Daniel and Mingo find a young mother and son (Geraldine Brooks and Kurt Russell) wandering in less-than-safe Wyandot country, and take them back to Boonesborough. Complications ensue when Mingo runs into a bear attack he views as possibly supernatural-inspired, and a husband (Joshua Craig) shows up to note her previous settlement was destroyed by Indians fearful of her possible witching abilities.
Around-the-fort again this week, and probably a Halloween episode that the production schedule bumped to January 1965. Striking stage and TV genre specialist Geraldine Brooks is the witch candidate, and Russell makes the first of five DB appearances as he begins a long evolution from 1965 Disney child star to laconic action player in 2023. Craig does his workmanlike gruff heavy, but the most intriguing casting is Westerns journeyman Morgan Woodward as a settler. Take a good look at a period portrait of the real elder Boone, and the Woodward profile is much the same. If he had taken the title role in the series it would have lent the effort a very heavy patina of authenticity, but the 1965 handsome leading man requirement is irrevocable.
Draw your own conclusion as to whether the writers are sneaking in a Joe McCarthy/Cold War paranoia parable (and not much of a profile in courage to so by the late date of 1965), but someone decided colonial era = 1692 Salem, Massachusetts witch trials story. Brooks is also an artist, so she must be doubly suspect, though its unbelievable to watch Christian Euro-American settlers buy into the "she captures spirits on paper!" belief. Further credulity is suspended when Cambridge-educated Mingo follows the paranoids to an extent. Daniel of course provides the secularized Enlightenment viewpoint.
In reality, the morning-after shame of the Salem experience discredited witching accusations in the colonies after, and there is no record of serious charges being mounted anywhere in eighteenth-century America. The massacre that Brooks is accused of provoking is said to have taken place at Deerfield, NY. C. the 1760's. There was a French and Indian massacre of much of Deerfield, Massachusetts' English population in 1704, but no witchcraft connection. Deerfield, NY did not originate until 1798. One more lost straw brings the flying broom down - settlers were ill-inclined to listen carefully to Native American religious interpretations.
An interesting stab at making a colonial-era Halloween episode, but out of that context it looks the same as Halloween decorations do in daylight - mostly ridiculous.