Gunsmoke Country: The Television Western Era in Kanab

The television era of the nineteen fifties and sixties was the golden age of Kanab's film economy. When American audiences developed an insatiable appetite for televised Westerns, production companies found that Kanab's combination of varied terrain, reliable sunshine, and cooperative local support made it ideal for the rapid production schedules that weekly television demanded.

Gunsmoke, which ran for twenty seasons and became one of the longest-running dramatic series in American television history, shot multiple episodes in the canyons and valleys around Kanab. The Lone Ranger, Lassie, Wagon Train, Daniel Boone, and F Troop all used the landscape here. The productions brought crews and equipment into town for weeks at a time, filling hotels and hiring local extras and wranglers. The Parry Lodge's register of celebrity guests grew longer every season.

The decline of the television Western in the nineteen seventies slowed but did not stop the flow of production to Kanab. Feature films continued to arrive, including Planet of the Apes and The Outlaw Josey Wales. In more recent decades, commercials, music videos, and independent productions have added to the output. The Little Hollywood Museum at the edge of town keeps track of the full list, which runs to more than one hundred productions spanning more than eight decades.

For a town of roughly forty-seven hundred people, it is a filmography that would be remarkable for a city ten times the size. The canyon light that drew Tom Mix here in nineteen twenty-four still draws cinematographers today, because some problems of visual storytelling are best solved by driving to Kane County.