The cowboy cameraman

“The Famous Cowboy Artist”: A. D. Kean in Vancouver, 1913–1916
essay by Dennis J. Duffy

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In August 1913, cowboys from across North America converged on Minoru Park racetrack in Richmond to take part in “The Real West,” a rodeo championship sponsored by the BC Thoroughbred Association. The daily wild horse races were a big attraction. The haltered horses were brought into the arena and matched with three-man teams. At the sound of the starting gun, each would-be rider had to blindfold, saddle, and mount an unruly animal, while his two helpers held on with a single rope. The contestant then had to ride his horse over a set course to the finish line.

On opening day, August 23, one of the stars was a rider from BC’s Boundary Country, 31-year-old A. D. “Cowboy” Kean. As the Vancouver Sun reported, “Kean was very smart in saddling up, and despite the violent plunges of his mount got the wild horse on the gallop and finished the winner. . . . As a thriller, the wild-horse race became a favourite and immediately established these Real West competitions as the real thing.” ¹

When not competing in the Minoru Park events, the enterprising Kean took photographs of the rodeo action and printed them for sale as postcards. Surviving examples bear the notation “A. D. Kean / Cowboy Photo.” In September, thirteen of his pictures adorned the front page of BC Saturday Sunset. One image showed “A. D. Kean, Cowboy Photographer of BC, riding ‘Graveyard.’” ²

Born in Manitoba in 1882, raised in the western United States and southeastern BC, Arthur David Kean lived with his young family in Riverside, a hamlet near Rock Creek.³ He ran a butcher shop, but really he was a jack-of-all-trades; he farmed, caught and sold wild horses, competed in rodeos on both side of the border, and dabbled in writing and photography. The years 1912–14 were a watershed in his career. He rode in the 1912 Calgary and 1913 Winnipeg stampedes, started a photographic business, published his first magazine articles—and got interested in motion pictures.⁴

The autumn and winter of 1913–14 is a strange interlude in Kean’s story. On October 8, the BC Provincial Police in Rock Creek contacted the New Westminster Police. Constable Henry Nicholson was looking for A. D. Kean, who had “disappeared” from Rock Creek two months earlier, apparently bound for New Westminster to join “a Wild West show.”⁵

Kean’s public trail goes cold for just over eight months, from mid-September 1913 to mid-May 1914. Had he joined a Wild West show after Minoru Park? Did he spend that time in the United States, learning how to make movies?

Film historian Kevin Brownlow suggests that A. D. gained filmmaking experience at a pioneer movie studio in the United States—one that specialized in early Westerns. He claimed to have worked as a camera man for the Miller Brothers’ “101 Ranch outfit.”⁶ The 101 Ranch, an enormous spread near Bliss, Oklahoma, was home to a famous Wild West show and a movie production company. It’s an appealing notion, but it may well be that Kean’s claim was just chin music; the dropping of names to establish his credentials.

Publisher James Hamilton, Kean’s colleague, told a different story years later.

Cowboy Kean decided to take up motion picture photography and invested what was, for him, a large sum in the latest available equipment. He turned out some positively awful pictures at the start; full of every known error and a good many new ones previously unknown. Local picture houses offered him no encouragement, and no wonder. He persevered, as he always did, and after a year he improved his technique.[i]

^[i]    James H. Hamilton, “The Cowboy and the Whale,” in Western Shores: Narratives of the Pacific Coast (Vancouver: Progress Publishing, 1932), 88.

May 1914 found Kean on the BC coast. Up to that point, there had been relatively little film production in the province, and almost none by BC residents. Several visiting filmmakers had passed through the province between 1899 and 1914, shooting scenic and promotional footage for the provincial or federal governments or the CPR. Kean was the first British Columbian to become a professional filmmaker.

His rodeo background was an essential stepping stone in the transition to making movies. At the end of May, he struck a deal with the Vancouver Exhibition Association, producers of the annual fair now called the Pacific National Exhibition (the PNE). He would organize and manage a cowboy sports competition, “Range Days,” for that September’s fair. He would also be the exhibition’s “special photographer.”⁷

That summer, Kean travelled through the Interior to select cowboys and livestock for Range Days. He attended a boisterous two-day celebration of Dominion Day in Lillooet. Using “the first moving picture camera ever seen in these parts,” he filmed several races and contests.⁸ A two-minute segment of this footage, preserved by Library and Archives Canada, may be the earliest extant Kean film.

