John Wayne watched a 12-year-old boy walk out of a Colorado fairground holding a wooden horse and nobody in that crowd moved to stop what had just happened to him. Wait. Because John Wayne slipped that boy’s wooden horse into his costume pocket without saying a word, carried it through every remaining day of filming True Grit, and the person who eventually discovered what he’d done wasn’t anyone on that set and had no idea what it would mean when they found out.
>> >> This is the fall of 1968. Ridgway, Colorado, population just over 400, elevation 6,900 ft. The kind of town where strangers are noticed before they finished parking. The San Juan Mountains behind the main square are the color of a fire that hasn’t decided whether to go out. The aspens have turned and something is about to happen that this town will talk about for the rest of its life.
Paramount Pictures has been here for 3 weeks. They’ve transformed the square on Lena Street into Fort Smith, Arkansas. False fronts nailed to real buildings. Courthouse facade constructed overnight. Paddy wagon sitting in the dust like it’s always been there. For the people of Ridgway, the whole thing has the quality of a dream they keep expecting to wake from.
Men they’ve seen on theater screens since childhood are now eating breakfast at the same counter where they order their eggs. The biggest of them, the one with the eye patch and the worn leather vest, walks through town on his breaks without asking anyone’s permission and without anyone being able to quite believe their eyes.
John Wayne is 51 years old this autumn. He has spent 38 of those years in front of cameras. And the thing that people who meet him notice first, almost without exception, is that he doesn’t perform being John Wayne. He simply is. He walks the same way on a film set and off it. >> >> Same pace. Same eyes.
Same quality of attention that makes you feel, when it turns on you that you are the only person in the room worth looking at. On the morning of the fair, he is between setups. Director Henry Hathaway has called a 2-hour break while the lighting crew repositions for a courthouse exterior. Wayne has changed nothing about his costume.
The battered hat is still on his head. The gun belt is still buckled because it’s faster this way and because after decades on location, he knows that 2-hour breaks have a way of becoming 45 minutes without warning. He walks north through Hartwell Park past the big tree where the gallows sequence was filmed the week before, past the hitching post that the art department installed and that the locals have decided to keep.
The mountain air hits the back of his throat the way he likes it. He hears the fair before he sees it. Not music, not yet. What he hears first is the particular hum of a crowd that is watching something, the low collective attention of people gathered around a specific point. He follows it without deciding to, the way a man follows a smell from a kitchen he didn’t know was there.
He comes around the edge of the park and finds himself at the outer ring of Ridgeway’s annual craftsman fair. Maybe 60 people arranged in loose clusters around tables covered in handwork, quilts, pottery, leather goods, iron pieces, things made carefully by people who have been making careful things their whole lives. He stops at the edge and looks.
Notice what he notices. Wayne has always had an eye for craft, not the polished gallery kind, the working kind. The kind that has tool marks in it and knows it. He once held up a film set for 20 minutes because he wanted to watch a Navajo silversmith finish a piece rather than walk past. >> >> His crew had learned across the years that when Wayne stopped and looked at something made by hand, the schedule could wait.
He stops at the edge of the fair and he looks. And then he sees the boy. The boy is 12 years old. His name purposes of this story is Caleb Sutton, son of Roy Sutton, who worked the Smuggler Union Mine outside Ouray until a roof collapse 18 months ago took two fingers from his right hand and the steadiness from the other three.
Roy Sutton had been a Carver before the mine. Not a professional, he ran fence line for a rancher during the week, but on Sundays and on evenings he sat at the kitchen table with a piece of basswood and a set of knives his own father had left him and he made things. Horses mostly.
Small ones, four or five inches long, the kind that fit in a child’s hand. He had taught Caleb the grip, the angle, the way you let the grain of the wood suggest what’s already inside it before you start taking anything away. After the accident, Roy Sutton put the knives in a drawer. Caleb took them out three months ago.
He didn’t tell his father. >> >> He practiced in the woodshed behind the house in the early mornings before school, 30 minutes at a time with the door latched. >> >> He made six horses before he made one he considered finished. The finished one is four and a half inches long rearing up on its hind legs, the mane indicated in three clean cuts that took him four attempts to get right.
The wood is ponderosa pine from a fallen branch he found along the Uncompahgre River. He has not sanded it. He has left the tool marks because his father always left the tool marks. He entered it in the youth division of the Craftsman Fair three days ago. The jury has just finished their deliberation.
Stop right there and hold what you’re about to hear because the way this next part unfolds matters. The jury chairman is a man named Harland Briggs. In Ouray County that name opens doors and closes them. He owns the largest lumber supply operation in the valley, sits on every civic board worth sitting on, and this is the part that matters, his 13-year-old nephew Douglas has entered the youth division with a painted wooden box, lacquered to a mirror finish, brass hinges imported from a catalog.
Douglas Briggs has won this division for the past two years. The box is on the judging table right now. Its surface catching the autumn light like something that arrived already certain of the outcome. Notice something, Caleb is 12 years old. The youth division it turns out is for entrance 14 and under. 12 qualifies. Caleb is standing in the right room and yet the ruling comes down at 12 minutes past 2:00 in the afternoon.
