The Last Trail (1927)

Fox film's production of Zane Grey's The Last Trail (1927) puzzled many members of Zane Grey's West Society. They expected the film to portray events from Grey's novel, The Last Trail, which was about settlers moving to Ohio after the Revolutionary War. However, the movie revolved around stagecoaches and an exciting stagecoach race. While that sounds like fun, Zane Grey never wrote a novel about stagecoaches. Perhaps the closest possible connection would have been Grey's The Thundering Herd published two years earlier. However, that book was about the demise of the American bison... and bison are not stagecoaches. Still, there had been an exciting scene of a wagon driven by a young woman "racing" in the midst of stampeding buffalo, but that is a reach.

Finally, Society film expert Bob Lentz brought sanity to the discussion when he shared the following quote from Ed Hulse’s excellent book Filming the West of Zane Grey:

In 1921, Fox licensed a fifth Zane Grey property. The Last Trail, third and final installment in the author’s Ohio River trilogy, was never thought suitable for motion picture adaptation. But William Fox thought the novel’s title an especially exploitable one. Over the next dozen years, it would appear on three Fox-released Westerns—not one of which used so much as a single syllable from the novel.

Since this movie really isn't about one of Grey's novel, we will only share two more posters then move on. For those who are interested in reading Zane Grey's The Lost Trail, click here or you can listen to Zane Grey's novel by clicking here