A Ticket to Tomahawk | |
---|---|
![]() Theatrical release poster | |
Directed by | Richard Sale |
Written by |
|
Produced by | Robert Bassler |
Starring | Dan Dailey Anne Baxter |
Cinematography | Harry Jackson |
Edited by | Harmon Jones |
Music by | Cyril J. Mockridge |
Color process | Technicolor |
Production company | |
Distributed by | 20th Century Fox |
Release dates |
|
Running time | 90 minutes |
Country | United States |
Language | English |
Box office | $1.3 million [1] [2] |
A Ticket to Tomahawk is a 1950 American Western film directed by Richard Sale and starring Dan Dailey and Anne Baxter. It was released by 20th Century Fox. Marilyn Monroe appeared in one of her earliest roles.
In 1876, Johnny Jameson (Dan Dailey), a "drummer" (traveling salesman), is the only passenger on the inaugural run of the Tomahawk and Western Railroad's narrow gauge train through the Colorado Rockies. The train is pulled by the Tomahawk and Western's only locomotive, a Baldwin ten-wheeler named Emma Sweeny.
During the ride, the conductor tells Johnny that certain people, stagecoach operators for example, would like to see the railroad's franchise fail. Soon afterwards, Dakota (Rory Calhoun), Trancas and Gila, who work for Colonel Dawson, the area stageline operator, cause a giant boulder to fall directly in the path of the train. Engineer Terence Sweeny (Walter Brennan) manages to stop the train in time, and he and the crew then disembark to move the rock.
Johnny decides to walk to the town of Epitaph and hitches a ride with Trancas and Gila. At the sheriff's office, when Johnny tries to report the train's delay to deputy Chuckity Jones (Charles Kemper), he is knocked out by Trancas. U.S. Marshal Dodge, meanwhile, is in the room next door getting ready to welcome the train with help from his tomboyish, knife-wielding granddaughter Kit (Anne Baxter). As they leave for the depot they are surprised by Trancas and Gila. The marshal shoots Trancas but is wounded by Gila. Johnny comes round and Kit suspects that he may also be one of the gang. Despite Chuckity intervening on his behalf she orders him to leave town before sunset.
Kit is deputized as a U.S. Marshal by her grandfather, who now cannot travel because of his wound. She and an Indian companion named Pawnee (Chief Yowlachie) are assigned to escort the train to Tomahawk. Colonel Dawson orders Dakota to join the posse that is escorting the train and also an Indian scout, Black Wolf, to stir up the local Arapahos. Other gang members plot to blow up the engine during a night stop.
Only after he has bought his ticket out of town does Sweeny learn that there is no track laid for the next forty miles. He is informed by local railway entrepreneur, Bishop, that the rails were lost at sea en route from England. Bishop explains that, as the train must reach Tomahawk to fulfill the requirements of the franchise contract, he has arranged for the Emma Sweeny to be hauled by a team of mules. Another condition is that the train must reach Tomahawk by a rapidly approaching deadline with at least one paying passenger. Kit is not pleased to discover that the passenger assigned to her care is Johnny, who is now reluctant to travel on the train. Johnny is roped to the side of the engine, and the locomotive, minus its passenger car, sets off pulled by the mules and accompanied by assorted wagons. Chinese laundry man Long Time (Victor Sen Yung) joins the group with much delayed laundry for Tomahawk, together with Madame Adelaide (Connie Gilchrist) and her dancing girls, Annie, Ruby, Clara (Marilyn Monroe) and Julie. A musician with pianola accompanies them.
As planned, Dawson's men Bat, Charley and Fargo show up at a night stop claiming to be telegraph men who are there to repair lines cut by the Arapahos. Kit gives them permission to bunk in the camp. Johnny convinces Madame Adelaide and the dancers to put on a show in the camp, and later joins in the musical performance himself. Kit gradually softens her attitude towards Johnny.
When all are asleep, Bat and Charley leave while Fargo tosses sticks of dynamite under the engine. Johnny, sleeping alongside the train, smells the lit fuse and alerts the others. Kit cuts the fuse with a shot and disables Fargo, but before he can talk, Dakota kills him.
Some time later, a few miles beyond where the track restarts, Bat and Charley are placing dynamite charges under a trestle. Johnny, Kit and Pawnee are scouting ahead and stop at the bridge. Bat and Charley consider shooting them, but are then themselves attacked and killed by Indians, and the dynamite is set off prematurely. Kit, Johnny and Pawnee are chased back to the train, which is then attacked by the war party. Johnny identifies the Arapaho chief, Crooked Knife, having previously worked with him in a travelling western show.