Caleb Sutton’s entry is disqualified. Wrong category, the chairman says. He should have entered the junior division, not the youth division. The junior category has different criteria. No prize attached. Nobody appears to have mentioned this distinction when Caleb registered 3 days ago and nobody appears troubled by that fact now.
The chairman delivers this information in the tone of a man explaining something obvious to someone who should have known better and then he turns back to the table where the lacquered box is waiting. Caleb says nothing. He picks up the horse. He walks out. That is what Wayne sees from the edge of the crowd.
Not the deliberation. He’s arrived too late for that. What he sees is a boy of 12 walking out of a fair holding something small in both hands and the particular quality of the way he’s walking, the kind of walking that means a person has decided not to let their face do what it wants to do and is spending everything they have on keeping it still.
Wayne has spent 38 years reading faces for a living. He moves. He doesn’t move fast. Fast would be wrong. Would draw attention. Would make the boy feel like a scene being managed. He moves at the pace of a man who happens to be walking in the same direction and has all the time in the world.
He comes alongside the boy just past the edge of the crowd where the park opens up and the sound drops and he says one thing. He says, “What have you got there?” Caleb Sutton looks up and whatever he was expecting to see, anything, anything at all, it was not this. It was not 6 ft 4 of John Wayne in a worn leather vest and a battered cavalry hat looking down at him with the kind of patient attention that makes a person feel suddenly that whatever they are holding is worth looking at.
Caleb holds up the horse. Wayne takes it. Not quickly. He puts his hand out flat and lets the boy set it there, the way you receive something from someone who has been carrying it carefully. He turns it in the light. He is quiet for what feels to a 12-year-old standing in the autumn air of a Colorado mountain town like a very long time.
What he is actually looking at, the grain lines in the wood, the angle of the cuts on the mane, three of them clean and confident, the decision someone made not to sand, to leave the evidence of the process in the surface of the thing, the stance of the horse, rearing, weight shifted back, the whole small body of it suggesting movement without being able to move.
He turns it over. On the underside, barely visible, two letters scratched with the tip of a knife, RS. Wayne looks at the initials. He looks at the boy. “Who’s RS?” he says, and that is the question that breaks something open because Caleb Sutton has been holding his face very still for the last 4 minutes and he has mostly succeeded, but nobody has asked him about his father, nobody has held the horse and looked at it the way this man is looking at it, and the answer comes out not quite the way he intended. “My dad,” he says,
>> >> “he taught me. But that’s his mark. I put his initials on because he can’t.” The sentence stops, starts again. “He had an accident. He can’t use his hand the same way now.” Wayne is quiet for a moment. “He know you entered this?” he says. Caleb shakes his head. Wayne is quiet again, but this time it’s a different kind of quiet.
The mountains are very clear to the south. Somewhere on Lena Street, a grip is shouting something about a cable, and neither of them looks toward the sound. “What happened in there?” Wayne says. Caleb tells him, not the whole thing, just the shape of it. Wrong category. The chairman’s decision, the way it was said. Wayne listens.
He does not make any expression that could be called dramatic. His face does what his face does. The jaw sets a fraction, the eyes sharpen a fraction, and then he is looking at the horse again, turning it in the light, and you would not be able to say from looking at him whether he is angry or simply thinking.
Then he does something that nobody, not Caleb, not the handful of people who have drifted to the edge of the park and are watching from a careful distance, expects. He walks back to the fair. Not fast, not with any announcement. He simply turns and walks back the way he came, and the crowd parts for him the way crowds part for a man who has never in his life considered the possibility that a crowd might not part for him.
He goes to the table where the horse was displayed. He looks at the chairman. Arlen Briggs is a large man who has spent 30 years being the largest presence in most rooms he enters, and the experience of having John Wayne look at him with that particular quality of stillness is apparently not something he has encountered before, because he straightens up in a way that suggests his body has made a decision his mind hasn’t caught up with yet.
Wayne doesn’t speak to Briggs. He turns to face the fair, the quilts, the pottery, the iron pieces, the people watching, and he lifts his voice just enough to carry without effort across the space. “This boy made something,” he says. “I want everybody here to get a look at it before I buy it.” One sentence.
That is all. Listen to what those words do to a crowd. Not the content of them, the fact of them. John Wayne in costume standing in the Ridgeway Craftsman Fair in the fall of 1968 saying, “I want everybody here to get a look at it before I buy it.” The crowd responds the way crowds respond to certainty.
They move toward it. People who had already walked past that table walk back. People who hadn’t looked at the horse look at it now. Somebody picks it up and passes it to somebody else, and it goes around the circle of people slowly, the way a thing goes when people are paying real attention to it. Arlen Briggs says nothing.
Douglas Briggs’ lacquered box sits on the judging table and catches the light. Caleb Sutton is standing at the edge of the crowd watching, >> >> and he will later tell people, when he is no longer 12 years old, when he is old enough to tell the story without his voice doing what a 12-year-old’s voice does, that the thing he remembers most from that afternoon is not what Wayne said and not the crowd turning to look at the horse, and not even what happened next.
