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WEEK OF NOVEMBER 25: Legendary stuntman Yakima Canutt
Howdy folks, it’s the fourth week of November 2024 and welcome to This Week in The West.
I’m Seth Spillman, broadcasting from the National Cowboy & Western Heritage Museum in Oklahoma City.
On this podcast, we share stories of the people and events that have shaped the history, art and culture of the American West – and those still shaping it today.
He’d been in Hollywood since the silent picture era. He’d taken punches, fallen off horses, rolled down hills and gotten up each time. And in the summer of 1958, he was in Rome, standing behind a Roman chariot, preparing to shoot one of the greatest action sequences in movie history.
Yakima Canutt had come a long way from Colfax, Washington, where he was born this week November 29, 1895.
He was born Enos Edward Canutt and was raised on a ranch in the Palouse, those fertile hills and prairies of Eastern Washington north of the Snake River. Ranch life brought an interest in horses, and by the time he was a teenager, Enos was competing in rodeos. When he was 19, he was at the Pendleton Roundup; a newspaper misidentified him (and his hometown), calling him “Yakima” Canutt.
The name stuck, and his rodeo career flourished. His next year at Pendleton, he finished second overall and won a world title two years later. He won the Fort Worth Rodeo three years in a row, and in 1923, he won the saddle bronc competition at Pendleton again.
That same year, after attending a rodeo awards event in Hollywood, he was deluged with offers to be in the movies. By 1928, Yakima had been in 48 silent pictures.
But when talkies came, he worried about his career. His voice had been damaged by illness when he was in the Navy, so leading a picture would not be in the cards.
He found his place in stunts. He began developing harnesses and stirrups so he could repeatedly fall off a horse without being hurt. He figured out how to cause wagons to crash and horses to tumble.
In 1939, Yakima was asked to double for John Wayne in John Ford’s classic western “Stagecoach.” In the movie, he performed what is still considered one of the most incredible stunts in history. Yakima dives onto a team of galloping horses; he turns around, drops to the ground between them, slides under all of the horses and the stagecoach they are pulling and comes out the other side.
Steven Spielberg paid homage to Yakima’s stunt by having Indiana Jones do the same thing 42 years later in Raiders of the Lost Ark.
Yakima would double for John Wayne in other films, with some saying the Duke’s “strong-silent-type” cowboy mannerisms may have been influenced by his stuntman. Yakima was also the uncredited action star in Gene Autry’s movies, the Lone Ranger and Zorro.
William Witney, one of the directors who worked with Yakima, said this: “There will probably never be another stuntman who can compare to Yakima Canutt. He had been a world champion cowboy several times and where horses were concerned, he could do it all. He invented all the gadgets that made stuntwork easier.”
Yakima continued to innovate stunt techniques, but as he got older, he worked more behind the camera, which brings us back to Rome in 1958.
Yakima had been asked to help coordinate the action of the chariot race in the William Wyler-directed epic Ben Hur.
He worked for months, training Charlton Heston to drive the chariot and its horses. His staging of the colossal wreck during the film’s chariot race was seen as a milestone stunt. Unlike the early years of Hollywood, which took a toll on horses and stunt performers, no horses died, and no one was seriously injured during Yakima’s Ben Hur sequence. Yakima’s son Joe doubled for Heston in the memorable scene in which he’s flung into the air during a collision between chariots.
In 1967, Heston presented Yakima with an honorary Oscar.
When Yakima accepted the award, he said it was “in the name of all those stunt men and women who kept defying busted bones and bashed-in heads to make pictures more real and reality more picturesque. They’re a great gang, and I’m honored you chose me to honor them.”
Yakima is a member of the National Rodeo Hall of Fame here at the Cowboy.
He continued to work in the movies through the 1970s and died in Hollywood on May 24, 1986.
Yakima Canutt was 90 years old.
And with that, we’ll yell cut on this episode of “This Week in The West.”
Our show is produced by Chase Spivey and written by Mike Koehler
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We leave you today with the words of Charlton Heston from the foreward of Yakima Canutt’s autobiography entitled “Stunt Man”: “It is not only his work but (Yakima) himself who provides us all with a model of the finest kind of professional – the kind of man who always does his best. In a time when, increasingly, nobody cares about excellence, Yak cares.”
Much obliged for listening and remember, come Find Your West here at the National Cowboy & Western Heritage Museum.
