During the fight with Diablo's tribe an Indian gets under the hooves of his horse. It looks really bad. As something similar once happened to me and I hardly survived it I'm interested if anyone knows what happened to the poor stuntman.
shareI have no idea but from what i read a lot of them died back then. When compared today where everything is more carefull and more things are done with CGI.
sharei dont know what happend to him in patricular. i read however that during ford's early westerns (back in the 20's) many "stuntmen" (usually hired cowboys and rodeo riders) got very badly injured and even died. those were different times i guess, but it's tough to know ppl died for a movie.
shareI've heard that Ford, having started as a stuntman, was terribly, terribly careful about his stuntmen...who knows which information is more accurate though of course.
shareDuring the retreat, a calvary horse goes over a small rise and trips, falling on the soldier. The soldier got up, but looked quite dazed.
This was well before the "no animals were harmed" stuff we see today, though the horse did not look injured.
I noticed it too. My reaction was ,"Wow! That had to hurt."
shareMight have been a few bruises on that one but by 1948 the horses used were all trained falling horses and worth a fortune, so not to many hurt.
Ford was pretty careful with the horses, although running y's were used on Stagecoach, Ford and Yakima Canutt swore nothing got hurt.
In Fort Apache, the rearing black horse with the white strip was stuntman Frank McGrath's trick horse ( McGrath played the bugler. Its the horse that falls on top of the rider. It was used in late Ford films Three Godfathers and She wore a yellow Ribbon, the big sorrell buglar's horse was also one of Frank McGrath's and was used in later films.
Three of the falling horses used were very well trained falling horses that belonged to Fred Kennedy ( who was the only stuntman to die on a John Ford film in the Horse Soldiers.) Kennedy is not listed in IMDB but you can see him as a soldier in the horse riding scene and standing beside John Wayne at the end of the battle when Cochise rides up.
I think one of the falling horses was also the Jerry Brown horse, plain dark coloured horse. It was also used in Rio Grande, the dark coloured horse ridden by an Indian ( Fred Kennedy) that Ben Johnson knocks over.