Tom Mix

1880-1940

While legend reported that Tom Mix was born near El Paso, Texas, his birthplace was actually a small community in Pennsylvania - Mix Run, near Dubois. He was born on January 6, 1880, and was the son of an Irish captain in the celebrated U.S. Seventh Calvary. His mother was of Scotch and Cherokee Indian extraction. The man who was to become one of the screen’s greatest two-gun, hard-riding cowboys, learned to ride a horse at a very early age, and was an accomplished knife-thrower and lariat spinner. He attended Virginia Military Institute and after leaving VMI, he went to Texas to become a Texas Ranger. At the outbreak of the Spanish - American War in 1898, he enlisted in the army and went to Cuba. He was a scout and courier for General Chaffee, and at the Battle of Cristobal Hill he was wounded in the neck by a Spanish bullet. He also saw service in the Orient during the Boxer Rebellion in China and in the Philippine Insurrection. He later went to South Africa and participated as a non-combatant in the Boer War. After returning to the United States, he served as a guide to Theodore Roosevelt during one of T.R.’s hunting expeditions. He served as sheriff of Montgomery County, Kansas, and later as sheriff of Washington County, Oklahoma, and Two Buttes County, Colorado. Subsequent to that, he became a United States marshal in Montana, Arizona, and New Mexico. During a second term with the Texas Rangers, he single-handedly captured the notorious Shonts Brothers, desperadoes who had terrorized the Texas-Mexico cattle country for years. In 1909, he joined the Miller Brothers “ 101” Ranch and won numerous rodeo titles throughout the west. In 1918,he became a star at William Fox’s Studio and appeared in scores of silent westerns. In all of these pictures and in many to follow during the 1930s, Mix’s companion was his horse, Tony. Mix went to RKO Studios in 1929 after several extensive personal appearance tours through Europe and in the mid-1920s. He toured for three years with the Sells-Floto Circus and in 1931 signed a contract with Carl Laemmle for six talking pictures. At one time during his film career, Mix made more than $10,000 a week. In 1932 Mix made Destry Rides Again, which was the first of a series of nine westerns for Universal pictures. In 1935, he starred in what was to be his first serial and last motion picture. for Mascot entitled The Miracle Rider. Tom Mix made nearly 400 movies during his career, but his voice did not fit the new medium of talking films and after 1935 he appeared in road shows. His last years were spent touring with the Tom Mix Circus. On October 12, 1940 he was traveling across the Arizona desert in one of his custom-built roadsters on his way to Hollywood to discuss a movie comeback. The car overturned at a high rate of speed on a dirt road eighteen miles south of Florence, Arizona, and he was killed instantly. His wonder horse, Tony, died in 1944 at the age of 34. In June 1968, the Tom Mix Museum was opened in Dewey, Oklahoma, the site where he first starred in a movie. It features a $250,000 collection that retraces the life and legend of this great western film star.

From "Western Films Heroes, Heavies and Sagebrush",
by Author F. McClure and Ken D. Jones

Other Links

Tom Mix
Rugged Virtue in the Saddle
The Fabulous Tom Mix
Tom Mix the Actor
Tom Mix Circus and Films