EULOGY FOR A COWBOY

BEN JOHNSON'S Last Trail Ride

The crisp air on that late September morning made crawling out of a warm bedroll woeful, but the smell of hot coffee brewing encouraged me. I stood up and reached for my hat. To the south, dark brooding clouds above the mesas promised rain. An orange glow slowly ascended from behind the mountains rimming the eastern ridge of Monument Valley. Cookie and his crew had been up since before dawn preparing breakfast. A few early risers had gathered by the campfire, hands clasped around steaming cups of coffee.

A big man with a weathered face had been one of the first to arise. He had poked his head through his tent's flaps, rubbed his eyes, and bellowed in his Oklahoma drawl, "Daylight's a-breakin', boys and girls! We ought to be 10 miles down the trail and trottin' by now!"

Academy Award-winning actor and reallife world champion rodeo roper Ben Johnson had returned to Monument Valley, from his home near Phoenix, for the first time in almost 50 years. Thirty trail riders, including me, had joined him on a nostalgic journey to where he had made some of those classic Western movies back in the days when we were smaller and our heroes were larger. For the rest of us riders, this would be the experience of a lifetime. No one knew it then, of course, but it also would be Ben Johnson's last trail ride.

I'd met Ben 20 years ago in Oklahoma City at the library of the Cowboy Hall of Fame. But in a sense, I'd known him all my life. He was one of my first cowboy heroes. And he'd been a real cowboy, off-screen as well as on, winning the world championship in team roping in 1953.

Raised on an Oklahoma ranch, Ben didn't climb into the saddle, he glided in. And he could handle horses. One of his most impressive feats on horseback was the "Roman Ride" he performed in the movie Rio Grande. He rode standing on a pair of racing horses, one leg planted on the back of each mount.

Ben had come to Hollywood in the 1940s as a horse wrangler for movie mogul Howard Hughes, but he was soon working as a stuntman and doubling for such stars as Gary Cooper and John Wayne.

Then came his big break. It happened in Monument Valley during the filming of Fort Apache. He made a daring rescue of a runaway wagon team, saving some actors from death or serious injury. In gratitude, director John Ford promised to reward him. Ben thought that might mean a speaking part in Ford's next film.

"He called me into his office when we got back to Hollywood," Ben recalled, "and handed me a seven-year contract. I read down to about the third line where it said, '$5,000 a week,' and I didn't read any further."

Ben went on to become one of Ford's most appealing proteges, playing everything from devil-may-care cowboy to heroic gunman and lovable curmudgeon. Ultimately he not only won an Oscar - in 1972 for his role as Sam the Lion in The Last Picture Show he also got his own star on Hollywood's Walk of Fame.

Part of the secret to Ben's success was that he was very much like those rock-solid heroes of the silver screen. He was what they called in the Old West "a good man to ride the river with," honest, strong, independent. And moral.

At a time when movies began shocking audiences with four-letter words, Ben refused to cave in. In fact, he turned down his role in The Last Picture Show until director Peter Bogdanovich allowed him to rewrite his lines and expunge the foul language.

At the beginning of our six-day Don Donnelly Horseback Vacations trail ride in Monument Valley, we had gathered by Guy Cly's corral at the foot of Sentinel Mesa. Before we set out, Donnelly, who has been running trail rides in Monument Valley for a dozen years, gave instructions to the riders, including one who said he'd never been on a horse before. Much to Ben's amusement, Donnelly told the fellow, "No problem, we'll give you a horse that's never been rode, and the two of you can start out together."

Leaving Cly's corral, we headed in an easterly direction, winding our way toward the landmark Mittens. The riders were a mixed group, including an oil heiress and a lawyer, both from Oklahoma; an artist from New York City; a mining engineer from Toronto; and a doctor from Denver. Several were fans and knew more about Ben's movies than he did. One recited some of the actor's lines to him as we rode along the dusty trail.

I was trotting alongside Ben when he nodded toward a large sand dune. "During Fort Apache, I was riding through that sand when my horse stumbled and went down," he said. "He went into cardiac arrest, and it looked like he was a goner. The doc ran up with a bottle of aspirin. I jammed as many as I could down the horse's throat, and we managed to save him."

Ben stopped and waited for the riders to gather around. Then he pointed toward the Mittens. "We were filming She Wore a Yellow Ribbon when a big thunderstorm blew in," he told us. "Lightning was bouncing off those buttes so the assistant director told the actors and crew to pack it in. John Ford like to had a fit, sayin', 'I'll tell you when to cut!' We were all scared of lightning, but we were more afraid of John Ford," Ben said with a broad grin.