He shot other small-town news items on the trip, including scenes of soldiers entering service in the First World War. He was in Kamloops on August 11, 1914, when men of the 102^nd Regiment, Rocky Mountain Rangers, were dispatched to guard key points along the CPR. He filmed the small contingent marching through town to board the evening train.⁹ Kean’s footage showing BC troops of the Canadian Expeditionary Force (CEF) would become a major aspect of his cinematic work.

Despite the outbreak of war, the 1914 Vancouver Exhibition began as scheduled on September 4. The local press responded warmly.

The opening performance of “Range Days” proved to be as thrilling and exciting as was expected, and was greatly enjoyed by the crowd present. The demonstration only shows that the Exhibition Association, in securing A. D. Kean and his 30 roughriders, has gone the limit to provide the best entertainment obtainable for the patrons of Vancouver’s annual fair.[i]

[i]     “People Patronize Opening Day of Exhibition Liberally,” Daily World, Sept. 5, 1914, p. 16.

The enthusiasm for Range Days continued throughout the fair, and the Exhibition Association’s final verdict was positively glowing. “The Range Days, put on under the superintendence of Mr. A. D. Kean, were of exceptionally high order. The riders were good and plenty of them. The stock was good untried stuff.”¹⁰ Kean would be contracted to manage the exhibition’s Range Days in 1915, and again in 1923.

Kean’s scouting trips produced an additional benefit; he was hired to manage another rodeo at a fall fair. The cowboy sports he presented in Kelowna late that September were on a much smaller scale than Vancouver’s, but they were no less popular.

The energetic labours of Mr. Kean, together with the attraction of a $50 prize for the best bucking horse, [have] produced over twenty of the best-known unbreakable horses in the country, and it must be confessed that the excitement prevailing upon the wild and erratic rides of the cowboys surpassed that shown to the milder forms of sport.

Mr. Kean proved a capable manager who handled his boys without a hitch. Not only does he rope and ride anything with four legs, but he takes moving pictures of the cowboys as well.[i]

[i]     “Fall Fair and Sports,” Kelowna Courier and Okanagan Orchardist, Sept. 14, 1914, p. 1.

The events were staged on a racetrack in Kelowna’s north end, at the foot of Knox Mountain. A memorable photograph shows A. D. as the “Chief of Cowboys,” leading a parade of riders past the judging stand.¹¹

With his rodeo duties finished for the season, Kean could focus on marketing the films he had shot. Here he encountered a problem that would plague his film career: getting his work onto movie screens. In British Columbia, the Moving Pictures Act of 1914 regulated the censorship of films, as well as the licensing of movie theatres and film exchanges.¹² The exchanges were part of a regional distribution system unique to North America. They purchased film prints from the distribution chains and rented them to theatres in their territory. This system was profitable for the exchanges and kept the exhibitors’ costs down.¹³ It benefitted every level of the film business—except for independent producers like Kean.

When he offered his first reels to three local exchanges, the managers said they couldn’t accept “outside films.” He then approached local theatres, who insisted that they were bound by their contracts with the exchanges. At length, however, he succeeded in placing two reels at the Pantages Theatre on East Hastings. Manager E. D. Graham paid him twenty-five dollars for a week-long booking in November.¹⁴ Kean’s first significant public film screening in Vancouver was flamboyantly promoted in the Daily World.

The big added feature will be the first showing of a remarkable series of moving pictures covering the Wild West exhibitions given here at the recent Vancouver Exhibition, and other cowboy scenes at Kelowna, Armstrong and on the Hon. Price Ellison’s Duck Lake ranch near Kamloops. Another very interesting reel shows scenes in the Okanagan Valley orchards during the apple and pear harvest, which is most timely just now in view of the interest aroused in British Columbia apples. These B. C. pictures should be seen by every child in Vancouver, as they are a liberal education in exploiting the resources of the province. The pictures were made by Arthur D. Kean, the famous cowboy artist.[i]

[i]     “Two Headline Attractions on Pantages Bill,” Daily World, Nov. 7, 1914, p. 8.

