Mingo receives word that a Cherokee friend of his, Craw Green, has disappeared from the settlement of Logan's Fort. Going incognito as a white trapper, Mingo visits and investigates - but runs into a wall of hostility and silence from the Logan's Fort residents.
Fess Parker took a break here and allowed Ed Ames to take center stage. The storyline is largely lifted from Spencer Tracy's "Bad Day at Black Rock" (1955) as Mingo seeks out a few ethical citizens interested in the truth. The small-town crime boss role is handled by Jeffrey Hunter, inaccurately dressed in an outfit more appropriate to a "Wild Wild West" episode. Hunter's acting is wooden in the extreme; one can only speculate if he would have flourished had he chosen to stay with "Star Trek" past his pilot role as Captain Christopher Pike. Another ST connection is Sabrina Scharf, playing a helpful Cherokee-Scottish local lass; she would go on to play Captain Kirk's Native American love interest Miramee in 1969's "The Paradise Syndrome."
Historical topics touched on rather distantly here include tribal land dispossession and the difficulties of mixed parentage in frontier society, but they are pretty much drowned in a standard Western stranger-cleans-up-the-town storyline. There was a Logan's Station, Kentucky (present-day Stanford) on a branch of the Boone's Trace trail during the 1770's, and it was the site of a thirteen-day tribal siege in May 1777.
The Logan's Fort tavern is likely Cincinattus' Boonesborough store filmed from a different angle, and reference is made to a Cherokee god that appears to have no historical basis.
Ames probably would have been a strong presence as a protagonist if he had been given his own series, but the overall story here seems better suited to a six-shooter rather than a flintlock setting.
Fess Parker took a break here and allowed Ed Ames to take center stage. The storyline is largely lifted from Spencer Tracy's "Bad Day at Black Rock" (1955) as Mingo seeks out a few ethical citizens interested in the truth. The small-town crime boss role is handled by Jeffrey Hunter, inaccurately dressed in an outfit more appropriate to a "Wild Wild West" episode. Hunter's acting is wooden in the extreme; one can only speculate if he would have flourished had he chosen to stay with "Star Trek" past his pilot role as Captain Christopher Pike. Another ST connection is Sabrina Scharf, playing a helpful Cherokee-Scottish local lass; she would go on to play Captain Kirk's Native American love interest Miramee in 1969's "The Paradise Syndrome."
Historical topics touched on rather distantly here include tribal land dispossession and the difficulties of mixed parentage in frontier society, but they are pretty much drowned in a standard Western stranger-cleans-up-the-town storyline. There was a Logan's Station, Kentucky (present-day Stanford) on a branch of the Boone's Trace trail during the 1770's, and it was the site of a thirteen-day tribal siege in May 1777.
The Logan's Fort tavern is likely Cincinattus' Boonesborough store filmed from a different angle, and reference is made to a Cherokee god that appears to have no historical basis.
Ames probably would have been a strong presence as a protagonist if he had been given his own series, but the overall story here seems better suited to a six-shooter rather than a flintlock setting.
