Daniel and Mingo come upon the scene of a a massacred Cherokee village. The perpetrators are scalphunters led by Simon Perigore (Dan Duryea), operating off a French and Indian War bounty system for Shawnee scalps, now indiscriminately applied to British allied tribes because the authorities are none the wiser. Dan and Mingo arrest Duryea and pack him off to Salem for trial, but his gang frees them and returns to Boonesborough to take Daniel's family hostage.
A somewhat roundabout plot this week played as a hostage drama. Westerns guest star specialist Duryea excelled in playing menacing, slick villains, and he delivers here. He is assisted by Jack Elam in his younger, more urbane version before he launched into his bug-eyed irascible brawler persona. And also along is Duryea's son Peter as Perigore's offspring, an educated innocent shocked at his father's doings.
Hostage dramas serve bottle episodes well; most of the action takes place in the Boone soundstage cabin or on simulated outdoor sets. Lots of nighttime scenes, always anathema to black and white productions.
A high quota of violence in the hour, but largely alluded to offscreen. Rebecca and Jemima are given at least a taste of their own agency as they try to circumvent Duryea's gang.
Some muddied historical background; during the F & I war both sides did pay scalp bounties, the British more than the French. Any British bounties were unlikely to be directed at the Shawnee as alluded to here; they were nominal Crown allies for the conflict's duration. And why a Virginia court would allow scalphunting to go on in peacetime is unexplained; we can roughly date the episode as adjacent to Pontiac's Rebellion, and British frontier interests in the period between the French withdrawal and the Revolution's opening leaned away from the punitive and toward accommodating pacification in order to keep the fur trade flowing.
Redcoat report (?): Virginia militiamen (4) attempt to escort Duryea to justice, but they are clearly decked out as redcoats even in black and white, regiment undetectable. A similar well-equipped local unit would have been unknown in frontier Kentucky. The episode is one of the series' vaguest regarding time period.
The hour seems overly ambitious as to how deep a storyline can be imparted in a single hour, and the result is an assembly line around-the-fort endeavour.