The Sun was equally impressed with his films. “They show British Columbia cowboys at play with their bucking bronchos, their roping contest, and all the other accessories that go to make up a real Wild West show.”¹⁵

The BC Animated Review, another reel of regional items by Kean, played at the Pantages two weeks later. It included footage of horse racing at Minoru Park, Scottish dancing at the Caledonian Games, troops departing from Kamloops, and the funeral procession of Immigration Inspector W. C. Hopkinson, who was killed by a Sikh activist in the aftermath of the Komagata Maru incident. The Sun noted that the motion pictures at the Pantages were “of more than ordinary interest.”¹⁶

Kean knew that screening three reels at a single Vancouver theatre was barely a beginning. To survive as a producer, he needed to regularly book his films into multiple theatres. Under the regulations, he could only market his product through the exchanges, which wouldn’t take them. The cost of a film exchange licence, at 300 dollars per year, was prohibitively high for an independent operator. He was also prevented from exhibiting his own films within eight kilometres of any licensed movie theatre.

Kean expressed his frustration in a November 19, 1914 letter to C. L. Gordon, BC’s first Censor of Moving Pictures. He emphasized that BC’s motion picture industry was “as yet unorganized,” while the American-owned film exchanges had “practically unlimited means at their disposal.” A. D. urged the creation of a less expensive category of exchange licence for those handling only BC-made films.¹⁷ In early December, the government amended the regulations along those lines. An exchange licence for marketing BC films was priced at fifty dollars, and the eight-kilometre exhibition limit was reduced to five kilometres. In 1916, the cowboy took out an exchange licence and officially set up shop as “Kean’s Canada Films.”¹⁸

Kean’s production work continued to expand in 1915. In August, he again managed and filmed Range Days at the Vancouver Exhibition; both undertakings proved successful. The response is captured perfectly in a single sentence from the Sun’s daily coverage: “Such sensational wild horse riding as was seen at the exhibition yesterday was never witnessed in this vicinity before.”¹⁹

In the fall, he circulated a film called Wild Animal Life in British Columbia, shot on northern Vancouver Island earlier that year. Apparently, A. D. had “spent several months patiently waiting to secure perfect pictures of moose, elk, caribou and bear in their native haunts.” Victoria’s Dominion Theatre showed the film in the first week of September.²⁰ At the same time, Kean was working on an industrial film for the Britannia Copper Mines; it would show the “entire workings” of the mine at Britannia Beach.²¹

There was plenty of military activity to keep up with, too. In their original form, Kean’s “war pictures” were short vignettes that showed individual units drilling, marching along city streets, and relaxing in camp. The films did more than echo the patriotic sentiments of the day; they were genuinely popular with the public.

Kean was at the New Westminster CPR Station on November 7, 1915, when the 47th Battalion, “Winsby’s Winners,” left for Montreal. A week later, the Dominion Theatre showed his film of the event, which was praised as “very fine” by the Province. “While The Ivory Snuff Box [the feature film at the Dominion] is a splendid photoplay and is full of interest, the pictures of our soldier boys leaving . . . for the trenches [are] most appreciated. One of the train coaches is decorated with a huge banner which reads ‘Bound for Berlin.’”²²

In January 1916, Kean began assembling longer compilations of his local military footage. One was shown at the original Orpheum Theatre from January 31 to February 2, billed as a “Grand Military Review of BC’s Part in the Great War.” This film featured several key BC battalions, including the 16th (Canadian Scottish), the 29th (“Tobin’s Tigers”), the 62nd (”Hulme’s Huskies”), and the 72nd (Seaforth Highlanders). It also showed the contributions of BC women to the work of the Red Cross.²³ The most memorable review appeared in the Daily World.

It was these pictures which seemed to attract the greater part of the audience last evening. The house was drab coloured with khaki uniforms, and there were many who seemed to see in the departing lines of the first Highlanders or Tobin’s Tigers those whom they knew – possibly those who will not return.[i]

[i]     “Music and Drama: Orpheum,” Daily World, Feb. 1, 1916, p. 7.

