The Unsung Joe: Blackjack Ward

In the early 1930s, the corner of Gower street and Sunset boulevard became the gathering place for a Hollywood subculture that kept itself almost entirely separate from the rest of the movie colony: the cowboy extras. The corner was near the poverty row studios that produced western B-movies and serials, and the Columbia drugstore there let the men use its payphone as a point of contact for Central Casting. At any time of day, between 25 and 50 characters in Stetsons and checked shirts could be seen on the sidewalk, killing time and -- because all these men had once been genuine cowboys, unlike the cowboy stars like Roy Rogers or Gene Autry -- reminiscing about the old days before the great ranches of the west had been broken up into farms and homesteads, when they’d been able to get real work driving cattle across the open range.

By the 1940s, the corner was known as Gower Gulch. This is the story of the killing that earned it that name.

From the early days of Hollywood, dispossessed and disillusioned cowboys had drifted into Hollywood, looking for work. A studio backlot was a long way from the prairies and plains that they were used to, but at least working as an extra in westerns kept them in the saddle and allowed them to dress as they’d always dressed and associate with other men who knew a lariat from a branding iron.

Blackjack Ward was one such man. He’d been a range rider most of his life, and claimed to have served as Pancho Villa’s right-hand man in the Mexican revolution of 1910⁽¹⁾ but, by 1927, when he was in his late 30s, the scarcity of work on the range had brought him to Hollywood. His skill on horseback kept him busy in the hundreds upon hundreds of westerns that required competent riders, and his villainous scowl and expressive eyes secured him plenty of work as background henchmen such as the one on the left of this still from The Ghost Rider (1935):

(Still courtesy of Les Adams, via The Old Corral)

However, like most of the Hollywood cowboys, Blackjack never took to city ways, and the same urge to keep the ways of the open range alive that lay behind affairs such as the exclusive round-ups that were held in the desolate flatlands beyond Los Angeles, at which only men who had worked on chuck wagons before 1910 would gather to share their old staples of sow belly, beans and sourdough biscuits, doubtless led to Blackjack’s involvement in the story that lay behind this headline:

⁽²⁾

On the morning of February 23, 1940, around 50 cowboy extras were standing around outside the drugstore on the corner of Gower and Sunset. Blackjack was there, and so was Johnny Tyke, another western bit-part player who had an impressive criminal record and was currently wanted by the police in connection with a string of hold-ups. Here’s his mug shot:

⁽³⁾

What happened next is probably best told in what purport to be Blackjack’s own words, pieced together from newspaper reports that appeared in subsequent days:

“I had known Tyke for quite a while -- I fed and helped that varmint for years. A few months ago, he was in jail for drunk driving, but I didn’t go to see him and, when he got out, he kept pestering me because of it. We had arguments and he threatened me. One day he said he was going to beat me to death or else use his Bowie knife on me.

“Well, we met in the drugstore where the boys hang out, and Tyke started in again. He got real abusive and called me names no man worth the powder to blow him to hell will take back where I come from in old Arizona, but I says, ‘Look here, you’re bigger than me and you probably could whip me. There ain’t no sense to this anyway, and I don’t want no trouble.’

“I got in my car and started to drive away. Tyke jumped in front of the car and yelled, ‘No you don’t. Let’s settle this right now.’

“Well, I usually carry my old gun with me; just a sort of habit a man gets into when he spends a lot of time riding the range. When Tyke tried to get in the car, I shot at him once through the windshield and drove off.” ⁽⁴⁾

According to witnesses among the cowboy extras on the corner, however, Blackjack’s story is incomplete. The papers reported that a wrestler known as Yukon Jake Jackson picked up the tale. “I heard the glass fly and the gravel kick up and I knew it was a bullet that just went by my kisser,” he said. He hadn’t been sure whether he was watching some sort of movie stunt or a dress rehearsal until the bullet smacked into the wall beside him. “Then I says, ‘This is no picture. This is real.’” He called out, “Get for cover, men! Them’s not blanks he’s a-shootin’! Them’s bullets!”

“I saw some feller run east on Gower. I seen a man coming from an auto with a rod and he was right behind the man runnin’ like he was goin’ right down Hollywood. I heard a shot and Tyke done a little wobblin’.”

Jackson followed Blackjack and Tyke down an alley and saw them grappling with each other. “I tried to edge into where I could make them listen to reason. I heard Blackjack say, ‘You been botherin’ me for the last time.’ But Tyke was goin’ for a weapon. At least, it sure looked like it, because he passed up a lot of doors.”

Before Tyke was able to find whatever weapon he was going for -- if that was indeed what he was doing -- Blackjack shot him again, this time in the head.

Blackjack took off in his car as the police arrived, but he only got a few blocks before he was cornered. According to the officers, Blackjack jumped from his car and turned on them, holding down the trigger of his pistol while he “fanned the hammer in true frontier style.”⁽⁵⁾ The gun was empty, however, and the officers overpowered him and took him into custody, where he was charged with murder.

