Harry Carey and Ruiz Family Tragedies

About 30 minutes after the collapse, the Ruiz and Carey ranches were inundated and obliterated by a 55 foot wall of water and boulders and debris.

The ranch, homesteaded by the popular actor, was about 5 miles below the dam, and included the Carey's wooden home as well as several outbuildings and the Harry Carey Trading Post - a tourist attraction that included billed entertainment from Navajo natives and other performers, along with a store that sold Western and Indian curios.

The ranch was occasionally used for filming. The Careys' son, Harry Carey Jr. (Dobe), who would follow in his father's acting footsteps, was born in the Carey ranch home in 1921.

The trading post washed away in the St. Francis Dam disaster of March 1928 and was not rebuilt. In an interesting side story, the Navajo performers left about a month before the dam failure, son Dobe said in a 2005 interview. Dobe said a shaman saw "a big crack and predicted it would break." The ranch house was situated at a higher elevation and survived the flood, only to burn down in 1932. The Careys replaced it by building a Spanish adobe home, which they sold with the rancho in 1945.

Harry Carey was born Henry DeWitt Carey II on January 16, 1878 on 116th Street in the Bronx section of New York City. His father was a special-sessions judge and president of a sewing machine company. Harry attended a military academy but declined an appointment to West Point, instead trying his hand as a playwright.

Carey grew into one of the most popular Western stars of the early motion picture days, occasionally writing and directing films as well. In the 1930s he moved slowly into character roles and was nominated for an Oscar for one of them, the president of the Senate in "Mr. Smith Goes to Washington" (1939).

Carey would appear in at least 233 films, including short features, between 1909 and 1949.