Where William S. Hart prided himself on the authenticity of his pictures, those of Tom Mix (1880-1940) were pure unadulterated fantasy. He had first entered films in the middle of 1909 as a stockman and supporting player in a rodeo movie, Ranch Life in the Great Southwest, and from then until 1917 he worked for the Selig company turning out more than a hundred Westerns, one and two-reelers, which Mix often wrote and directed, as well as starred in. It would be in the year 1917 that he would move over to Fox where his career jettisoned. The inspiration for Mix's films was the circus and the archetypal Wild West show, where Hart's had been Victorian stage drama and photographic realism.
Tom Mix's cowboy hero, flamboyant in costume, involved himself in fast-moving and far stretched stories, heavy on the stunts, action and comedy. Fleet of foot, keen of eye and unrelentingly gallant, Tom Mix would become the Douglas Fairbanks of the sagebrush. He set the style and template for the Westerns of a host of rivals and imitators. Indeed from his own supporting casts would emerge George O'Brien and Buck (Charles) Jones who were at the time marketed as clean-cut Western stars by their contracted Fox during the 1920s.