In Sundance, Utah, where Robert Redford spent most of his time off screen, he was just known as “The Bob.”

“Have you seen The Bob today?” “The Bob was just down at the river.” “Here comes The Bob.” Staff said it in a way you might speak of royalty, like “Here comes The King.”

For those of us who live in the Rocky Mountain West, The Bob was more than a movie star, he was a kind of royalty, the intellectual Cowboy King of the West. Redford, who passed away at the age of 89 last week, was the prototype for us of the ideal New Westerner. He didn’t just play the West on screen; he lived it daily, embodying its landscapes, struggles, and enduring cultural power.

Redford’s personal choices—to live in the mountains, to dedicate himself to conservation, to buck authority and promote independent voices in film—blur the line between Robert Redford the man and Robert Redford the Western icon.

From an early age, he felt a pull toward independence and open landscapes. He has often described himself as a misfit in conventional settings, restless for wider horizons—an attitude deeply aligned with Western archetypes of wanderers and seekers.

“I think I just have an outlaw sensibility,” he said in an 2022 interview with Bob Woodward, the crusading journalist Redford portrayed in “All the President’s Men.” “I’ve always been independent. I’ve always wanted to stay free.”

After a brief stint at the University of Colorado on a baseball scholarship, Redford hitchhiked through the American West, absorbing the landscapes and cultures that would later define his artistic vision. These early travels instilled in him the sense of freedom, risk-taking, and respect for the land that echo throughout his career and activism.

Rooting Himself in Utah

Unlike most Hollywood stars who anchored their lives in Los Angeles or New York, Redford chose the mountains of Utah as his true home. In the early 1960s, he bought land at the base of Mount Timpanogos and built a retreat there. His decision was less about escape than about alignment with values: solitude, creativity, and stewardship of nature.

“I wanted to a find a place that would be the last outpost of development and this seemed to be it,” he said in an interview for CBS Sunday Morning. “So I bought two acres of land in 1961 for 500 bucks. From a sheepherder.”

Think of that: Just as his career was taking off as one of Hollywood’s most bankable movie stars, he decamped from the Yellow Brick Road for remotest Mormon Utah.

He built his own house and “that’s how it all started,” he said. Eventually he bought 6,000 mountain acres and named them after his first big movie role, the Sundance Kid, launching the Sundance Institute and film festival that would nurture the best and most iconoclastic independent filmmakers outside of Hollywood. He managed to escape the traps of success in Utah, grounding himself in something realer and leaving a legacy much greater than his own fame.

Life as a Western Archetype

His movie choices mirrored his Western orientation, so much so he became the guy we Westerners expected to represent all that was good about the West on the screen.

In 1969, Redford starred in “Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid” about the infamous Wyoming outlaws, and then three years later, starred in “Jeremiah Johnson.” That hyperrealistic American Western was based partly on the life of the legendary mountain man John Jeremiah Johnson, a.k.a Liver-Eating Johnson, and filmed in the Utah mountains near his home.

He also starred in “The Horse Whisperer,” “Electric Horseman,” “Tell Them Willie Boy is Here,” and directed and narrated the Montana classic, “A River Runs Through It,” all Westerns of a sort. He also produced an eight-episode TV documentary, “The American West.”

With Redford, it was more a case of art imitating life than the more common life imitating art.

Like the Sundance Kid or Jeremiah Johnson, he lived on the edge of convention, forging his own path, often against the grain of mainstream Hollywood. His square jaw and rugged good looks, often compared to the cowboy ideal, reinforced his status as a symbolic Westerner. Yet unlike those mythic gunslingers, he redefined the Western archetype

Though he looked like a golden boy, he thought like a subversive. I think that tension kept us coming back for more, and during the counterculture days of the 70s, rang truer than traditional heroes for most of us.  He played hero roles, but his heroes were often flawed and vulnerable, white knights well aware of how easy it is for a man to tarnish. The Sundance Kid dies in a blaze of gunfire. “The Candidate” ends his upset campaign victory, a victory of style over substance, by asking “What do we do now?” The champion skier in “Downhill Racer” isn’t a triumphant underdog, but rather a sports fanatic who makes no effort to mask his arrogance and understand himself beyond his image.

“He has a passion for telling stories that reflect the strengths and the vulnerabilities of the American spirit,” Barbara Streisand said In her tribute to Redford when he won a lifetime achievement Oscar, “our struggle to achieve what is highest in our nature, and though we don’t always succeed, Robert Redford films make certain that we celebrate the effort “

Streisand, his costar in “The Way We were,” called him our “intellectual cowboy.”

But I’ll be forever most thankful for how he appreciated and elevated the Rocky Mountain West in America’s imagination. He took our homeground and sprinkled a bit of stardust on it, making it even more magical than it already was.

In Jeremiah Johnson, which most of all celebrates the union of man and mountain, a loquacious character named Del Gue rides off into the snowscape at the end summing up what I’d guess is Redford’s truest take on the West he called home:

“These here is God’s finest scupturings!” Del Gue says of the Rockies.  “And there ain’t no laws for the brave ones! And there ain’t no asylums for the crazy ones! And there ain’t no churches, except for this right here! And there ain’t no priests excepting the birds. By God, I are a mountain man, and I’ll live ’til an arrow or a bullet finds me. And then I’ll leave my bones on this great map of the magnificent…

“The Rocky Mountains,” he concludes, “is the marrow of the world.”