A family of Quakers pulls up to the Boone place (the outdoor set, utilized mainly at series' beginning and end) and announces their intentions to settle in Cherokee country without recourse to self defense; an immediate (horse-mounted, a DB rarity) Cherokee raid on the Boone homestead helpfully illustrates the tensions Dan will attempt to reconcile.
Another around-the-fort week, but a fairly action-packed one. 1950's feature film stalwarts who segued into TV Alexander Scourby ("Giant") and Eve McVeagh ("High Noon") are the requisite principled Quaker couple; Jay Silverheels, in a post-Tonto role, is the Cherokee leader and predictably a man of few words. Jemima gets to explore teen love with the Quaker son, though her character growth has a definite time limit to be explained in a future review. Cincinatus gets more dimension in this outing as he is allowed to move beyond helpful tavern keeper to critic of the Quakers' outlook as unsuitable to the frontier.
The hour has something of a John Ford quality to it as core beliefs are played out against a violent background; there is a body count in this one. The theme of a pacifistic approach to a time of conflict is further explored in the Gary Cooper feature "Friendly Persuasion." Dan takes up the task of trying to accommodate the Quaker worldview while simultaneously keeping the family safe.
This episode was tailor-made for Cherokee Mingo as interlocutor, but he is away for the week. The Shawnee get a break from vilkain duty and get to go fishing this week, but the historically-correct Cherokee step up; they were at odds with the trans-Appalachian settlers for most of the 18th century before attempting to revert to slaveowning and agriculture from the 1790's until the Trail of Tears expulsion to Oklahoma in the 1830's.
Although the Quakers seem prime candidates for frontier fish out of water, they mainly clustered in the Delaware River region upon American emigration (their pacifism derived from the revulsion of some Britons to the violence of the 1640's English Civil War). They tended to follow in the wake, rather than the vanguard of the settlement line.
Again an around-the-fort outing, but one done well, and enhanced by the 1940's-feature patina of Season 1.
