Long a Favorite Site, Frontierland’s Age Beginning to Show

The riverfront area where three people were injured Thursday at Disneyland is in the heart of Frontierland--an original area of the park that now houses some of its most-faded attractions.

Frontierland was Walt Disney’s favorite section of the park he created, a tribute to an American West that still was very much in the front of the nation’s consciousness when Disneyland opened in 1955.

Westerns dominated movie and television screens. On the “Disneyland” TV show, which made the park a household name coast to coast, the first season’s hit was “Davy Crockett,” starring Fess Parker. The original movie made coonskin caps a fashion must-have for the grade-school set.

Frontierland played to the same audience, with shooting galleries, river rafts to a child-play area called Tom Sawyer Island, Wild West stage shows at the Golden Horseshoe Saloon, keelboat and canoe rides, and a special favorite of Disney’s--the Mark Twain steamboat.

With live narration by “pilots” interspersed with a taped spiel imitating the “Huckleberry Finn” author’s ruminations on the Mississippi, the Mark Twain navigated the circular Rivers of America canal past ersatz Indians, weed-chomping moose and burning settlers’ cabins.

The Columbia, modeled on a late 1700s vessel out of Boston, was the ship involved in Thursday’s accident. It was added as an attraction a few years after the park opened, recalled David Koenig, author of two unofficial histories of Disneyland.

Koenig said the Mark Twain underwent a major overhaul several decades ago. But it had deteriorated significantly since then, and this winter has been docked for repairs, its boiler unusable, paint peeling in places, dry rot clearly showing.

So the Columbia, normally brought out only on days of especially heavy attendance, has taken its place as the workhorse ship on the Rivers of America attraction.

The Columbia has had its troubles, employees said. This fall, wood siding and trim on the big boat was rotting away, with chipped paint exposing large chunks of wood, said one Disneyland worker.

The full-fledged stage review at the saloon was replaced long ago with a popular but less expensive act, Billy Hill and the Hillbillies.

The keelboats closed for repairs two years ago and didn’t reopen last summer, though park officials say they could return.

“Frontierland’s condition is just aging,” Koenig says. “It’s not like this danger trap, a million accidents waiting to happen. But being one of the oldest areas, it’s beginning to show its age.”

Park officials have suggested privately that now that $100 million has been spent updating Disneyland’s Tomorrowland section, Frontierland is next on the list for an overhaul.