Salem Land Company speculator Hamer (Kenneth Hamilton) wants Boonesborough and its environs for the timberland, but Daniel won't sell. So Hamer sends out homicidal professional boxer Thomas Cromwell (Maxwell Reed) and knifeman Blake (William O'Connell) to pay high for beaver, intending to divert the settlers from harvest and starve them out.
Around-the-fort time again, but the hour's caper makes it an interesting one. Silents to TV journeyman Hamer ("The Ten Commandments") is our urbane Snidely Whiplash, and British 50's teen heartthrob Reed is given sufficient range to make his character a complex one. Blake (Andorian Thelev in "Star Trek: TOS's" "Journey to Babel" is silkily smooth as a James Bond henchman in a log cabin setting. He had a long stretch in a variety of productions, and sadly passed away about three weeks prior to this review. Sarah Marshall (Dr. Janet Wallace in the "ST:TOS" episode in which Kirk-Spock-McCoy prematurely age, now almost too painful to watch) is a beast-taming beauty.
The setup here is frontier land speculation v. Honest agrarian toil, and something of an oversimplified one; land consolidation began almost as soon as American settlers broke into an area and has continued ever since. 150 acres was considered sufficient to support a farm family in the 19th century; in 2024 talk is increasingly common about 10,000-acre plus farms. Left unsaid here is why, if Hamer wants timber he just doesn't contract to buy it from the landowners; need for hard cash on the Appalachian frontier would probably guarantee sale.
The real Boone was hardly above land speculation; he was an agent of such for North Carolina entrepreneur Richard Henderson's Transylvania Company, though by himself a less than successful businessman. The series rarely depicts Daniel's farming efforts, but this hour is an exception.
We are still seeing exteriors from the incongruous Kanab, Utah set, but it's always refreshing to see a Western depicting the actual efforts of locals to make a living ("Wagon Train," "Tales of Wells Fargo") as opposed to just gunslinging. An above-average bottle episode.
Around-the-fort time again, but the hour's caper makes it an interesting one. Silents to TV journeyman Hamer ("The Ten Commandments") is our urbane Snidely Whiplash, and British 50's teen heartthrob Reed is given sufficient range to make his character a complex one. Blake (Andorian Thelev in "Star Trek: TOS's" "Journey to Babel" is silkily smooth as a James Bond henchman in a log cabin setting. He had a long stretch in a variety of productions, and sadly passed away about three weeks prior to this review. Sarah Marshall (Dr. Janet Wallace in the "ST:TOS" episode in which Kirk-Spock-McCoy prematurely age, now almost too painful to watch) is a beast-taming beauty.
The setup here is frontier land speculation v. Honest agrarian toil, and something of an oversimplified one; land consolidation began almost as soon as American settlers broke into an area and has continued ever since. 150 acres was considered sufficient to support a farm family in the 19th century; in 2024 talk is increasingly common about 10,000-acre plus farms. Left unsaid here is why, if Hamer wants timber he just doesn't contract to buy it from the landowners; need for hard cash on the Appalachian frontier would probably guarantee sale.
The real Boone was hardly above land speculation; he was an agent of such for North Carolina entrepreneur Richard Henderson's Transylvania Company, though by himself a less than successful businessman. The series rarely depicts Daniel's farming efforts, but this hour is an exception.
We are still seeing exteriors from the incongruous Kanab, Utah set, but it's always refreshing to see a Western depicting the actual efforts of locals to make a living ("Wagon Train," "Tales of Wells Fargo") as opposed to just gunslinging. An above-average bottle episode.