BRONCHO BILLY

Gilbert M. Anderson (also known as Max Aronson) was a leading entrepreneur and actor who became prominent after playing multiple roles in The Great Train Robbery (1903). In 1907, Anderson and George K. Spoor founded the Essanay ("S" for Spoor, "A" for Anderson) Film Manufacturing Company, which would become one of the most prominent silent movie companies of the time. Anderson wrote, produced, and starred in hundreds of Western shorts, bringing to the screen its first cowboy hero, Broncho Billy, a character Anderson took from a popular series of stories by Peter Kyne.

Over the next seven years Essanay produced close to 400 Broncho Billy episodes, averaging one per week and installing Broncho Billy as one of the first recognizable characters in film history. Viewers responded enthusiastically, and Anderson became one of the screen's first stars. Broncho Billy was usually a noble character, but occasionally he played the good bad-man, an outlaw sporadically motivated to seek redemption after seeing a beautiful woman or an innocent child. Anderson used dime novels, pulp magazines, and stage melodramas as sources for his Broncho Billy stories. All of these silent shorts depicted Hispanics in a negative light, and some are among the most egregious of the period. The term "greaser" appears in some of the titles and was frequently used in the films.