Clara Clayton

CLARA CLAYTON BROWN (Mary Steenburgen), in Back to the Future III , is the wife of inventor Emmett L. Doc Brown.Clara Clayton came to Hill Valley to teach school. Originally her fate was ignominious: her horses ran away with her and carried her, and her rig, over the edge of the Shonash Ravine near Hill Valley, California, in 1885. The ravine was named the Clayton Ravine in her memory. And in every timeline but the eventual surviving one, generations of schoolchildren always nominated the teacher they would like to see follow Clara Clayton into the ravine.In another timeline, Emmett Brown, the local blacksmith, reined in her horses and saved her life. But gang leader Buford Tannen shot him in the back over a matter of eighty dollars. She buried him on Boot Hill, paying for the funeral with her own money.But in yet a third timeline, a stranger named Clint Eastwood prevents that murder by throwing a pie shell to knock the gun out of Buford Tannen's hand. Eastwood later goes into a gun battle with Tannen, armored with a furnace door under his serape. Later, Clara finds out about Emmett Brown's strange experiment with a steam locomotive, and stows away aboard it. Emmett rescues her from a fall to a certain death, and stays in Hill Valley while Clint Eastwood, in a horseless carriage being pushed ahead of the locomotive, goes over the edge of the Shonash Ravine--and vanishes without a trace, except for two fiery streaks stretching out straight across the ravine, as if they were extensions of the railroad tracks.Emmett marries her, and explains about the great time engine he had built into that horseless carriage. Clara encourages him to build another--this time, using a steam locomotive. He does, and introduces her to wondrous worlds of the future, where he can equip his new time engine to fly through the air and to go to any era they desire. They finally build a private car to add to their train, a car decorated according to the Victorian style she knows and loves. They have two sons, named Jules and Vern, after the great visionary French author Jules Verne, who is contemporary to the period into which Clara Clayton was born.When Jules and Vern were six years old, Emmett and Clara returned to Hill Valley of 1985, to where the tracks crossed what now was called the Eastwood Ravine. In fact they made two separate trips. In the first, they reclaimed Emmett's favorite dog, Einstein (named after a German scientist who would, among other things, inspire the United States Navy to make real a part of one of Jules Verne's best-loved concepts: a submarine that could stay underwater for months at a time). In the second, Clara once again met young Clint Eastwood, who actually was a young buck named Marty McFly. While there (and then), they also met a young and spirited girl who, Clara gathered, would marry that young buck, who would go on to become one of the best-loved troubadors of his era. Show less «