About two years ago I was watching an episode of the Western 1950s TV series Cheyenne and a copy of this print was hanging on wall in the background. I was pleasantly amused by this and since I never knew anything about the print I did a little research. I was hoping the print would be from a painting by the most famous Western artists, Frederic Remington or Charles Russell but it wasn’t. The original painting was done in 1923 by California artist Fred Grayson Sayre (1879-1939). Among the dozens of Western artists, Sayre is considered to be one of the best at depicting landscapes in America’s Southwestern deserts. The painting doesn’t seem to have an official name. The only information on it comes from art dealers on the internet selling prints of it and they call it “The Wagon Train” or “Covered Wagons.” I couldn’t find any information on anybody buying the original painting. The earliest reference to prints of it being sold are from 1937. When Gran got her copy I don’t know. Maybe she bought it at the Pizitz Department store in Birmingham when she worked there part time as a clerk in the 1940s and 1950s.

Then something of a strange thing happened. Since the Cheyenne TV episode two years ago I’ve spotted the print in a Joel McCrea Western movie and the the TV series Alfred Hitchcock Presents which isn’t even a Western series! With my curiosity aroused about how three different movie and TV shows could be using the same print I quickly checked all my seven seasons of Cheyenne and what seasons I had of the Western TV series Death Valley Days and Zane Grey Theater. I found no new sightings of the print but just recently I saw a reference to it being in a John Wayne movie Tall In The Saddle from 1944. I bought a DVD copy to check it out and sure enough there it was hanging on a wall in the background big as life.

While checking these TV series I noticed the paintings decorating the walls in the various TV shows were almost always different. There was not a lot of duplication. I did spot one painting of a cowboy sitting on a horse that shows up a few times but aside from that the only painting showing up four times so far is “Covered Wagons.” My few hundred Western TV shows and movies are only a small piece of the thousands of Western TV shows and movies but if the print shows up four times in that small sample then how may more examples could be out there? This apparently disproportionate number of “Covered Wagons” sightings just could be a weird coincidence. Or is there another explanation? I was thinking that if all the Hollywood movie and TV studios used the same warehouse to get their props from it wouldn’t be surprising to see the same print hanging on background walls. But each major studio had their own separate prop department. So why were Hollywood prop people at different studios led to use the same print? I’m guessing this print was more popular among the public than many other Western prints and therefore stood a better chance of being noticed by a prop person and therefore being used in a movie or TV show. At any rate it does please me to speculate that Hollywood prop people and Gran had the same good taste.