The compilation shown at the Orpheum may have been called BC for the Empire. In the trade journal Moving Picture World, that title was attached to a four-reel set of “military pictures dating from the beginning of the war up to the present time.”²⁴On February 16, a three-reel film called British Columbia for the Empire was shown at the Kamloops Opera House. It featured men of the Rocky Mountain Rangers and the BC Horse leaving Kamloops, as well as other units departing Vancouver and New Westminster. Military compilations by Kean were also shown at Vancouver’s Dominion Theatre in April and Greenwood’s Star Theatre in October.²⁵

Regrettably, none of these compilations have survived. The most complete example of Kean’s military films now extant is a ten-minute short called The North British Columbians, “Warden’s Warriors,” 102^nd Battalion, CEF, Historic Departure. Shot over four days in June 1916, it shows the battalion leaving its camp at Goose Spit near Comox.

Decomposition of the nitrate film base has damaged much of the surviving print, but the essence of the picture comes through. Colonel John W. Warden inspects the battalion and receives the unit’s overseas flag from BC Premier W. J. Bowser. One especially striking sequence shows the troops, complete with band, marching along the beach towards Comox. Arriving at the wharf, they board a CPR steamship for passage to Vancouver. Reviewing the program at the Colonial Theatre in early July, the Daily World noted: “This reel is quite different from the usual run of local pictures, and is really a triumph of motion picture photography.”²⁶

Kean’s Canada Films was becoming a familiar brand to Vancouver moviegoers. A. D. responded to a limited market by diversifying his subject matter: local industries, the war effort, civic celebrations, and soft news items. On May 4, 1916, he documented the first convocation ceremony of the University of British Columbia; the following day, he filmed New Westminster’s annual May Day festivities. Both items were screened at the Colonial Theatre the following week.²⁷

Kean was also finding new outlets for his work. The Ford Motor Company of Canada had started a newsreel, The Ford Canadian Monthly, which was provided free of charge to theatres, recruiting stations, and the troops in France. In the spring of 1916, Kean began leasing west coast material to Ford for the series.²⁸

A. D. was in Victoria on the rainy afternoon of Saturday, July 15, 1916, to film the 103rd Battalion, the “Vancouver Island Timber Wolves,” boarding the steamship Princess Victoria in the Inner Harbour. Kean is clearly visible in Ernest Crocker’s photo of the occasion, standing atop the ship’s wheelhouse with his camera and tripod. When his film of the departure was shown locally at the Variety Theatre on August 3, “the large audience marked its appreciation through loud and prolonged applause. The films show very clearly every face in the battalion, and also the large number of people who were on hand to bid them God speed and a safe journey.”²⁹

The newspapers were full of recruiting news, and local units were very competitive in their search for men. In fall 1916, the Sixth Field Company of the Royal Canadian Engineers produced its own recruiting picture. The Daily News-Advertiser praised “the excellent and beautifully clear films made by that local firm, Kean’s Canada Film Co.”³⁰ The film’s story followed a fresh volunteer from the company’s recruiting office in downtown Vancouver to their drill hall in North Vancouver. The film depicted the training and daily work of the Engineers: “trench preparing, bridge building, wireless telegraphing, and even the demolition of a railway track, a striking scene having been got of the actual explosion.”³¹

Canadian Engineers at Work premiered at the Rex Theatre on Hastings Street in Vancouver on November 27, 1916. At each screening, company recruiter Sergeant E. Evans urged eligible men to enlist with the Canadian Engineers. In 1917, promoted to Lieutenant, Evans was sent on an extended recruiting trip through northern and Interior BC, showing the film at every town he visited. Canadian Engineers at Work proved a valuable recruiting tool, and earned frequent praise in local newspapers.³² This tour made the film Kean’s most widely circulated early production.

He was just hitting his stride. At the end of 1916, he released a remarkable documentary about industrial whaling on the BC coast. He would later spend three years as the BC government’s official cinematographer. In 1924, he embarked on the biggest film project of his career. Policing the Plains (1924–27) was an ambitious (and ultimately disastrous) feature-length epic docudrama about the Royal Northwest Mounted Police.

