Ranch near Laramie, WY, 1941 (photo by Marion Post Wolcott)

Anyone who is well acquainted with the Western genre is probably familiar with the plot device of the ranch in peril. Many Western films and stories feature a pretty girl and her father, or a widow, or perhaps a family, trying to keep their mortgaged ranch from being foreclosed upon by the villain of the piece. It’s up to the hero to raise the money, or, alternatively, expose the crookedness of the man holding the mortgage. It’s a plot seen often enough to have become a cliché of the genre. Looking a little closer, though, the time period at which this type of plot became prominent is interesting. From what I’ve seen, it’s not so prevalent in earlier Western fiction (e.g. 1900 through 1920s). Land was sometimes endangered, yes, by range disputes, the elements, and so on, but the mortgage theme in particular had not yet become a cliché. But as I noted in a book review last summer, some collections of Western short stories from the 1930s through the ’50s featured the ranch-in-peril plot in a significant number of the stories.

Several years ago I read a very interesting article (regrettably no longer available to read online) titled “Through the Great Depression on Horseback: Lawyers in Western Films of the 1930s” by Francis M. Nevins Jr. One particular paragraph struck me as illuminating, since I’d watched plenty of the B-Westerns Nevins is referring to, and his comments on the ranch-in-peril theme made perfect sense:

Dozens of Western films of the thirties dealt with the evil banker foreclosing or about to foreclose the mortgage on the ranch that the young lady and her father own. Today we laugh at this as a cliché, but I believe we must keep in mind that this story line wasn’t at all entertaining for the people who were watching these films in little towns in the western and southern and middle states of America during the 1930s. Losing their homes to a bank was the threat that dominated their lives; for many of them, it was reality. These little Western films, remember, were made by people who didn’t have much money, who weren’t making much money, and for people who didn’t have much money and weren’t making much money.

The point about the evil financier is very true. If you’ve watched any amount of this type of Western you’ve probably seen it lots of times, but it takes on new significance if you consider it in its Depression-era historical context. Many of the chief villains were bankers, lawyers, and slick businessmen of one sort or another, often masquerading as honest citizens for most of the film. (My siblings and I inadvertently coined our own term for this type years ago: suit-villain. The kind that always wears a suit and spends most of his time behind a desk scolding his henchmen for their inefficiency. Sometimes wears a thin moustache and often has a derringer hidden in his inside coat pocket.) A sterling example of the crooked banker in the B-Western is 1940’s Texas Stagecoach. Here a banker convinces the owners of a stagecoach line to borrow heavily from him to finance an ambitious road construction project, then has his accomplices maneuver them into a feud with a rival company and sabotage their work so he can eventually foreclose.

The ranch-in-peril was already considered a cliché by the late ’40s, if you go by the criteria that it was ripe for satire. Songwriter Jack Elliott took a poke at it in the tongue-in-cheek number “I Love the West,” sung by Dale Evans in the movie Bells of San Angelo:

Some material in this post is drawn from one published a few years ago on a now-defunct prior blog of mine.