FOR THE FIRST TIME! A complete and true history of the Ray "Crash" Corrigan Movie Ranch, from its prehistory to its current status as a city park. Corrects all of the falsehoods and exaggerations concerning the ranch and its operation as both a movie location and as an amusement park. Includes many details of its day-to-day operation, especially the amusement park business (its highpoints and its shortcomings!). An extensive and expanded filmography of the movie ranch. Profusely illustrated with nearly a thousand illustrations, including almost 500 photographs from a 4,000 negative collection of Corriganville images, most of which have not been published before.

This book covers the early life of a boy who led a storybook life growing up at Corriganville Western Movie Ranch. During his life there he was befriended by stuntman Shorty Shea who would be killed at the hands of the Manson family.

A photographic history of "B" Western movie location ranches in Chatsworth, California. More than 350 photos of scenes lensed in the Santa Susana Mountains. Come ride with author Jerry England as he takes you on a photographic tour of famous Chatsworth area movie ranches. Witness Tom Mix, Roy Rogers, Gene Autry, John Wayne, Allan Lane, Bill Elliott, Charles Starrett, the Lone Ranger, Buster Crabbe, Tim McCoy, Lash LaRue, and many other six-gun heroes as they ride the pony trails of the gone, but not forgotten Iverson Movie Location Ranch, Brandeis Movie Ranch, Bell Moving Picture Ranch, Corriganville Movie Ranch, Spahn Ranch, and Burro Flats. View action scenes filmed at Chatsworth's reservoir, train depot, and railroad tunnels. Then follow your favorite Hollywood cowboy through the western streets, outlaw shacks, stagecoach stops, and ranch houses you've seen in hundreds of "B" Westerns.

Santa Susana is one of three rural towns in Simi Valley that began at the turn of the 20th century. The town derives its name from the surrounding mountains, Sierra de Santa Susanna, and grew up alongside the railroad depot built by the Southern Pacific Company in 1903. The history of Santa Susana can be traced back to the Chumash Indian village of Taapu and a Spanish land grant, El Rancho Simi. The area was first surveyed by the Simi Valley Land and Water Company in 1887 for the sale of ranches. By the mid-1950s, Santa Susana had become a recognized agricultural center, noted for citrus and walnut production. Corriganville and Bottle Village are unique tourist destinations that originated near the Santa Susana Airport. In the surrounding mountains, quirky religious groups established communes away from the public with strange names and stories: Pisgah Grande, The Great Eleven Club, and WKFL Fountain of the World.

In the first book-length scholarly study of the San Fernando Valley—home to one-third of the population of Los Angeles—Laura R. Barraclough combines ambitious historical sweep with an on-theground investigation of contemporary life in this iconic western suburb. She is particularly intrigued by the Valley's many rural elements, such as dirt roads, tack-and-feed stores, horse-keeping districts, citrus groves, and movie ranches. Far from natural or undeveloped spaces, these rural characteristics are, she shows, the result of deliberate urbanplanning decisions that have shaped the Valley over the course of more than a hundred years. The Valley's entwined history of urban development and rural preservation has real ramifications today for patterns of racial and class inequality and especially for the evolving meaning of whiteness. Immersing herself in meetings of homeowners' associations, equestrian organizations, and redistricting committees, Barraclough uncovers the racial biases embedded in rhetoric about “open space” and “western heritage.” The Valley's urban cowboys enjoy exclusive, semirural landscapes alongside the opportunities afforded by one of the world's largest cities. Despite this enviable position, they have at their disposal powerful articulations of both white victimization and, with little contradiction, color-blind politics.

For the first time in print, the true story of the life of the western actor, Ray "Crash" Corrigan, from the immigration of his parent's to the United States, to his time in jail, to his starring role in a hit western series, to owning a movie ranch which he opened up to the public, to his failings as a husband and father, through all of his triumphs and defeats. Illustrated with many rare and never-before-seen photographs.