Harry Carey

The deeper you get into the life of Harry Carey, the more fascinating it becomes. My initial assumption was that it’s a stage name. (Harry Caray, for example, was born Harry Carabina and thought “Caray” sounded better on the air.) Obviously the first thing I do before writing about people is start looking up basic details, and it turns out, yes, his name was in fact Henry DeWitt Carey II, son of a prominent New York judge and member of the New York Supreme Court. We’re not at Tallulah Bankhead levels, where the next step of research was looking at the Wikipedia page for her family, but we’re still looking at a man who did not exactly grow up a poor ranch hand.

The younger Carey himself studied law at NYU. (His father doesn’t have a Wikipedia page, so I don’t know if it was his father’s alma mater.) In the early years of the twentieth century, he wrote a play called Montana and toured in it for three years. His next play was a failure. Henry B. Walthall, who we should get to at some point, then introduced him to D.W. Griffith. Carey’s first film was in 1908, for Griffith. He alternated shorts and features for years, working in mostly Westerns. He made a wide array of movies as a character named Cheyenne Harry. In 1917, he was in the first movie by a director by the name of John Ford.

With the coming of sound, Carey settled into character actor work, being too old by then to have a career as a leading actor. There’s some speculation that Will Rogers copied some of Carey’s mannerisms, though I don’t know how true that is. Carey would become one of the first honorees on the Hollywood Walk of Fame in 1960, twelve and a half years after his death. He lost the 1939 Best Supporting Actor Oscar to Thomas Mitchell; Carey was one of two nominees for Mr. Smith Goes to Washington and Mitchell won for Stagecoach.

And then there’s his ranch. Carey and his second, possibly third, wife Olive bought a thousand-acre ranch in Saugus, California. (Or two thousand, if you trust the historic marker over Wikipedia, which you probably ought.) He built the Harry Carey Trading Post on it, featuring more than forty Navajo who tended sheep, made silver jewelry, and wove blankets, which were presumably sold at the post. On March 12, 1928, the Carey family was away. The Navajo were as well—according to that same marker because of “the advisement of a medicine man predicting that the dam would break.” And it did, killing a couple the marker only identifies as “the caretakers, Mr. and Mrs. Harter” along with at least 450 others.

After all that, what’s an alleged black widow bite that helped lead to his death? Now, he probably didn’t get it. There’s no reason to believe he did. His daughter-in-law said he’d never been bitten by a black widow, and it’s certainly true that a man with emphysema and lung cancer didn’t need the help from a spider to cause coronary thrombosis. 3 Godfathers is dedicated to him, and apparently one of the ways John Wayne stands in The Searchers is a direct reference to a common stance of Carey’s. He’s not often discussed today, but Western films owe much to him.