But that’s another story. Several other stories, in fact.

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Dennis J. Duffy retired from the Royal BC Museum in 2017, after a long association with the BC Archives’ audio-visual collections. He is the author of three books in the archives’ Sound Heritage Series, as well as the filmography Camera West: British Columbia on Film, 1941–1965. In 2008 he produced and edited the RBCM’s first DVD release, Evergreen Playland: A Road Trip through British Columbia. He writes about BC film history on his blog, Seriously Moving Images. [Editor’s Note: Dennis J. Duffy previously contributed an essay about Stan Fox, Man with a movie camera and the essay Knowing the country: the unfilmed Ethel Wilson to The British Columbia Review.]

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The films of A. D. Kean

Like many films made in the silent era, most of Kean’s work has been lost or destroyed. A few examples have survived, however, and can be viewed online. Unless otherwise stated, the original films are preserved by Library and Archives Canada.

• Dominion Day, Lillooet (July 1914 or 1915) [2:00 min.]
• BC rough-riding championship, Vancouver Exhibition, 1914 or 1915: This brief fragment [0:35], the only extant footage of “Range Days,” is used in Kean’s 1916 film Warden’s Warriors (below).
• Scenes from 1915 and 1917 May Day Celebrations: This reel of unedited negative is preserved at the New Westminster Museum and Archives. Kean filmed the city’s May Day each year from 1915 to 1923. [12:58]
• The North British Columbians, “Warden’s Warriors,” 102nd Battalion, CEF, Historic Departure (June 1916). Shows the battalion at its Goose Spit training camp and marching into Comox to board a steamship. [10:03]
• Whaling—British Columbia’s Least Known and Most Romantic Industry (1916–19): Initially shot off the west coast of Vancouver Island, this important early work was expanded with footage shot at Haida Gwaii in 1917–1919.[16:45]

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Notes

This article was condensed from two chapters in Dennis J. Duffy’s unpublished biography of Arthur David Kean. That project began when he wrote an article with his BC Archives colleague, David Mattison: “A. D. Kean, Canada’s Cowboy Movie-Maker” (The Beaver, February–March 1989, pp. 28–41).

            The newspapers cited below include Vancouver‘s Daily News-Advertiser, Province, Sun, and World, and Victoria’s Daily Colonist and Times.

            Special thanks to Chantaal Ryane for her editorial support to Mr. Duffy.

