Background

Gibson was born Edmund Richard Gibson on August 6, 1892, in Tekamah, Nebraska, the son of Hyram Gibson, a grocery store operator who also ran a small ranch, and Ida Belle Richards. He acquired the nickname "Hoot" as a youth because of his fondness for hunting owls on the nearby Sioux Indian Reservation. While there is little information about his early years it is clear that he learned to ride on his father's ranch and had left Tekamah by the time he was fourteen.

Career

Gibson worked as a cowboy throughout the West, eventually driving horses from Nevada to the San Fernando Valley of California. He also participated in Wild West shows and rodeos. Along with many other cowboys, Gibson was drawn into the emerging film industry as a stunt rider. At the end of one of the horse drives to California he was offered $20 a week, plus $2. 50 for each fall from his horse, by one of the film companies operating in the San Fernando Valley. Gibson's first screen appearance was in Shotgun Jones (1911). For the next few years he alternated appearances in rodeos and Wild West shows with work in movies made at Universal's San Fernando Valley ranch - which was complete with an Indian Village and a bunkhouse for the actors and cowboys. Gibson was part of a group of men whose way of life was destroyed as the open range was closed and the long cattle drives ended. They gravitated to Wild West shows, rodeos, and to the movies - moving from one to the other much as they had once moved from ranch to ranch. In 1912 Gibson won the gold belt as World's All-Around Cowboy Champion at the Pendleton, Oregon, Round-Up, a measure of the real skills he brought to his film work. In 1915 he toured Australia with a Wild West show. After the United States entered World War I he served in the Fourth Division in France. He then returned to California and began to appear more regularly in films but attracted little attention. Gibson's break came in 1920 when Carl Laemmle, head of Universal Pictures, selected John Ford, the younger brother of a Universal director, to direct a series of five-reel Westerns, and Gibson, who had been part of Universal's cast of extras and stuntmen off and on since 1910, to star in them. The first of these was Action (1921). The two men made three pictures together in rapid order and were launched on their successful careers. Gibson and Ford shared an apartment in Hollywood while making these pictures and became lifelong friends. Gibson's career reached its peak between 1925 and 1930. He was earning an average of $14, 500 a week and making up to eight films a year, nearly all of which were Westerns, including several serials - Long, Long Trail (1929), Lariat Kid (1929), Mounted Stranger (1930) - with titles that left little doubt as to what they were about. In all he made 200 silent and seventy-five talking pictures. He lived on the grand scale of Hollywood stars of his generation. Most of the estimated $6 million he earned was spent on fast cars, airplanes, a ranch in Nevada, and several marriages and divorces. Gibson survived an airplane crash during a match race against fellow cowboy star Ken Maynard. Many feared his film career would be ended by the serious injuries he suffered, but despite a permanent limp he returned to the screen in 1935. In 1944 Gibson retired from motion pictures. He lived on his ranch in Nevada, which he had named the "D-4-C. " In the early 1950's he turned to television as host of a live cowboy show on a Los Angeles station. Following the show's short run he became the greeter at the Last Frontier Hotel in Las Vegas, where he lived until his final illness. During his retirement Gibson made occasional film appearances, the most notable of which was as a blacksmith in John Ford's The Horse Soldiers (1959). When the company gathered in Natchez, Mississippi, for location shooting, the headline of the local paper revealed Gibson's enduring popularity. Gibson died on August 31, 1973 in Palm Desert, California.

Achievements

• Gibson was among the most popular stars of Westerns; his pictures captured a vanishing way of life that Gibson knew well.

Works

More photos

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  • Marked Trails
  • The Hard Hombre (1931)
  • Sunset Range
  • Clearing the Range
  • Man's Land
  • Feud of the West
  • The Law Rides Again
  • Wild Horse (1931)

Connections

On September 6, 1913, Gibson married Rose August Wenger, a rodeo performer he had met at the Pendleton Round-Up in Oregon sometime between 1911 and 1913. On April 25, 1922, Gibson married singer Helen Johnson; they had one daughter and were divorced in 1927. In June 1930 he married actress Sally Eilers; they were divorced in August 1933. In 1941 he married rodeo performer and singer Dorothy Dunstan.

Father:

Hyram Gibson

Mother:

Ida Belle Richards

Spouse:

Sally Eilers

She was an American actress.

Spouse:

Helen Johnson

Spouse:

Rose August Wenger

She was an American film actress, vaudeville performer, radio performer, film producer, trick rider and rodeo performer; and is considered to be the first American professional stunt woman.

Spouse:

Dorothy Dunstan

colleague:

John Ford

He was an American film director.

References

• Immortals of the Screen