After the war party is driven off, Johnny volunteers to talk peace with him. He has learned that Long Time is carrying a load of fireworks and develops a plan. He is welcomed by Crooked Knife, who agrees to allow the train safe passage. However, some of the braves distrust Johnny and ask him to produce a sign that he is "big medicine." Johnny sets off a rocket, signaling Kit and Dakota to set off the rest of the fireworks on a nearby hill, and the Indians are impressed. As the railway bridge is now out, Kit intends to take the locomotive over a mountain by dismantling it and carrying it in pieces. Dawson, meanwhile, thinks he has been double-crossed and shoots Black Wolf. He then rounds up his men for a final showdown.
The Emma Sweeny is stripped of her cab, smokestack, tender and various other parts, and hauled over the mountain by the mules in several pieces. When they reach the track, the engine is put back together. Kit discovers that the water tower needed to fill the tender has been sabotaged by Dakota, but unknown to Dakota, the tender was already filled with water.
When Kit discovers that he sabotaged the tower, Dakota jumps aboard the train, slugs Johnny and forces the fireman to start the engine moving, leaving Kit and the rest of the party behind. Kit jumps into the cab. Dakota tries to shoot Kit, but is out of ammunition and throws his gun at her instead, knocking her unconscious. Johnny wakes up, and while he and Dakota fight on top of the cabin, Kit comes round and throws her knife at Dakota, causing him to fall off the train and plunge to his death in a ravine.
Dawson and his gang ambush the train but cannot catch up with it. However, they manage to shoot holes the boiler. The Emma Sweeny loses steam pressure and slows to a halt within sight of Tomahawk. A posse, headed by Marshall Dodge, rides out from the town and, together with the Araphoe, subdue Dawson's gang. Dawson flees but is pursued by Pawnee, who takes him out by throwing a tomahawk at him.
As the train has stopped just short of its goal, Johnny attempts to talk the mayor of Tomahawk into extending the town limits, thereby fulfilling the requirements of the franchise. He succeeds with seconds to spare. Kit has fallen in love with Johnny, but he says he cannot be with her, as he cannot give up his traveling life. She grabs her knife and threatens to cripple him to prevent him from traveling.
Several years later, Johnny is married to Kit and working as the train conductor. As the train sets off, he limps after it, waving to Kit and their five young daughters, all named after Madame Adelaide's dancers.
The steam locomotive that stars in the film, known as Emma Sweeny, was actually Rio Grande Southern #20, a 3-foot-gauge 4-6-0 Ten-Wheeler built by the Schenectady Locomotive Works in 1899. To appear older, it was dressed up with a false smokestack, headlight, and various other parts. It was also given a colorful paint scheme. The scenes of Emma Sweeny running under steam were shot on the Denver & Rio Grande Western Railroad's Silverton Branch (now the Durango & Silverton Railroad) north of Rockwood, Colorado, and a shot of the train crossing a large trestle used the Rio Grande Southern Railroad's Lightner Creek Trestle.
For the scenes where the locomotive is pulled by mules while off the track, a full-size wooden replica of RGS #20 was built, as the real locomotive would have been too heavy for the mules to pull. The mules pulled the model over parts of Molas Pass and on Reservoir Hill, which is now the site of Fort Lewis College.
After filming was completed, the replica changed hands several times, eventually being used in Petticoat Junction as a studio stand-in for the Hooterville Cannonball. [3] (The "real" Hooterville Cannonball was Sierra Railway #3, a larger standard-gauge Ten-Wheeler [4] ).
The wooden Emma Sweeny model was later put on display in Jackson, California, still in its Hooterville Cannonball appearance. In 2011, it was donated to the Durango Railroad Historical Society, which has restored the model to its Emma Sweeny appearance and placed it on display at Santa Rita Park in Durango, Colorado. [5]
In 2020, Rio Grande Southern #20 returned to operation, having last run in 1951. It was restored over a 14-year period and made its public debut on August 1, 2020. It is now operational and resides at the Colorado Railroad Museum. [6]
Song [7] | Performer(s) | Note(s) |
---|---|---|
"Oh, What a Forward Young Man You Are" | Performed by Marilyn Monroe, Marion Marshall, Joyce MacKenzie, Barbara Smith and Dan Dailey | – |
"A Ticket to Tomahawk" | Sung by chorus during the opening credits | Later sung by Dan Dailey (on guitar) |
"Pat Works on the Railway" | Sung by Dan Dailey (on mandolin) | (uncredited) |
"Ta-ra-ra Boom-der-é" | – | (uncredited) |
"Oh, Dem Golden Slippers!" | – | (uncredited) |
"Polly Wolly Doodle" | – | (uncredited) |
"She'll Be Comin' Around the Mountain When She Comes" | – | (uncredited) |
"Ach, Du Lieber Augustine" | – | (uncredited) |
"The Irish Washerwoman" | – | (uncredited) |
"Cheyenne" | – | Played by the calliope |
The Arapaho are a Native American people historically living on the plains of Colorado and Wyoming. They were close allies of the Cheyenne tribe and loosely aligned with the Lakota and Dakota.