1. “BC Cowboys Win Wild Horse Race,” Sun, Aug. 25, 1913, p. 11. ↩︎
2. “Broncho Twisters at Work and Play,” BC Saturday Sunset, Sept. 13, 1913, p. 1. ↩︎
3. May Lindsay, “Riverside,” in Boundary Historical Society: Fourth Report, 1964 (Grand Forks, BC: Gazette Printing, 1964), 20–21. ↩︎
4.  His magazine articles appeared in Rod and Gun in Canada in May and August 1913. ↩︎
5. “This Man is Lost,” New Westminster News, Oct. 9, 1913, p. 8; “Missing Husband Sought,” World, Oct. 9, 1913, p. 4. ↩︎
6. Kevin Brownlow, The War, the West and the Wilderness (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1979), 243; E. C. Thomas, “Heard in Canadian North West,” Moving Picture World, Aug. 7, 1915, p. 1036. ↩︎
7. “Rough Riding Event Will Be Attraction; Services of Well-Known Cowboy have been Obtained by Fair Management,” Sun, May 27, 1914, p. 8. ↩︎
8. “Lillooet Loyally Celebrate[s] Natal Day,” The Prospector (Lillooet), July 3, 1914, p. 1. ↩︎
9. “Kamloops Men’s Departure,” Inland Sentinel, Aug. 12, 1914, p. 4; “Round About Town,” Inland Sentinel, Aug. 31, 1914, p. 4. ↩︎
10. Vancouver Exhibition Association, Bulletin No. 5, 1914, p. 25. ↩︎
11. Photo H‑01724, A. D. Kean fonds, BC Archives, Royal BC Museum (BCA/RBCM). ↩︎
12. “An Act to regulate Theatres and Kinematographs,” Chap. 75, Statutes, Province of British Columbia (Victoria: King’s Printer, 1914), 573–77. ↩︎
13. David A. Cook, A History of Narrative Film (New York: W. W. Norton, 1981), 31. By 1915, Vancouver had at least seven film exchanges; they are listed in the “Classified Business Directory,” Henderson’s Greater Vancouver City Directory 1915, 1170. ↩︎
14. A. D. Kean to C. L. Gordon, Nov. 19, 1914, correspondence file M-283-18 (1920), Dept. of Attorney-General, GR-1323, BCA/RBCM. ↩︎
15. “Feature Musical Act; Films of the Exhibition,” Sun, Nov. 9, 1914, p. 6. ↩︎
16. Kean to Gordon, 1914; “Pantages Theatre,” Sun, Nov. 17, 1914, p. 5. ↩︎
17. Kean to Gordon, 1914. ↩︎
18. Order-In-Council no. 1312/1914, Dec. 10, 1914, BC Dept. of the Attorney-General, GR-0113, BCA/RBCM; E. C. Thomas, “New Vancouver Exchange,” Moving Picture World, Feb. 19, 1916, p. 1174. ↩︎
19. “Sensational Riding Seen at Exhibition,” Sun, Aug. 19, 1915, p. 6. ↩︎
20. “BC Wild Animals Shown at Empress,” Kamloops Standard, Nov. 30, 1915, p. 1; “Dominion Theatre,” Times, Sept. 2, 1915, p. 7. Over the years 1916–19, Kean shot additional wildlife footage to expand the film. In 1919, it was purchased by the BC Game Conservation Board. ↩︎
21. “The Province Photo Play Review: Close-Ups,” Province, Nov. 13, 1915, p. 12. ↩︎
22. “Forty-Seventh Pull Out for Montreal and Berlin,” Daily World, Nov. 8, 1915, p. 9; “Dominion Theatre” [ad], Province, Nov. 15, 1915, p. 2; “Local War Pictures at Dominion,” Province, Nov. 16, 1915, p. 8. ↩︎
23. “Orpheum” [ad], Daily World, Jan. 29, 1916, p. 9; “The Man from Oregon is Orpheum Feature,” Sun, Jan. 31, 1916, p. 7; Amusements: Orpheum,” Sun, Feb. 1, 1916, p. 3. The “old” Orpheum Theatre had opened in 1913 at 761 Granville Street, north of Robson. ↩︎
24. E. C. Thomas, “BC for the Empire Films,” Moving Picture World, Feb. 12, 1916, p. 1000. ↩︎
25. “Opera House Tonight” [ad], Inland Sentinel, Feb. 16, 1916, p. 4; “Dominion Theatre” [ad], Province, Apr. 8, 1916, p. 13; “Star Theatre” [ad], Ledge (Greenwood), Sept. 28, 1916, p. 1. ↩︎
26. “Own Their Films,” Province, July 4, 1916, p. 13; “Music and Drama: Colonial,” Daily World, July 4, 1916, p. 12. ↩︎
27. “Colonial is Showing Tarkington Flirt,” Sun, May 8, 1916, p. 8. ↩︎
28. E. C. Thomas, “Ford Boosts Recruiting,” Moving Picture World, Apr. 22, 1916, p. 671. ↩︎
29. “Another Battalion Leaves for Overseas,” Times, July 17, 1916, p. 14; photo J-02288, Ernest Crocker fonds, BCA/RBCM; “Local Troops are Shown in Pictures,” Colonist, Aug. 4, 1916, p. 10. ↩︎
30. “Moving Pictures: At the Rex,” News-Advertiser, Nov. 28, 1916, p. 4. ↩︎
31. “Film Depicts Work and the Activities [of] Canadian Engineers,” Sun, Nov. 28, 1916, p. 9. ↩︎
32.   “Film Shows Work of Canadian Engineers,” News-Advertiser, Jan. 20, 1917, p. 7; “Lieut. E. Evans, Canadian Engineers, in City Looking for Men,” Prince George Star, Feb. 23, 1917, pp. 1 & 6. ↩︎