A British officer (Macdonald Carey) is abducted from a tavern by a group of angry Shawnee (ready and waiting for regular weekly villain duty and led by Claude Akins) out for revenge for his role in a past village massacre. He escapes and makes his way to Boonesborough.
Longtime "Days of Our Lives" soap stalwart Carey is the Crown officer; he would take on the the role of minor Founding Father Benjamin Church in the 1979 miniseries "The Rebels." Akins specialized in 1960's Western heavy roles before taking in more genial-comedic parts in the 1970's-80's "Movin' On" and "Sheriff Lobo" series.
Season 1 might be running into budgetary flak from NBC at this point, and as the formula goes for 1960's Westerns: Need to minimize paid speaking roles + cannot do another repetitive soundstage hour = small party of settlers pursued by tribesmen episode. Improbably, Rebecca, Jemima, and Israel are along on an extended Dan and Mingo hunting trip. But, things are livened up somewhat when a fair amount of action takes place along the SoCal creek-bed we will come to know well, and Carey's character brings PTSD into the story in an era long before PTSD was openly discussed. Like the previous week's outing, a fair amount of out-of-season Halloween imagery is liberally distributed.
The elements were present here for an interesting frontier-struggle story, perhaps drawing in Pontiac's Rebellion, but the tentpole is a concocted tale based on a purported British-Mohawk massacre inflicted upon the Shawnee during the French and Indian War. No historical basis; the Shawnee spent the majority of the F&I War as British allies, and Crown forces for most of the war were too hard-pressed defending outposts and fighting French regulars to engage in punitive expeditions against tribal villages (an exception being Major Robert Rogers'
1759 raid on St. Francis, Quebec).
Redcoat report - one, impossible to tell regiment due to black and white photography. Reference is made to the British military academy at Sandhurst, not around until the early nineteenth century.
The hour is something of a thematic oddity in the DB lineup for 1965; it would have been far more powerful if released after the March 1968 My Lai massacre in Vietnam broke into general public knowledge.
