At Bear Track Gulch
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About At Bear Track Gulch
Alice Lorraine, a young Eastern schoolteacher, brings her invalid father to the mining camp at Bear Track Gulch on a doctor's advice. She is the first woman to step off the stage there. Jack Turner sells the pair his cabin for ten dollars and starts courting her. Her father dies, and a letter says the Eastern bank holding her savings has failed. The men mean to raise a subscription. Old Pete Griffin stops that plan. They hire her as the camp's teacher, hide a gold nugget by the cabin, and auction the place as a mining claim so she will have fare back East. Jack learns the photograph he feared was a sweetheart is her father as a young man. He tells her so, and she stays.
Cast & crew
More about At Bear Track Gulch
Harold M. Shaw directed the one-reel comedy Western for Edison. It opened in the United States on 14 January 1913 and in Britain on 19 April 1913. Edna Flugrath plays Alice. John Sturgeon plays her father, Mr. Lorraine. George Lessey plays Jack Turner. Shaw later married Flugrath.
Themes
Making
Shaw had only recently been made a full-time Edison director. Flugrath, his lead, later became his wife. The gulch story is played as comedy: a fake nugget and a staged auction instead of a gunfight.
Music
Silent.
Preservation
A print survives. Reviews written from a viewing describe the quarter-hour cut.
Notes
- The camp has never had a woman visitor. The men clean themselves up before the stage arrives.
- Turner asks ten dollars for the cabin, then keeps coming back.
- The British release followed the American one by about three months.
- William West, Herbert Prior, and Bigelow Cooper are also in the Edison cast.
- Catalogues compare the camp-and-schoolteacher setup with David Belasco's play The Girl of the Golden West.
Scenes
- Jack sells Alice and her father his own cabin for ten dollars.
- The men plant a nugget and auction the cabin as a claim so she will not know the money is a gift.
- The photograph Jack thought was a rival turns out to be her father.
Influenced by
- David Belasco's The Girl of the Golden West