The killing divided the cowboy extras. One camp believed Blackjack had deliberately set out to murder Tyke -- Jack Montgomery, a sometime cattleman and ranch-owner who rode as an extra in countless films, stated simply, “Blackjack dry-gulched Johnny Tyke” -- while the other camp claimed that Blackjack had every reason to believe that Tyke, who was bigger than him by far and was known to carry a knife, really was about to cut his heart out, as he’d once threatened to do.⁽⁶⁾ Blackjack’s partisans turned out to support him at his arraignment hearing:

⁽⁷⁾
A statement released by a group of Gower Gulch extras read: "Tyke has been a nuisance and a menace to us all for several years. He has always been mean and ornery. He was a good stunt man but was always working himself out of jobs because he was so mean. He has made a practice of annoying motion picture extras and cowboys. He has forced his way into our homes and forced us to feed him and made a practice of slapping us around on the street. Somebody had to do something about it and it turned out to be Ward. He had been pestering and annoying Ward and making his life miserable for months. Blackjack is a tough old cowboy, but we're all for him."⁽⁸⁾

But the trial, which took place in July that year, was concerned not with how ornery Tyke might have been, but with the issue of whether the killing had been in self-defence, and that all depended on the question of whether Tyke was armed or not. Things looked bleak for Blackjack, as no weapon had been found on Tyke’s body.

Finally, the question was resolved by the intervention of Yukon Jake Jackson, who inserted himself into the story for a second time when he produced a pearl-handled knife in court, saying, “This here knife was Johnny Tyke’s. I heard Blackjack testify that Tyke had said he was going to cut Ward’s heart out with his shiv. That started me to thinkin’.” Jackson said he had suddenly recalled something that had happened just after the day of the killing, when he had taken his Doberman out into the parking lot where Tyke had died. “My mutt started prowling round in some bushes. He dug up this knife. I didn’t think nothing of it at the time and stuck it in my pocket and tossed it in with my fishing tackle. I forgot all about it until I heard what Blackjack said.”⁽⁹⁾

When a shoemaker called Joseph Hebec, who made the steep-heel boots that the cowboy extras wore, identified the knife as the one that he had previously testified to having seen Tyke carrying shortly before he was killed, the prosecutor moved that the case be dismissed. Blackjack was free to go home and resume his career, which he did, although his previously steady flow of work slowed to a trickle after the trial, never to regain its former level.

As he celebrated his release, Blackjack was asked for a comment by a reporter. Strapping on the gun that he’d used to kill Johnny Tyke, he said, “From now on, I’ll carry her unloaded.”⁽¹⁰⁾

That resolution might have saved the life of another Gower Gulch extra, in a postscript to the affair that occurred two years later. In April, 1942, Blackjack was drinking in the Roundup Café with a cowboy extra called Henry Isabell when an argument started, apparently concerning the trial. When Blackjack called Isabell a stool pigeon, Isabell threw a punch that knocked him to the floor. Blackjack got up, and Isabell knocked him down again. At that, Blackjack pulled out his gun and would no doubt have shot Isabell dead, if only he’d had any bullets. Instead, he proceeded to pistol-whip him, which earned him a year in jail for assault with a deadly weapon.⁽¹¹⁾

Blackjack died in 1954, at the age of 63, three years after he was fined $50 for chasing a stall owner through a market with a meat cleaver after the man refused to loan him $1:

^⁽¹²⁾

Perhaps surprisingly, Blackjack died peacefully in bed. According to the stories that the retired extras of Gower Gulch would tell when they met up in later years to kick back and recall past glories, Blackjack’s last words, whispered in the ear of an old friend from his range-riding days, were, “Bobby, you tell my friends adios, and my enemies I’ll see them in hell."⁽¹³⁾

Sources: (1)'The Hollywood Posse', Diana Serra Cary, University of Oklahoma Press, 1996, p.138; (2)Morning Avalanche (Lubbock, Texas), Feb 24, 1940; (3)El Paso Herald-Post, Feb 24, 1940; (4)Blackjack's quotes come from The San Antonio Light, Feb 24, 1940, Zanesville Signal, Feb 24, 1940, The Hammond Times, Feb 25, 1940; (5), (6) and (8)Waterloo Daily Courier, Feb 25, 1940; (7)Hayward Daily Review, March 5, 1940; (9)Reno Evening Gazette, July 19, 1940; (10)Ogden Standard-Examiner, July 24, 1940; (11)Lima News, April 11, 1942; (12)Wisconsin State Journal, Sep 27 1951; (13)'The Hollywood Posse', Diana Serra Cary, University of Oklahoma Press, 1996, p.142.

Comments

It seems that life in Hollywood in those years was more dangerous than in fiction, at least for those old cowboys who were used to wear their guns and fists all of a sudden when any little argument -serious or not- forced them to show who was more macho among all them! In my opinion, Ward didn't know how to handle things properly...but one had to be there by 1940, in order to see if manners were useful then! Nice article as usual, plenty of accurate data and stylish narration. Go ahead!

Posted by: Fabián Cepeda | October 20, 2009 at 07:08 AM

Thanks, Fabián. Glad you liked it. To me, Blackjack's two subsequent convictions suggest that he killed Tyke not because his only other option was to let himself be killed, but because he lost his temper. He seems to have been, basically, a pretty violent man. However, like you say, I'm sure a lot of those guys were just the same...

Posted by: diarmid mogg | October 20, 2009 at 08:18 AM