(Western music) - The actor John Wayne came to personify the Old West.

He was a guy who slow talked and fought his way across the frontier, who could ride and tumble with the best of them.

He became the archetypical tough-guy cowboy, but he wasn't a cowboy, far from it.

So who taught John Wayne to be John Wayne?

It was a guy from eastern Washington who most people have forgotten, if they ever heard of him, a guy who changed how we see the West and changed Hollywood itself.

He was Yakima Canutt.

(Western music) (logo crackles) (playful music) Canutt's real first name was Enos, just as John Wayne's was Marion, not very cowboy.

He was born in the 1890s, on the edge of Washington's frontier.

Whitman County, back then, was still a place where cattle was rustled and the citizens, occasionally, strung up supposed bad guys from the upper floor of the county courthouse.

Enos Canutt's family were Oregon pioneers in the 1850s and moved to a spread in the Snake River Hills, south of Colfax to farm and ranch.

The Land of the Palouse country was fertile.

Canutt grew tall and was surrounded by family.

His uncle was county sheriff for a time.

As a child, his family moved, for a brief time, to Seattle where he attended Green Lake Elementary School, his only education.

(gentle music) (upbeat music) But Canutt was born to ride horses, bust broncos and bring down steers.

His first rodeo was in 1912 here at the Whitman County Fairgrounds, where he won the bronc riding contest.

He was a tall lad who could take the punishment dished out in the rodeo arena and he thrived on it.

He was the Gretzky of the saddle, the Griffey of bulldogging steers.

He went on to win numerous first place awards and competitions throughout the teens and the twenties.

By the age of 20, Canutt was a major rodeo star.

At the Pendleton Roundup in Oregon one year, he picked up the nickname Yakima, though he wasn't from there.

Some say it was a reporter's mistake, but Yakima, or Yak, he became, typo or not.

The new silent film industry drew some cowboys like Canutt to Hollywood in the rodeo off-season, where guys like Yakima were being tapped for a new trend in pictures, Action Westerns.

He made his first film in 1915.

He got mixed up with early stars like Tom Mix and mostly acted in bit parts in dozens of movies, but he could do his own stunts and that proved to be Canutt's cowboy superpower.

He could leapfrog onto a horse, fall off of it, arrange a wagon crash and stage a convincing fight scene and he could teach others how to do it.

His stunt work took off, but Canutt's voice ruled out most acting in the talkies.

His vocal cords had been damaged during World War I when, as a Navy man, he suffered from the Spanish flu in Bremerton.

Not only could Canutt transition to performing stunts, he invented techniques and equipment that were new and allowed more realistic and more dramatic violence, train crashes, wagon attacks, things done that goosed entertainment value, but also protected his fellow stuntmen.

(dramatic music) (guitar music) In the 1930s, he started working with a young John Wayne who was fascinated by Canutt and watched him carefully.

Wayne wasn't yet a big star and was just shaping his famous persona.

One biographer of Wayne said Canutt was a mentor and a model, an example of lanky macho without swagger.

Wayne later wrote that he spent weeks studying the way Yakima Canutt walked and talked.

"He was a real cowhand," Wayne said, and he took his way of talking from Canutt, slower and stronger, especially as he got angry.

- Every time you turn around, expect to see me, as one time you'll turn around and I'll be there.

- But it was Canutt's stunt work that bonded them.

(intense music) (Western music) In 1939, Yakima created and performed a spectacular stunt on a runaway stagecoach in the movie of that name, John Ford's "Stagecoach."

It's considered a Western classic, partly because of an action scene where Canutt jumps onto a running team of horses, is shot by Wayne, then drops down, passes under the horses and coach, only to come out alive.

Hard to believe someone actually did what was seen on screen, nothing digital about it.

He stood in for Clark Gable for parts of the famous burning of Atlanta scene in "Gone with the Wind."

He arranged classic stunts and dramatic sequences, like the thrilling chariot race in "Ben Hur."

(intense music) Canutt worked with lots of great action stars, like Douglas Fairbanks and Errol Flynn.

Much of his work was anonymous, standing in for other characters or for masked men like Zorro and the Lone Ranger.

As time went on, Canutt was credited with virtually inventing the profession of stuntman and when his own stunt days were over after too many broken bones, in addition to inventing stunt techniques for the movies, he became a well-known second unit director on many films you've heard of, "Ivanhoe," "Swiss Family Robinson," "Spartacus," "El Cid," "Cat Ballou," "Where Eagles Dare," "A Man Called Horse."

(dramatic music) His final directing job was for a Charles Bronson film called "Breakheart Pass" in 1975, (Western music) a tale of the West that involved a spectacular crash of a runaway train, full of cavalry soldiers.

Some of it was filmed here on the Camas Prairie Railroad across the border from the land of Canutt's birth, near Lewiston, Idaho.

A special extension was built on a railroad trestle so the train would sail spectacularly off into space, then scatter as it crashed and rolled into the canyon, 200 feet below.

(Western music) Such spectacles were part of the legacy of Canutt who won an honorary Oscar for his contributions to film, in general, and who got a star on Hollywood's Walk of Fame and inducted into the Rodeo Hall of Fame.

(Western music) Today, we take special effects and stunts for granted as cinematic fare, but the guy who truly embedded macho stunts in our movie-going expectations was a guy who did so quietly and without fanfare, the cowboy who inspired John Wayne and became the template for the Hollywood cowboy superhero was the son of the Palouse, Yakima Canutt.

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