Two Men Named Hal Taliaferro
If you've watched a lot of B-Westerns from the 1930s and '40s, you've probably seen Hal Taliaferro a dozen times. If you watch primarily "A" pictures, you might remember him in the role of buckskin-clad trail hand "Old Leather" in Red River (1948), half hidden behind Buffalo Bill-esque hair and beard. And even if you don't know the name or the face, you might recognize him by his voice—he had one of the most distinctive and recognizable speaking voices in old movies. The first time I watched Dark Command (1940), in which he had a bit part as a townsman, I couldn't spot him in a crowd scene but knew he was there somewhere because I knew the voice.
Like many actors, he performed under a screen name. Two different screen names, in fact. But unlike a lot of regulars in Western movies, Taliaferro was a genuine Westerner himself, born into a ranching family and working as a cowboy in his youth before he headed for Hollywood. And the story behind his second and probably most familiar screen name goes back to some entertaining tales from his family's early days ranching in Montana in the 1880s. Hal Taliaferro was born Floyd Taliaferro Alderson in Sheridan, Wyoming in 1895, and grew up on his family's ranch near Birney, Montana. As a lanky youngster Floyd was nicknamed "Skin and Bones" and the name got shortened to "Bones," and subsequently his younger brothers Allen and Irving were nicknamed "Big Bones" and "Little Bones"—so when the brothers grew up and took over the family ranch it became known as Bones Brothers Ranch. A cattle ranch to begin with, it eventually became a popular working dude ranch. Author Mary Roberts Rinehart, best known for her mystery novels but accomplished in multiple genres, was an avid traveler and camper who penned a number of nonfiction travel books and articles about her experiences, including a good deal of enthusiastic writing about her visits to America's western national parks and to dude ranches in Wyoming and Montana. Her fondest connection was to the famous Eaton's Ranch near Sheridan, Wyoming, but she also visited the Bones Brothers Ranch, and in 1925 published a piece in the Saturday Evening Post titled "Riding the Circle On Hanging Woman," in which she described riding on a cattle roundup there with the Alderson family. (This was actually due to the connections between Eaton's and the Bones Brothers Ranch: the Alderson boys had worked on Eaton's dude ranch for a time before returning to develop their own, and their cousin Patty Alderson married into the Eaton family.)
By this time, however, Floyd Alderson was in Hollywood, putting his cowboy upbringing to new use on the silver screen. He first went to work in movies about 1915, doing horse wrangling, stunt work, and uncredited acting. After some time in the army during WWI, he went back to film work, and in 1925 he got his first lead role. According to The Old Corral, producer Lester F. Scott Jr. picked out several actors with real Western background or experience to star in silent action Westerns, and Floyd Alderson—who was given the screen name of Wally Wales—was one of his choices. Over the next decade "Wally Wales" starred first in nearly twenty silent films and then a string of early "talkies." Stills from these films show him as a tall, lean, dashing figure in the enormous white hat and silk neckerchief that were de rigueur for screen cowboy heroes of the period—almost unrecognizable to anyone who remembers him from his second career as a character actor!
In the mid-1930s, as he approached age forty, his career as a leading man came to an end—but his acting career didn't. He changed gears and continued working steadily in supporting and bit parts, sometimes credited and sometimes not: henchman, guard, deputy, chauffeur, henchman and henchman again. Around 1936 he switched to the new screen name of Hal Taliaferro, using his real middle name as his surname, and under this name he became a staple of supporting casts in the B-Westerns of the late '30s and the '40s. He played mostly bad guys, often the second-in-command villain who took his orders from the "brains heavy" and bossed the other henchmen around. There was variety to his parts—sometimes he was the smooth and debonair type of crook, other times rough and unkempt; sometimes his character was just plain mean, while other times there was a twist of humor. Occasionally he turned up on the right side of the law as a sheriff or ranger. My favorite of his good-guy roles is in Roy Rogers' The Border Legion (1940), in which he plays an upstanding sheriff with a dry sense of humor who aids and abets Roy in infiltrating an outlaw gang led by a couple other fine character actors, Joe Sawyer and Jay Novello. Whichever side of the law his character was on, anybody with a soft spot for the old-time B-Western will fondly remember Hal Taliaferro, with his familiar gruff voice, as one of the best supporting players in the genre.
But it wasn't until years after my childhood days of watching Taliaferro brawl and shoot it out with Roy Rogers and Gabby Hayes that I discovered a fascinating addendum to his story: what in all likelihood was the inspiration for his second screen name.
One of the first memoirs that I read when I first began to get deeply interested in Old West history was A Bride Goes West by Nannie Tiffany Alderson. And at some point I put two and two together and realized that Nannie was Floyd Taliaferro Alderson's aunt by marriage. (Nannie was Patty Alderson Eaton's mother, and lived at Eaton's Ranch with her daughter's family at the time Mary Roberts Rinehart visited there and wrote about it.) Nannie Tiffany, born in West Virginia, met Walter Alderson on a visit to relatives in Kansas, and in 1883 married him and traveled with him to the new ranch he had just started in Montana—a gently-reared Southern girl with little practical knowledge of any housekeeping, starting life as a new bride on the still wild and sparsely settled prairie! Her memoir is a wonderful chronicle of ranch life—and one of the most touching things about the book is the way she recalls the gallantry, loyalty and friendliness of the young cowboys who were part of the Aldersons' household and practically members of the family in those early years. In the absence of other women, they were the ones who taught the inexperienced Nannie many things about cooking, keeping a house and generally living on the prairie; and took turns staying with her at the ranch as her bodyguard when her husband was working out on the range. And among the little crew was a cowboy named Hal Taliaferro.
