ALONG THE WAY

Long Before the John Wayne Room Plaque, Real Men Who Won the West Stayed In Bisbee

While staying at the Copper Queen Hotel in Bisbee, I was surprised to notice that the room next to mine had a wooden plaque on its door identifying it as "The John Wayne Room." I didn't know quite what to make of that. Was it, for example, the hotel's attempt to create a sort of quaint Western ambience in the manner of some hotels at, say, Disneyland? That seemed unlikely, because the Copper Queen's authentic ambience and history don't need any cute hype to get a guest's attention. In any case, I didn't see plaques on any of the other doors. The John Wayne Room is 211. I stayed in 212. At checkout time, curiosity compelled me to ask the desk clerk about the room. She told me that when Wayne stayed at the hotel, he always requested that room.

I regretted that the luck of the draw had given me 212 instead of 211. As a nostalgist and aficionado of life's fascinating little coincidences and improbabilities, I would have loved it that Wayne had spent a considerable amount of time in the same room as I, looking at the same four walls, using the same facilities. With a bottle of tequila, perhaps, and boots propped up on the bed rail. I found myself wondering why he was so partial to 211. Presumably it was essentially identical to the room that I had stayed in and had the same mundane view of a little alley, from which wafted upward the conversations of workers from a nearby restaurant during their breaks.

I don't want to seem too much in awe of John Wayne. I know he worked as an actor and was not really the Ringo Kid, Hondo, Nathan Brittles, Tom Dunson, Sergeant Stryker or the like. But when I was growing up, he represented the archetypal American hero frontiersman, cowboy, cavalry soldier, World War II pilot, naval officer, soldier and marine. The year Sands of Iwo Jima came out, I had a picture of Wayne as Sergeant Stryker the back cover of "John Wayne Comics" taped to my bedroom wall.

John Wayne defined tough-ness, self-reliance and hero-ism for me as an adolescent. Only much later would I see the irony of that symbolic heroism. I thought about the idea that while he was making war movies like Back to Bataan, The Flying Tigers and They Were Expendable, many men some of whom would later co-star with him were engaged in real-life combat, earning Purple Hearts, Silver Stars and Distinguished Flying Crosses for real.

Wayne's connection with Arizona and the Southwest shows in that most of the Indians he fought against came from Southwestern tribes almost always the Apaches.

I felt a sense of the Wayne mystique when I spent a night next door to The John Wayne Room. In retrospect, however, it seems a little misplaced, because the Copper Queen Hotel has hosted major real-life historical figures like Teddy Roosevelt and "Black Jack" Pershing as well as countless cattlemen, soldiers, mining officials, Territorial governors, gamblers and politicians the men who really did win the West.

Put into this context, Wayne's commemorative room seems slightly gauche. Who, for example, were some of the guests who stayed in that same room during the early 1900s? No doubt some of those guests I played real-life roles in the Apache Wars of the 1860s, '70s, and '80s. I remember, with a subliminal hint of my original excitement, any number of Wayne's exploits in movies like Fort Apache, She Wore a Yellow Ribbon, Rio Grande, and Hondo but just imagine what the lives of many of the early-day guests of the Copper Queen must have been like. As someone who grew up in a mining community in the backwoods of north Idaho in the 1950s, I think the authenticity of those lives deserves to upstage the mythology Wayne's life represents. No disrespect to Hondo, but I'm inclined to believe that Louis L'Amour would have agreed with me in this matter.

Incidentally, poet Allen Ginsberg once stayed in the Copper Queen, too. But that, as the man said, is another story.