While researching digitized movie industry trade journals from the time of The Trail To Yesterday, I came across this mention in Motion Picture News touting a scene that is not in the film copy I have. There is a scene in the film where the heroine Actress Anna Q. Nilsson sees a snake while on her horse, leading the horse to a wild gallop as she faints. Then rescued by the lead Bert Lytell.
When I first saw this scene after reviewing the digitized film from the archive in Amsterdam, my first thought was that the 'quick-sand' scene (as described in Charles Alden Seltzer's book version - 1913) was replaced with the snake scene in the movie. This makes sense since both in the book and the movie this marks a turning-point where the heroine begins to trust the cowboy Dakota (Bert Lytell).
So why did this trade journal 'rumor' not come to fruition in the film? My speculation is that this film shot in March and screened in May of 1918. The studios at the time cranked out many films in a year. From my research, the star actor, Bert Lytell, was in four pictures between March and August.
Therefore, the extra time and production cost to do a quick-sand scene may have lead to it being scrapped and replaced with simply calling-in a snake wrangler, placing the snake near the horse and setting up the photography.
In addition, I believe it would have not been edited out of this foreign distributed version of the film; since a quick-sand scene would be considered a high-value scene.
Hopefully further research will lead to a conclusive answer to this mini-mystery.
Archived Motion Picture News clipping on this topic.