The Cheyenne are an Indigenous people of the Great Plains. Their Cheyenne language belongs to the Algonquian language family. Today, the Cheyenne people are split into two federally recognized nations: the Southern Cheyenne, who are enrolled in the Cheyenne and Arapaho Tribes in Oklahoma, and the Northern Cheyenne, who are enrolled in the Northern Cheyenne Tribe of the Northern Cheyenne Indian Reservation in Montana. The Cheyenne comprise two Native American tribes, the Só'taeo'o or Só'taétaneo'o and the Tsétsêhéstâhese. The tribes merged in the early 19th century.
Durango is a home rule municipality that is the county seat and the most populous municipality of La Plata County, Colorado, United States. The city population was 19,071 at the 2020 United States Census. Durango is the home of Fort Lewis College.
Red Cloud's War was an armed conflict between an alliance of the Lakota, Northern Cheyenne, and Northern Arapaho peoples against the United States and the Crow Nation that took place in the Wyoming and Montana territories from 1866 to 1868. The war was fought over control of the western Powder River Country in present north-central Wyoming.
Pawnee Rock, one of the most famous landmarks on the Santa Fe Trail, is located in Pawnee Rock State Park, just north of Pawnee Rock, Kansas, United States. Originally over 150 feet (46 m) tall, railroad construction stripped it of some 15 to 20 feet (6.1 m) in height for road bed material. A memorial monument, picnic area, and pergola have been constructed on the top. From the top of the pergola is a view the Arkansas river valley and the route of the Santa Fe trail. Today it is a prominence rising 50 or 60 feet above the surrounding plains. Matt Field, who traveled the Santa Fe Trail in 1840, later wrote, "Pawnee Rock springs like a huge wart from the carpeted green of the prairie." Traders, soldiers, and emigrants who stopped, carved their names into the brown sandstone. Some of these names are still visible among the graffiti of the more recent visitors.
Green Acres is an American television sitcom starring Eddie Albert and Eva Gabor as a couple who move from New York City to a country farm. Produced by Filmways as a sister show to Petticoat Junction, the series was first broadcast on CBS, from September 15, 1965, to April 27, 1971.
Petticoat Junction is an American television sitcom that originally aired on CBS from September 1963 to April 1970. The series takes place at the Shady Rest Hotel, which is run by Kate Bradley; her three daughters Billie Jo, Bobbie Jo, and Betty Jo; and her uncle Joe Carson. The series is one of three interrelated shows about rural characters produced by Paul Henning. Petticoat Junction was created upon the success of Henning's previous rural/urban-themed sitcom The Beverly Hillbillies (1962–1971). The success of Petticoat Junction led to a spin-off, Green Acres (1965–1971). Petticoat Junction was produced by Filmways, Inc.
Hooterville is a fictional agricultural community that is the setting for the American situation comedies Petticoat Junction (1963–70) and Green Acres (1965–1971), two rural-oriented television series created or produced by Paul Henning for Filmways and CBS. Prior to the airing of Petticoat Junction, Hooterville is mentioned in an early episode in the first season of The Beverly Hillbillies, another Paul Henning sitcom. In this episode, Jethrine Bodine, Jethro Bodine's sister has a budding romance with a slick traveling salesman, Jasper, who invites her to a dance in Hooterville. Hooterville is a town, a valley, and a county, and has been described as "a place simultaneously Southern and Midwestern, but in a vague sort of way." Little concrete or reliable information can be gleaned from the two shows about the place, as references in individual episodes are rife with inconsistencies, contradictions, geographic impossibilities and continuity errors. The writers of the two shows often changed the details about the Hooterville community at will for the purpose of cracking a joke, and they left certain details intentionally vague and unexplained.
The Hooterville Cannonball is a fictional railroad train featured in Petticoat Junction, an American situation comedy that originally aired on CBS from 1963 to 1970. The train was considered an "important character" by the show's producers, and producer Paul Henning hired railroad historian Gerald M. Best to make sure that the locomotive sounds used on the show were authentic to a train of the same type and age.
