The only John Wayne western you’ll never see: “It is one of the treasures that everybody wants”
Martin Scorsese estimated that 90% of American movies made before 1929 have become lost films, with 75% of all silent pictures having vanished into the ether. Considering he made well over 150 features following his screen debut in 1926, it’s impressive that John Wayne only has two of them to his name.
In the early days of cinema, nobody gave a second thought to preservation. Pictures were made, shown to an audience, and then locked away in a vault somewhere. Thanks to a combination of neglect, degradation, and poor storage conditions, great swathes of history have simply disappeared forever.
As one of Hollywood’s most legendary stars, Wayne achieved that rarest of things: silver screen immortality. It’ll be a long time before his name slips out of the history books, if it ever does, but there are two roles nobody will ever see again, unless the unthinkable happens and they’re discovered somewhere.
It was almost three, until a print of the 1933 romantic drama Baby Face was found by a curator at the Library of Congress in 2004. It might even be just the one, with speculation claiming that the only known copy of 1937’s Adventure’s End resides in the same institution, although it’s never been confirmed or denied whether that’s the case.
What can’t be argued is that there’s a solitary western with ‘The Duke’ in the lead role that nobody’s seen for decades, a status that won’t change unless a hunt that began decades ago bears fruit. Made when the actor was in his late 20s, 1936’s The Oregon Trail would be another unremarkable entry in Wayne’s extensive filmography if it weren’t for the fact that it’s taken on mythical status.
The plot is the sort that Wayne would make his own in the years to follow; his retired army captain, John Delmont, sets out to find his father’s killer after discovering hidden family revelations in his old man’s journal, all while forging a romantic connection with Ann Rutherford’s Anne Ridgeley.
He wasn’t a star when it was made, even if he was only a couple of years away from crossing that bridge with John Ford’s Stagecoach, but the mystery of what happened to The Oregon Trail has captivated ‘Duke’ diehards for years. It screened in cinemas; after that, nobody’s really sure where it went.
The only proof of its existence is a collection of still photographs, which Kent Sperring accidentally discovered when he bought Wayne merchandise from an online retailer and ended up with the negative for a lost film. Since then, he’s travelled the globe and visited several continents, chasing as many leads as possible to dredge up the fabled flick.
“I looked all over the world for it,” he told the BBC. “It is one of the treasures that everybody wants.” Based on how many movies thought lost have been rediscovered, it’s not an impossibility that The Oregon Trail will follow suit. Until that does or doesn’t happen, it remains Wayne’s only contribution to the western that can’t be seen anywhere by anyone.
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