By David Cohea, ReMIND Magazine
Best known as the Lone Ranger’s TV sidekick Tonto, Jay Silverheels worked for decades around the fringes of Hollywood, picking up jobs mostly in movie and TV Westerns playing Native Americans. Yet despite his chiseled looks, impressive resumé and solid acting talent, he frequently lost those parts to White actors.
Born Harold J. Smith in 1919, a Mohawk from the Six Nations Reserve in Ontario, he was the grandson of a Mohawk chief. Smith was an outstanding athlete and excelled at lacrosse. He was in Los Angeles in 1937 for a touring box lacrosse match when he caught the eye of comedian Joe E. Brown, who convinced Smith to do a screen test. This led to jobs as an extra or stuntman.
Eventually, Smith adopted the screen name of Jay Silverheels and began to get acting parts in various Native roles, with credits in major films like Key Largo (1948) with Humphrey Bogart and Lust for Gold (1949) with Glenn Ford. He played Geronimo opposite James Stewart in Broken Arrow (1950).
In 1949, Silverheels appeared with actor Clayton Moore in The Cowboy and the Indians. Later that year the two were cast to star in the TV series The Lone Ranger, with Silverheels playing the Lone Ranger’s trusted sidekick Tonto. Silverheels appeared in 217 episodes of the series, which ran from 1949-57. The Lone Ranger was the highest-rated show for ABC in the early 1950s and its first true “hit.” Still, the pay was awful and working conditions rough.
For Native Americans, Silverheels was one of the first of their own to be seen on a TV show. Yet for all the visibility brought by the role, Silverheels didn’t think much of Tonto. He said once, “He’s stupid. The Lone Ranger treats him like some kind of servant, and this seems to suit Tonto fine.”
In the ’60s and early ’70s Silverheels continued to pick up Native parts in various TV shows, including Rawhide, Branded, Daniel Boone and The Virginian.
He formed the Indian Actors Workshop in Hollywood in the late 1960s to help Native Americans get acting jobs and change the industry’s image of them.
In 1979 he became the first Native American to have a star on Hollywood’s Walk of Fame. Silverheels died at age 62 in 1980 due to complications from pneumonia. In 1998 he was posthumously inducted into the First Americans in the Arts Hall of Honor.