Dale Evans

Dale Evans was born Frances Octavia Smith in Uvalde, Texas on October 31, 1912. Dale’s first marriage, to her high school sweetheart, ended shortly after it began. Dale found herself jobless in Memphis, Tennessee. She sang well, so she set out to make a career as a vocalist. Soon after, she found a job singing and playing piano at a local radio station. It was there, at the suggestion of the station manager, that she changed her name to Dale Evans. Later, Evans moved to Chicago, where she became a vocalist with a number of different orchestras. Her film career began when talent scouts heard her and cast her in films needing female singers. This was in the 1940s, the heyday of Westerns, Dale soon found herself playing roles opposite men like Roy Rogers.

In 1944, Evans made her first film with Rogers, titled The Cowboy and the Señorita. Three years later, Evans and Rogers were married. They would eventually make 28 movies together. In 1950, Evans penned what was to become her husband’s most famous song, Happy Trails. At the time, Rogers’s closing song for his television show was “Smiles Are Made Out of the Sunshine.” Evans felt it gave the right message, but was not the right fit in imagery. “I didn't think the song,” Evans said later, “said enough about what it means to be a cowboy, especially when the trails you ride aren't always sunny ones. A cowboy has to ride no matter what the weather. For years, Roy had signed autographs with ‘Many Happy Trails’ or ‘Trails of Happiness’ and I thought that's what he needs, a trail song.” So Dale Evans wrote her husband a signature song.

The work of Evans and Rogers, as well as Gene Autry and other television stars from the 1950s had a profound effect on how Western America was imagined in the late twentieth century. For many baby boomers who grew up along with the television the West is, as historian Patricia Nelson Limerick has said, a myriad of landscapes infused with “childhood yearnings.” Much of the tourism and retirement spending in the New West, Limerick says, is a result of baby boomers moving into and through a landscape they will always equate with the joys of youth. The region is a place where boomers can “play hide-and-go-seek with time.”

In 1995 Dale Evans received the honor of induction into the Cowgirl Hall of Fame. She died in February, 2001.

1. Listen to Roy Rogers and Dale Evans singing her optimistic (“Some trails are happy ones/ Others are blue/ It’s the way you ride the trail that counts/ Here’s a happy one for you”) song “Happy Trails,” then think of your favorite trails, roads, or pathways. Draw a map of how those trails extend from your home or school, and where they lead and end. Compare your map with the maps of classmates and make notes about why certain places, and the journeys to get there, make you feel good.
2. Look in the travel section of your newspaper for advertisements regarding travel. Invariably, the images will be designed to sell the reader on the idea that a journey to a particular place will be a pleasant experience. What imagery is used to sell the idea that a journey to a given place will be a “Happy Trails” experience?

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