The Last Ride of the Dalton Gang

"The Last Ride of the Dalton Gang" is not any good. The script writers spin and twist the story to distort reality. A better movie would be the "The Last Day" starring Richard Widmark, Barbara Rush, and Robert Conrad. Though "The Last Day" creates a story around Richard Widmark's fictitious character, the movie is closer to some of the actual events and situations.

"The Last Ride of the Dalton Gang" characterizes the lives of the Dalton's as being frolicking womanizers. The whole movie distorts a historical event and trivializes the defenders of Coffeyville and the ones who died in the defense of their town.

Despite having a cast with some well known actors, the movie took liberties with facts in trying to make a more entertaining story line. Rather than go in to the film in general, I'm going to share a couple of trivia bits from a day I spent on site as a sheriffs deputy working set security in June 1978.

The scene with Buffalo Bill's Wild West Show was filmed at the Lake Don Pedro Hacienda rodeo grounds in Tuolumne County, CA. When scenes were being shot, myself and another deputy had to stop traffic on the access road that was in the near horizon as a car would have been easily visible in the shot.

During one such scene, a long light blue limo pulled up to my post demanding to go past. I informed the driver of the traffic stoppage and at that point a rear window lowered and a voice from inside asked about the delay. I stepped back to talk to the voice and found it was Jack Palance! Once the scene was done, the road was cleared.

While walking around later, I saw a male sitting on his trailer step and approached him, ending up talking with Randy Quaid for about ten minutes. A lot of our conversation was about a movie he had been in a year earlier, "The Choirboys". Randy was very friendly and funny and gave me his autograph in my notebook, something I still have over 40 years later!

Larry Wilcox was also in the cast as were character actors Mills Watson, Matt Clark, SueAne Langdon and others. I didn't make a lot of money that day but did make some good memories!!