The thing he remembers most is the fact that Wayne walked back, that he turned around and walked back. Wayne pays for the horse from his wallet, cash. The amount he pays is his business and Caleb’s and nobody else’s, and neither of them ever makes it public. He wraps it in his handkerchief, the one from his vest pocket, which has his initials on it, which is a thing Caleb will notice later, and he puts it in his jacket.
Then he looks at Caleb and he says, quietly, so that it is between the two of them, “Your father’s initials are on the bottom of that horse. I’m going to take care of it.” He walks back toward Lena Street. The setup is ready. Hathaway is waiting. The 2-hour break has become, as it always does, something considerably shorter. There is no time left for anything that isn’t the film.
What nobody in Ridgway knows, what nobody on the production knows, is what Wayne does with the horse when he gets back to set. He doesn’t put it on a prop table. He doesn’t tell anyone about it. He puts it in the pocket of his costume, the worn leather vest he wears as Rooster Cogburn, and he keeps it there through the rest of the True Grit shoot, through the final days on Owl Creek Pass, through the snake pit sequence, through the last setup on Last Dollar Road. Nobody asks about it.
Nobody notices a small weight in the pocket of a vest that has seen enough hard use not to give anything away. When filming wraps, he takes the horse home. Now, stay with this for a moment, because here is the part that takes years to surface. True Grit opens in June of 1969. Roy Sutton sees it at the Outlaw theater in Ouray in the middle of a Tuesday afternoon.
He is not a man who goes to many films. He goes to this one because the whole valley has been talking about it for a year, because the film crew was here, because his son spent 3 weeks asking every person he knew to describe what the inside of the courthouse set looked like. He watches the whole film. He watches Wayne move through the sets he recognizes, the square on Lena Street, the courthouse, the mountain passes above Ouray.
And somewhere in the middle of it, watching the man in the worn leather vest walk across a screen in a dark theater in the town where it was all filmed, something shifts in Roy Sutton that he can’t quite name. Not about the film, about something else. Something his hands have been waiting to do.
He drives home along the Uncompahgre without saying anything to anyone. He goes to the kitchen drawer where he keeps the knives. He opens it. He looks at them for a long time. The following Sunday morning, Caleb comes downstairs to find his father sitting at the kitchen table with a piece of basswood and the old knives. Roy Sutton’s right hand is not what it was.
Three of the five fingers don’t fully close. The grip that used to be automatic now has to be constructed piece by piece with a kind of deliberate attention that costs something. He is not making anything yet. He is just sitting with the wood and the knife, relearning the weight of it. He doesn’t explain why. Caleb sits down across from him and watches.
And neither of them says anything. And the light comes through the kitchen window the way it always does on Sunday mornings in the San Juans. And outside the aspens are making the sound they make when the wind comes through them, which is a sound that has no comparison except itself. Caleb doesn’t tell his father about Wayne and about the horse and about the fair until 2 years later.
He picks a specific moment, a Sunday morning, same table, his father’s hands moving more easily now, the deliberateness less costly. He tells the whole story start to finish. The fair, the chairman, the crowd parting, Wayne’s hand held out flat to receive the horse, the four words, “Your father’s initials are on the bottom of that horse.
I’m going to take care of it.” The pocket of the leather vest, the rest of the shoot. Roy Sutton listens to the whole thing without speaking. When Caleb finishes, his father is quiet for a while, the way he is quiet when he is working something through that he wants to get right. Then he says, “He left my initials on it?” Caleb nods.
Roy Sutton sets the knife down on the table. He picks it up again. He makes a cut in the wood in front of him, a clean one, the kind that comes from knowing exactly where the grain wants to go. “Good man,” he says. “That is all.” There is a version of this story where John Wayne makes a speech, where he confronts the jury chairman in front of the whole fair, where there is a scene, a satisfying, cinematic, easily quotable scene that ties the whole afternoon into a neat shape.
That version would be easier to tell. It would also be wrong because the point of what happened in Ridgway in October of 1968 is not what was said. It is what was done, quietly, without an audience, without a guarantee that anyone would ever know. Wayne took a boy’s carving and kept it in his pocket for the rest of the True Grit shoot and never mentioned it again.
The initials on the bottom, RS, scratched with the tip of a boy’s knife, were never visible to anyone on that set. They didn’t need to be. How this story came to be known at all is the way these things usually come to be known, slowly, in pieces, through the people who were there. Years later, when the Ridgway Western Heritage Society began collecting first-hand accounts for the 50th anniversary of the True Grit shoot, Caleb’s account was among them.
A small paragraph in a book of memories from a town that had watched something extraordinary happen in its square and never quite stopped talking about it. It was a boy’s best work, made from what his father taught him in the mornings before anyone else was awake. John Wayne understood what that meant. One man who understood exactly what it meant happened to be walking through a park in Colorado on a Tuesday afternoon in 1968, and he turned around when he didn’t have to, and he walked back.
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