In December 1924 a promoter sets out to drive thousands of mule deer across the Grand Canyon like cattle, with a famous novelist and a Hollywood director along to watch. Boone tells how the plan meets the deer, and what small surprise turns up two years later.
Somebody should have asked the deer. That's all I have to say against the winter of nineteen twenty-four. On the Kaibab Plateau, north of the canyon, the word was the mule deer had outrun their feed and were starving. Then along came George McCormick, who must have been some talker, because he sold the Forest Service and the State of Arizona on driving them like cattle. Up to ten thousand head, off the plateau, across the Colorado and up the far side to the South Rim. Six days, he said. A man who rode with him, Jack Fuss, called him "an old prospector and a horse thief" fifty years on. No one else said so. Don't hang him on it. Then Hollywood got wind of it. A film company paid two thousand dollars for the rights, dreaming of thousands of deer swimming the Colorado. Zane Grey came to write the book, and D. W. Griffith came with him. McCormick set out from Flagstaff on December seventh with twenty-five men and went down the Tanner Trail off this same rim. Over on the Kaibab the line closed in, and the deer did not retreat. They ran straight through. One big buck charged four riders, Zane Grey among them. The newspaper says it just missed. Another writer has the great novelist on the seat of his pants, watching his horse depart. Two days of that, and not one cameraman got one shot. On December sixteenth the snow and sleet came in. Grey and Griffith fled in a Cadillac, stranding a photographer and four cameramen, and Grey ran a front page apology, saying deer could not be driven and the mountain lions ought to come back. Not a deer delivered. Then rangers on the North Rim found an abandoned fawn. They raised him on canned milk from a bottle and called him Chummie, and the one he cared for most was Mrs. Johnson, the ranger's wife. In nineteen twenty-six Ranger Fred Johnson was ordered to the South Rim. When the day came, that fawn climbed in the car. He'd been born thirteen miles from the South Rim. He rode more than two hundred and fifty miles to see it, by way of Lees Ferry, one year and nine months after the great drive, and the chief ranger wrote him down as the only true Kaibab deer to arrive. Ten thousand head, two famous men and a Cadillac, and what got there was a fawn who wouldn't be parted from a lady.
Photo: F. S. Baker, U.S. Forest Service, 1924 (Flickr 30187654008) · Public domain (U.S. government work)