User Reviews

A town with two main streets: Peace Street and Cow Street. And the town needs a new marshal, at least for three months during cattle season. The job: keep the drovers where they belong.

The drover, Willie Dix, who first challenges Cheyenne gets pants and spanked. Bill Lockhart runs the big bar and warns Cheyenne that his biggest problem will be Carl Banner and his Big K boys. At first, Banner tries to help and sends his man Turk to assist; but Cheyenne rejects it.

Banner has a plan. He orders Turk to start busting up Cow Street which is actually owned by the pious people of Peace Street. And Banner plans to make use of that. Cheyenne tries to establish order but order has a cost: drovers can't spend, and the rich can't get richer. And when Willie Dix tried to bushwhack Cheyenne, Dix gets killed.

In addition, there is a non-existent love triangle between Cheyenne, Jenny (daughter of deceased marshal) and Bill Lockhart (deputy). Bill saw Jenny kiss Cheyenne on the cheek, and leaped to a conclusion.

Banner tries to cut a deal with the mayor and his cronies. Put a head tax on each cow, Banner collects and splits with the Peace Street crowd, and no one the wiser. Cheyenne turns in his badge, if he can't be a real marshal then it's not the job for him. And Jenny fears that Bill will take on the judge and either become corrupted, like her father, or be killed, Bill takes the job and Cheyenne tries to warn him but Bill is more Othello run by the green-eyed monster than reason. Banner decides to take the town apart when the mayor also puts a head tax on his cows. The merchants tell Bill to take his two deputies and basically surround all the drovers to protect their property. Even Leonidas had his three hundred which is 298 more than Bill has against 10,000 stampeding cattle.

Cow Street is about gone, but because of Cheyenne Bill survives and has learned his lesson. Problem, for me, is there was too much story for one episode. As it is, its ending seems incomplete.

The boys are deputies and the door was Cheyenne Bodie's fist. The new marshal, Bill Lockhart (Rhodes Reason), is jealous of Cheyenne, who long ago had had a relationship with Bill's fiancée, Jenny (Lisa Gaye). Since Cheyenne is an honorable gentleman, he's willing to let past loves stay in the past, but the third arm of the triangle doesn't usually deal well with competition. Understandable when the competition is Cheyenne Bodie; still, it's annoying to see a grown man behave the way Lockhart does after he sees Jenny give Cheyenne an innocent peck on the cheek. The confrontation with Cheyenne ends with Bill flat on the floor, but it doesn't knock any sense into him and the new marshal arrests Cheyenne for assault.

But that's getting ahead of the story. In the first scene are Robert Wilke and Hal Baylor, two of Cheyenne Bodie's most ubiquitous adversaries. There's something rather comfortable about seeing them onscreen together, plotting havoc; it's like meeting an old distant cousin that you never really liked but can't deny is a part of your family. And we know it's going to get interesting. As usual, Wilke (as cattleman Carl Banner) and Baylor (as drive foreman Moylan) make excellent villains, but they're no match for the law in Cripple Creek. First, Cheyenne Bodie takes the job but turns in his badge after it's obvious that the town leaders want only a compliant figurehead. That's when Bill Lockhart dons the star, more out of envy ("I'm not afraid of you, Bodie") than from any real desire to do an honest job. Finally, when Banning and Moylan stampede cattle through town to destroy it, law prevails and they end up targets of Cheyenne Bodie's repeater rifle. There's a lot of small-town drama in the meantime involving greedy, corrupt, and self-satisfied councilmen, who after the dust settles get their comeuppance when Lockhart vows to be a witness against them when they are tried for their many misdeeds. But he turns his back on the job at last, as he had promised Jenny, and the last scene shows them together waving good-bye as Cheyenne rides away down "Peace Street."

I've often complimented the production values of the series, which generally are excellent. In this episode, however, one glaring failure is that the director allowed Clint Walker's stand-in to be so front and center of the action; he might as well have been in close-up, he was so obviously not the star. After Clint Walker had renegotiated his contract the year before, they finally began to use stuntmen for some of the more dangerous action. It was usually done subtly and either from the back or from a distance, with varying degrees of success. In this episode, it is absolutely jarring to the continuity of the scenes he's in. Did the director sleep through the 'dailies'? Granted, it would have been almost impossible to find a convincing match for the strikingly handsome 6'6", proportionately perfect Clint Walker, but it could have been done better than it was. So far, I've noticed this glaring error in only a couple of the later shows because usually the camera stays away from the face. I'm glad Mr. Walker was spared those choreographed body blows, but the fake Cheyenne definitely distracted, even if only momentarily, from our engagement in the story.