William S. Hart: The Cowboy Who Gave It All Away

Three miles west of this freeway, up in the Newhall hills above the Santa Clara River, there is a ranch that most people driving Interstate Five have never heard of. You should know about it. William S.

Hart was the first great Western film star in American cinema, the man who defined the cowboy before anyone else had the chance. He dominated the genre from roughly nineteen fourteen to nineteen twenty-five, before Tom Mix and eventually John Wayne refashioned what the Western was supposed to look like. Hart was an unusual figure in early Hollywood because he had actually lived the childhood the genre mythologized.

He grew up partly in the Dakotas, where his father worked, and spent formative years among Lakota Sioux people. He spoke the Sioux language. He was obsessed with getting the details right at a moment when the rest of Hollywood was inventing the West wholesale.

He built his ranch house, La Loma de los Vientos, in the Spanish Colonial Revival style, stocking the grounds with bison and longhorn cattle, filling the rooms with Frederic Remington bronzes and Western art. When Hart died in nineteen forty-six, he left the entire property to the County of Los Angeles in his will, specifying that it be kept as a public park. The research behind this program attributes to his intentions the phrase 'for children forever,' though the precise wording of the will has not been independently verified against the original document.

The park opened in nineteen fifty-eight. The ranch house is unchanged. The Remington bronzes are still there.

The bison pasture still has bison. The admission is free. Almost no one driving Interstate Five through Santa Clarita knows it exists.

That is the strangest part of the story: a man who made the West famous on screen gave his actual piece of it to the public, quietly, and the public mostly drives past without stopping.