John Wayne's drawl, his measured line delivery, and his rolling walk were not invented in a studio office. Wayne copied them from a real cowboy named Enos Edward Canutt, known to history as Yakima Canutt. And the famous truck stunt in Raiders of the Lost Ark was a direct homage to a stunt Canutt performed forty years earlier. This episode follows Canutt from a ranch near Penawawa Creek in eastern Washington, where he broke his first wild bronco at eleven, to a world bronco-busting title at seventeen and the brutal rodeo circuit where a bull tore his upper lip open.

The conversation covers how a bout of flu in the Navy during World War I permanently damaged his voice and ended his leading-man prospects when talkies arrived, and how he reinvented himself as an engineer of action with the L-stirrup, the shotgun wagon release, and buried cable  ...