Grenville Mellen Dodge was a Union Army officer on the frontier and a pioneering figure in military intelligence during the Civil War, who served as Ulysses S. Grant's intelligence chief in the Western Theater. He served in several notable assignments, including command of the XVI Corps during the Atlanta Campaign.
The Powder River Expedition of 1865 also known as the Powder River War or Powder River Invasion, was a large and far-flung military operation of the United States Army against the Lakota Sioux, Cheyenne, and Arapaho Indians in Montana Territory and Dakota Territory. Although soldiers destroyed one Arapaho village and established Fort Connor to protect gold miners on the Bozeman Trail, the expedition is considered a failure because it failed to defeat or intimidate the Indians.
The Dull Knife Fight, or the Battle on the Red Fork, part of the Great Sioux War of 1876, was a battle that was fought on November 25, 1876, in present-day Johnson County, Wyoming between soldiers and scouts of the United States Army and warriors of the Northern Cheyenne. The battle essentially ended the Northern Cheyennes' ability to continue the fight for their freedom on the Great Plains.
The Durango and Silverton Narrow Gauge Railroad, often abbreviated as the D&SNG, is a 3 ft (914 mm) narrow-gauge heritage railroad that operates on 45.2 mi (72.7 km) of track between Durango and Silverton, in the U.S. state of Colorado. The railway is a federally-designated National Historic Landmark and was also designated by the American Society of Civil Engineers as a National Historic Civil Engineering Landmark in 1968.
The Ghost Town & Calico Railway is a 3 ft narrow-gauge heritage railroad and amusement park attraction within Knott's Berry Farm, an amusement park located in Buena Park, California.
The Rio Grande Southern Railroad was a 3 ft (914 mm) narrow-gauge railroad which ran in the southwestern region of the US state of Colorado, from the towns of Durango to Ridgway, routed via Lizard Head Pass. Built by Russian immigrant and Colorado toll road builder Otto Mears, the RGS operated from 1891 through 1951 and was built with the intent to transport immense amounts of silver mineral traffic that were being produced by the mining communities of Rico and Telluride. On both ends of the railroad, there were interchanges with The Denver and Rio Grande Railroad, which would ship the traffic the RGS hauled elsewhere like the San Juan Smelter in Durango.
Dawson is a ghost town in Colfax County, New Mexico, United States. Dawson was the site of two separate coal mining disasters in 1913 and 1923. Dawson is located approximately 17 miles northeast of Cimarron. Dawson was a coal mining company town founded in 1901, when rancher John Barkley Dawson sold his coal-rich land in northern New Mexico to the Dawson Fuel Company. The Dawson Railway was built connecting the town to Tucumcari. The mines were productive, and by 1905 the town boasted a population of nearly 2,000, later reaching around 9,000.
Denver and Rio Grande is a 1952 American Technicolor Western film, directed by Byron Haskin and released by Paramount Pictures. The film is a dramatization of the building of the Denver and Rio Grande Railroad, which was chartered in 1870. It was filmed in the summer of 1951 on location on actual D&RG track near Durango, Colorado.
The El Paso and Southwestern Railroad began in 1888 as the Arizona and South Eastern Railroad, a short line serving copper mines in southern Arizona. Over the next few decades, it grew into a 1200-mile system that stretched from Tucumcari, New Mexico, southward to El Paso, Texas, and westward to Tucson, Arizona, with several branch lines, including one to Nacozari, Mexico. The railroad was bought by the Southern Pacific Railroad in 1924 and fully merged into its parent company in 1955. The EP&SW was a major link in the transcontinental route of the Golden State Limited.
Joseph P. "Joe" Carson, mainly referred to as Uncle Joe, is a main fictional character on the CBS sitcom, Petticoat Junction (1963–1970). Uncle Joe is the only character in the series to appear in all 222 episodes. He is portrayed by Edgar Buchanan, who is described as "absolutely perfect in the role," and "the perfect choice to play the loveable codger."
The Hoyt Hotel was a 175-room hotel located in Portland, Oregon. Harvey Dick purchased the hotel in 1941. In 1962, he renovated the hotel and added the Barbary Coast Lounge and Roaring 20s Room, a nightclub that attracted celebrities such as Johnny Carson, Duke Ellington, and Anne Francis. Dick closed the hotel in 1972 due to declining business.
{{cite web}}
: CS1 maint: unfit URL (link)