I begin to see dimly where it might come from. Independence of character, and especially independence of thought, has always been a distinctive element of American and particularly American Western values; and as John Truby points out in The Anatomy of Story, a good way for a writer to create a character flaw is to envision how a strength carried too far can become a weakness, or a positive trait have a negative flip side. Perhaps the Westerner’s independence of character—extremely valuable in its place—sometimes tended toward a belief in his own ability to decide right and wrong based on situation rather than standard.

Eugene Manlove Rhodes, whose fiction displays the moral paradox as much as any of his contemporaries and perhaps more so, took this discussion head-on in a telling campfire conversation from his short story “An Executive Mind”:

“And who’s to be the judge of whether it’s a good law or not? You?”

“Me. Me, every time. Someone must. If I let some other man make up my mind I’ve got to use my judgment—picking the man I follow. By organizing myself into a Permanent Committee of One to do my own thinking I take my one chance of mistakes instead of two.”

“So you believe in doing evil that good may come, do you?

“Well,” said Jeff judicially, “it seems to be at least as good a proposition as doing good that evil may come of it…there isn’t one thing we call wrong, when other men do it, that hasn’t been lawful, some time or other. When to break a law is to do a wrong, it’s evil. When it’s doing right to break a law, it’s not evil. Got that? It’s not wrong to keep a just law—and if it’s wrong to break an unjust law I want a new dictionary with pictures of it in the back.”

That’s both the strength and the weakness right there. Enough strength and independence of mind to seek for the difference between justice and injustice, but too much independence in believing fallible human nature is capable of deciding what’s right without an objective standard. (So many earnest stories muddle onto the rocks here, having characters agonizing over whether they’re doing right or wrong, but leaving them adrift without an objective standard to measure their conduct by!) To judge a fallible human law you need the infallible measuring-stick of God’s law—by the campfire, as well as on the city street.

image: “Tall in the Saddle” by W.H.D. Koerner

Previously: A Good Man