In his day, Gordie Peer crossed paths with many a cowboy wannabe.
But the ones he preferred were the Tinseltown tenderfoots he taught to handle a shooting iron — guys like Clayton Moore, TV’s Lone Ranger.
Tutoring matinee cowboys didn’t exactly make Peer a household name. Still, he has managed to wrangle a durable legacy as a trick roper, whip-cracker and gunslinger in more than 50 years on the Wild West circuit as a sidekick to the stars.
Nowhere does his star shine brighter than in his adopted homestead of Okeechobee, where strangers beg autographs from the man whose photos grace a main street cafe.
Peer has had bit parts and performed stunts in dozens of movies and a short-lived TV show. He can crack his whip to the tune of “Dixie” or slice paper at 20 paces. He can twirl his pistol around his finger like a pinwheel, and holster it in a graceful flash. He recites cowboy poetry at the drop of a 10-gallon hat.
Over the years, his performances have dwindled, but not his passion for preventing America’s cowboy fancy from trotting off into the sunset.
“Cowboys started this whole thing,” Peer says of America’s pioneering, rugged spirit. “The West was the whole thing.”
HOPPED A TRAIN
When it comes to revealing details about his private life, Peer plays the mysterious stranger. Ask him his age: “I’m 49 years old” (he’s in his early 70s). Birthplace? “In the state of confusion.” Marital status? “Next question.”
The best sketch you get is that when Gordon Vernon Peer was a boy, his parents divorced, and he bounced around foster homes, and stayed on an Indian reservation near Syracuse, N.Y. While there, he and a friend hopped a freight train hauling Col. Jim Eskew’s Wild West Show. Peer, only 12, landed a job tending horses. Later, Peer worked a string of rodeos and Wild West shows, riding bulls and broncos, roping calves, watching the stars, and privately honing his skills, before heading to Hollywood. The pay was lean for extras, so he tried stunt work — once performing a jump while riding sidesaddle in a dress and wig as a stand-in for an actress.
Then, in 1951, a masked man walked into his life. As Peer demonstrated his gunslinger skills at a fair, Clayton Moore asked him to “show me some things” such as spinning a gun from holster to hand and back.
The two struck up a friendship, and soon Moore roped him into doing sidekick work on publicity appearances. To the delight of Lone Ranger fans, Peer would twirl ropes, spin guns and crack his bullwhip while the Masked Man narrated. Sometimes Moore would shoot the pistol out of Peer’s hand.
It was a sweet gig, which paid more than stunt work. Soon, Peer parlayed his sidekick success into work with other film cowboys such as Lash LaRue, who tamed the Wild West with his bullwhip.
Without Peer’s “expertise and training they would not have been capable of doing what . . . caused them to get the ‘ooohs’ and ‘aaaahs’ of their fans,” says Gail Woerner, author of Cowboy Up! The History of Bull Riding. “I think this makes him very important.”
TIRED OF THE GRIND
While driving through Okeechobee in 1958, Peer ran out of gas. Hungry and broke, he plunked 16 cents on the table inside a tavern at the city bus station.
Soon, the waitress returned with a plate of over-easy eggs, bacon, biscuits and potatoes and “took 15 cents, and said, ‘I can’t stand to see a man broke,’ ” he recalls, laughing.
That year, he moved to town. Peer soon grew weary of the touring grind. And in the 1960s, he quit the regular rodeo circuit. He spent his time working at the Okeechobee Livestock Market for 19 years and delighting schoolchildren with his Western shows.
On a recent Thursday, Peer sits inside Roper’s Cafe, where the decor is decidedly Western and the special is pork steak. The tavern with the benevolent waitress is now home to Eckerd Drugs in this town of 5,000.
Some things, however, are constant. Like admiration for cowboys. When Marshall co*ker took over Roper’s two years ago, Peer’s pictures adorned the walls. Exactly where they now hang. co*ker grew up in Okeechobee, devouring spaghetti Westerns, rooting for Tom Mix and Roy Rogers. He remembers the man who wowed students with his cracking whip and spinning guns.
“Gordie goes back as far as when I was in the fourth grade,” says co*ker, 51. “Everybody knows him. I kid him sometimes: ‘Gordie, you’re a legend in your own mind.’ “
The crack, co*ker says, in a way underscores Peer’s modesty: “He’s not the kind to just sit down and say, ‘Hey, I knew the Lone Ranger.’ You can ask him, and he’ll tell you, but as far as broadcasting it, he’s never been that kind.”
But since he is asked, between bites of a hamburger, he recounts the time Moore spoofed a waitress. She thought she recognized Moore, wearing sunglasses, not his mask. Moore never let on. After the meal, he exited, then quickly returned:
“He “opens the door,” Peer says, “and yells, ‘Hi-Ho, Silver, away!’ This woman just shrieks and drops dishes and everything, and says, ‘It is! It is! It’s him!’ He runs like heck and gets in the van and away we went.”
THE LAST OF THE COWBOYS
At Peer’s 20-acre ranch, you get the sense you’ve crossed into a shrine dedicated to all things Western. Cowboy movies fill shelves of his home. Photos of Will Rogers and the Lone Ranger, and Western movie posters wallpaper the walls — though none are among the films in which Peer did stunts or played bit parts. The only film he worked whose name he remembers was his first, Battle Cry, a World War II epic.
But listening to him reminisce about Hollywood’s golden age of Westerns is like taking in a scratchy newsreel:
“Lash [LaRue] could recite any verse in the Bible. . . . Tom Mix started on the 101 Ranch as a cowboy. . . .”
In a way, his home, his memories, are time capsules preserving an age when movies and TV often came with clearer message of right and wrong. Peer frowns on today’s morally ambiguous fare.
“When television came out, television was one of the biggest things to educate people, kids as well as adults,” he says. “If you’re going to educate them, put something on there that they need to learn. We’re sending the wrong messages, and the crime rate is way up. It would help for the [motion] pictures to have a message in them.”
He’s wistful for the days of the Lone Ranger Creed, which read in part: “That all things change but truth, and that truth alone, lives on forever.”
Truth is, the men who embodied such creeds largely have passed on: LaRue, Mix, the Duke and Moore, who died in 1999. Peer penned an ode to his friend, which, as the years pass, reads more like an epitaph to a fast-fading era:
I wonder who’s going to ride the silver stallion
Who’s going to sing our cowboy songs?
Who’s going to save us from the outlaws?
With all of our western heroes gone?
For now, the sidekick has taken up the reins. Peer has begun hosting the Roper’s Gathering, which annually draws Wild West aficionados, rope-spinning wannabes, and Western entertainers from all over. They savor memorabilia, write cowboy verse, strut their stuff.
And the semiretired Peer still makes the rounds performing at Western festivals, judging Wild West contests, giving face time at Western reunions and film festivals.
Call it one man’s last stand against creeping irrelevance.
“It was cowboys and Indians that founded this country,” Peer says. “It will always be a symbol.”
