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Tom Mix, wearing his famous cowboy hat, at a Notre Dame-University of Southern California football game at the Memorial Stadium in Los Angeles, December 1932.
Credit: Image donated by Corbis-Bettmann
After going AWOL from the U.S. Army in 1902, Tom Mix worked odd jobs in the Oklahoma Territory, married three times, and in 1909 won the national Riding and Rodeo Championship. In 1910, Mix's film career began when the Selig Polyscope Company chose the thirty-year-old extra to show off his cattle wrangling skills in Ranch Life in the Great Southwest.