"Ford was real tough. Duke Wayne and me visited him in the hospital just before he died. He looked at me and said, 'Ben, don't forget to always stay real.' And I've tried to do that."

"Did you have any gunfights around here, Ben?" a young woman asked.

"Yes ma'am," he drawled. "I've chased Indians and been chased by Indians around every rock in this valley.

BEN JOHNSON'S Last Trail Ride

"When we were filming Wagonmaster, I was being pursued by a band of Navajo warriors. I rode to this bluff and was supposed to turn and ride along its ridge. But that horse I was on got a case of cold jawand wouldn't respond to the bit. He jumped off that bluff, and we landed in the sand up to his belly. The reins were lying in the sand, so I just picked them up, spurred him, and off we went." That unintended leap was later measured at 32 feet, and the scene came to be known as one of the greatest examples of horsemanship ever filmed. "It was a thrilling ride," Ben opined with a sly grin. Another day Ben told a story about how he got a second big surprise during work on Wagonmaster. His costar, Joanne Dru, was supposed to toss a tub of bathwater out the back of a covered wagon, dousing both Ben and his horse. The script called for Ben to buck the horse around in a circle and get thrown on a certain spot where John Ford's cameras were set up. But one of the pranksters on the movie had slipped a real bucking horse in for the shot, and when that bathwater hit, the horse went ballistic and "plumb quit the Earth, pitchin' and squealing and having walleyed fits." Ben stayed with him and somehow managed to get bucked off in front of the cameras to complete the shot. Those two incidents explain why Ben was one of Ford's favorites. He could always handle the unexpected and make a scene work, emerging pretty much unscathed.Ben says that in all his years breaking horses and doing stunts, he never had a serious injury. "I lost plenty of hide," he admits, "but I never broke a bone." When some of the riders expressed amazement at Ben's movie horsemanship, he modestly replied, "I wasn't a good actor, so I had to be able to do something."

Ironically, in the movie he won the Oscar for, The Last Picture Show, he didn't ride a horse at all.

A few nights later, some of us were gathered at the campfire, trying to warm up. The wind was kicking up sand, and rain began to fall from the dark clouds hanging over the valley. Someone asked Ben about his famous barroom fight with the diminutive Alan Ladd in Shane. In the fight, Ben's character was supposed to lose, and it had to look realistic. "He could walk under my outstretched arm," Ben said of Ladd, a slow grin creasing his face. "So they put him on a platform and had me stand in a hole."

The weather in Monument Valley the week of our trail ride lived up to the adage that if you don't like it, stick around for a few minutes, and it'll change. It stormed, cleared up, then stormed again. During one blow, I told Ben I saw the Three Sisters spires leaning into the wind to keep frombeing knocked over. No real cowboy could let that pass, so Ben responded saying he remembered one morning in the valley when "it was so cold the Mittens were rubbing together to keep warm." On the last afternoon of the trail ride, Don Donnelly hosted a rodeo on a sandy flat just south of camp. No rough stock or roping in this one, just riding skills.

Events ranged from barrel racing to balancing an egg in a teaspoon at a gallop. My horse, Dan, and I had a good run at the barrels. We came in second - behind Ben Johnson.

Later that last evening, six-year-old Bronco Grinstead, who'd come on the ride with his parents, was practicing on a roping dummy attached to a bale of hay, and he was having trouble getting his loop to fall over the horns. Ben took the rope and offered him a few tips. Bronco had no idea he was getting advice from a champion roper. Ben built a loop, then noticed a crowd of riders had gathered. "Boy, I'd better not miss," he said good-naturedly.

He cast an unerring loop over the dummy on his first throw. Young Bronco was more impressed by that than all those cowboy movies he'd been hearing about. This was, after all, real life.

Some months later, on the afternoon of March 8, 1996, I was driving outside Phoenix when word came over the radio that Ben Johnson had died. It hit like the kick of a mule. Just a couple of weeks earlier, we'd been sitting around a table at the Festival of the West in Scottsdale, answering questions about frontier days. I pulled off the road and sat there for a long time. I was 10 years old when I saw Ben Johnson in She Wore a Yellow Ribbon, a teenager when he was in Shane, and more than 30 when he starred in The Last Picture Show. His movies marked milestones in my life, and he was a friend.

Ben had made his last earthly trail ride, fittingly, at Monument Valley where it all began. Now he rides celestial trails with other men of the West, artists and writers like Charles M. Russell and Will James. All of them were the genuine article, each in his own way presenting an authentic portrayal of the American West. But, unlike Russell and James, Ben Johnson is preserved on film for future generations. And that's good because we'll not see the likes of his kind again anytime soon.