Jay Silverheels

While playing in Los Angeles on a touring box lacrosse team in 1937, Silverheels impressed Joe E. Brown, with his athleticism.[2] Brown encouraged him to do a screen test, which led to his acting career.[3] Silverheels began working in motion pictures as an extra and stunt man[8][9] in 1937.[10] He was billed variously as Harold Smith and Harry Smith, and appeared in low-budget features, westerns, and serials.[11] He adopted his screen name from the nickname he had as a lacrosse player.[12][13][14] Jay Silverheels was cast in a short feature film, I Am an American (1944).[lower-alpha 1] From the late 1940s, he played in major films, including Captain from Castile starring Tyrone Power (1947), Key Largo with Humphrey Bogart (1948), Lust for Gold with Glenn Ford (1949), Broken Arrow (1950) with James Stewart, War Arrow (1953) with Maureen O'Hara, Jeff Chandler and Noah Beery Jr., The Black Dakotas (1954) as Black Buffalo, Drums Across the River (1954), Walk the Proud Land (1956) with Audie Murphy and Anne Bancroft, Alias Jesse James (1959) with Bob Hope, and Indian Paint (1964) with Johnny Crawford. He made a brief appearance in True Grit (1969) as a condemned criminal about to be executed. He played a substantial role as John Crow in Santee (1973), starring Glenn Ford. One of his last roles was a wise white-haired chief in The Man Who Loved Cat Dancing (1973).

Clayton Moore as the Lone Ranger and Jay Silverheels as Tonto. Moore is riding Silver, while Silverheels is riding Scout.

Jay Silverheels achieved his greatest fame as Tonto on The Lone Ranger (1949-1957). The fictional story line maintains that a small group of Texas Rangers were massacred, with only a "lone" survivor. The Lone Ranger and Tonto then ride throughout the West to assist those challenged by the lawless element. Their expenses and bullets are provided through a silver mine owned by The Lone Ranger, who also names his horse "Silver". Being irreplaceable in his role, Silverheels appeared in the film sequels: The Lone Ranger (1956) and The Lone Ranger and the Lost City of Gold (1958).[15]

When The Lone Ranger television series ended, Silverheels continued to be typecast as a Native American. On January 6, 1960, he portrayed a Native American fireman trying to extinguish a forest fire in the episode "Leap of Life" in the syndicated series, Rescue 8, starring Jim Davis and Lang Jeffries.

Silverheels appeared in an episode of the TV series, Love, American Style, in which two tribe members try to talk a young white man, who wishes to marry a girl from their tribe, into enduring the tribe’s “test of manhood” a barbaric ritual of surviving in the wilderness. No matter how she pleads and begs, using all her womanly wiles, he refuses, thus passing the tribe’s true “test of manhood.” Love and the Bachelor Party/Love and the Latin Lover/Love and the Old-Fashioned Father/Love and the Test of Manhood (Release Date: 11 February 1972).

Eventually, he went to work as a salesman to supplement his acting income.[16] He also began to publish poetry inspired by his youth on the Six Nations Indian Reserve and recited his work on television. In 1966, he guest-starred as John Tallgrass in the short-lived ABC comedy/western series The Rounders, with Ron Hayes, Patrick Wayne, and Chill Wills.

Despite the typecasting, Silverheels in later years often poked fun at his character. In 1969, he appeared as Tonto without The Lone Ranger in a comedy sketch on The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson.[17] The sketch was featured on the 1974 record album Here's Johnny: Magic Moments from the Tonight Show. "My name is Tonto. I hail from Toronto and I speak Esperanto." In 1970, he appeared in a commercial for Chevrolet as a Native American chief who rescues two lost hunters, who had ignored his advice, in that year's Chevy Blazer. The William Tell Overture is heard in the background.

Silverheels spoofed his Tonto character in a Stan Freberg Jeno's Pizza Rolls TV commercial opposite Clayton Moore, and in The Phynx, opposite John Hart, both having played The Lone Ranger in the original television series.

He appeared in three 1964/5 episodes of NBC's Daniel Boone, starring Fess Parker in the title role.

His later appearances included an episode of ABC's The Brady Bunch, as a Native American who befriends the Bradys in the Grand Canyon, and in an episode of the short-lived Dusty's Trail, starring Bob Denver of Gilligan's Island.

In the early 1960s, Silverheels supported the Indian Actors Workshop,[18] where Native American actors refined their skills[19] in Echo Park, Los Angeles.[20] Today the workshop is firmly established.[21]

• Lamparski, Richard (1970) [1968]. Whatever Became Of...? Volume 3. New York: Ace Books. OCLC 8977472.
• Misiak, Zig (2012). Tonto: The Man in Front of the Mask. Brantford, Ont.: Real Peoples History. ISBN 978-0981188065. OCLC 933150680.