Tom Mix: Mix Township's Most Famous Son

Tom Mix was born here in Mix Run on January sixth, eighteen eighty, in a log cabin in Cameron County, Pennsylvania. He enlisted in the army during the Spanish-American War, though his unit never went overseas, and later drifted west, working as a cowboy and ranch hand before landing in Hollywood. Between nineteen ten and nineteen thirty-five he appeared in roughly three hundred films, most of them silent Westerns, making him the biggest movie cowboy of the era.

His action-heavy style, elaborate costumes, and heroic white-hat persona shaped the template that every screen cowboy who followed him would imitate. Mix also performed in circus rings when film work slowed. He died on October twelfth, nineteen forty, in an automobile accident near Florence, Arizona.

The township where he was born is named for his family. A roadside monument topped with a metal silhouette of a riderless horse, south of Florence, Arizona, marks the crash site.