He was twenty-three when Nannie Alderson knew him, a lively, mischievous character who made a brief but vivid impression on their lives. Nannie referred to him as "that scamp Hal," and remembered him challenging her to a race on horseback (with her riding sidesaddle on a mule) and teaching their Newfoundland dog to carry in pieces of wood for the stove, "perhaps with a view to avoiding work." She wrote:
Of all my guardians, Hal was the most amusing. I had had so many frights with snakes, that on summer nights when Mr. Alderson was on the roundup, Hal would take his bed—a roll of blankets done up in canvas—and put it down outside the door of the shack, saying soothingly, "Now if you get scared you can just holler and old Sawney'll be right here." He always referred to himself as "old Sawney"—why, I never knew, or can't remember. He was a strange character, warm-hearted, reckless and wild...
Nannie remembered Hal as beloved in spite of his faults. He took the responsibility of protecting her seriously, and on one occasion when his younger brother Brown allowed Nannie to ride home alone after she asked him to escort a neighbor girl home instead, Hal was so furious that he decided to throw a good scare into his brother when he came home by asking him, "Where's Mrs. Alderson?" and pretending that she had never returned. Another time when Walt and Nannie Alderson were away from home, Hal heard that a man had been drowned in a nearby river on the day Walt Alderson was due to cross it, and immediately mounted up and rode all night until he found someone who could tell him definitely that the dead man was a stranger and not his employer. "That act of solicitude was very like Hal, and helps to explain why we loved him," recalled Nannie.
Hal's eventual exit from the Aldersons' lives was an explosive one worthy of Western fiction or film. In the spring of 1884, he and another man were alone at the ranch when a few Indians from the nearby Northern Cheyenne tribe stopped by for a meal. Afterwards, Hal looked out through the ranch house door and saw an old chief named Black Wolf sitting and smoking in the yard, and seized by one of his typical reckless whims, he said to his companion, "I'll bet you five dollars I can put a hole through that old Indian's hat without touching his head," to which the other man naturally replied, "I'll bet you can't." Hal drew his six-shooter and shot off Black Wolf's hat, just nicking his scalp. Though not seriously hurt, the chief was furious, and refused to believe it had been done as a joke—and the upshot was that the Cheyenne went on a brief but destructive warpath and burned the Alderson ranch to the ground. The uprising was swiftly quelled by a sheriff and posse, and a handful of the Cheyenne who had set fire to the house were tried and convicted; but Hal Taliaferro was also a wanted man for having started all the trouble, and had to flee Montana—on Walt Alderson's best cutting horse! Nannie Alderson, who fortunately was in Miles City with her newborn baby at the time of the Cheyenne uprising, described the story of Hal's escape as it was later told to her:
Miss Young and her mother, our neighbors on Muddy Creek, blackened his light hair and moustache with shoe polish and he got away, even riding some miles with the stock inspector who was trying to find him. I have heard it said that just before he left Montana he was hiding at the LX Bar ranch on Powder River, when somebody came and told him that the Deputy U.S. Marshal was in sight, riding down the long fenced lane that led to the house. Hal waited until the Marshal was almost up to him; then took his horse and rode to the bank of Powder River, which was in flood and a mass of floating, grinding cakes of ice. While the officers watched he plunged his horse into the stream and swam to the other side, knowing well that no one else would dare to follow. On the other bank he stopped and unsaddled, wrung out his saddle blanket and waved it at his pursuers in a final Hal-like gesture; then saddled again and rode away. That, at any rate, is the story. I don't know whether it's true or not, but it sounds just like Hal.
The Aldersons never saw him again, though his brother Brown continued to work for them until 1892, but years later they heard that he had settled in Kansas, married, and became a farmer. This was true: I found him on the 1900 and 1905 censuses and then discovered his memorial page at Find a Grave, with family information that matches everything Nannie Alderson knew about him and his brother.
She summed him up this way: "His brothers always said that he never thought before he did a thing. And I don't believe he ever thought after."
Given this colorful history, it's easy to understand Nannie's brother-in-law Lewis Alderson (father of the Bones Brothers) paying tribute to the Taliaferro brothers with his eldest son Floyd's middle name—and though I don't think anybody has ever confirmed it in black and white, it's hard to imagine that Floyd Alderson didn't have stories of the real Hal Taliaferro in mind when he chose his second screen name years later. I wonder if the real Hal would have chuckled over the thought of the dozens of outlaw and henchman characters who filled the movie screen with gunsmoke and fisticuffs under his name!
Floyd Alderson—or Hal Taliaferro, as movie buffs know him—retired from acting in the early 1950s and returned home to the Bones Brothers Ranch, where he lived and worked until his death in 1980. According to Wyoming Tales and Trails, the ranch continued to host dudes until the 1960s. Today, it is on the National Register of Historic Places, and is still owned and operated as a cattle ranch by members of the Alderson family.
This post is a contribution to the Legends of Western Cinema Week blogathon, hosted by Hamlette's Soliloquy, Along the Brandywine, and Meanwhile, in Rivendell. Visit any of the hosts to check out all the other contributions!