The Way West: Right to Left

Wagon Train's most tumultuous trek was perhaps its next to last season, the only one in color.

Wagon Train, "The Geneva Balfour Story"
OB: January 20, 1964, 8:30 p.m. EST, ABC
I was six days old when this episode was first broadcast.

Radio and recording comedian turned TV advertising genius Stan Freberg once told a hilarious story about the TV commercial that may have been his masterwork. Singer and dancer Ann Miller would headline a team of chorus girls in a 1930s-type number for Heinz Great American Soups, and it would be directed like a Busby Berkley-type revue from that era...by the then-retired Busby Berkley himself. The commercial was expensive enough--it had a kitchen that broke away to reveal a large stage, and a giant can of soup that came out of the floor while Miller danced on top of it--but still, they could only afford 20 dancers. And Berkley was used to directing huge revues, with as many as 100 and counting. So when he arrived for work, Freberg and his people broke it to him that he wouldn't quite have a hundred dancers. The great showman responded, "Eh, don't worry, I can even make 50 girls look like a hundred!"

Wagon Train basically worked on a very similar production method: each week they made 10 wagons--10 small wagons, in fact--look like an old west wagon train of 100 or so. The wagons were fairly small; if we ever saw any of the larger Conestogas (built especially for wagon train travel, to hold items and keep them from sliding around or tipping over on rocky overland trips), it was in the often-used stock footage. The effect of using smaller wagons was on the one hand, laughable. The sets made them clearly appear to be more roomy on the inside than the outside...inside they appeared to be the size of my bedroom. But also, it had a bittersweet effect. In real life, most covered wagons were simply farm wagons covered with canvas, indicating most of the travelers were rural, middle and working class citizens. It was perhaps meant to appeal to audiences who had moved to new territories and frontiers themselves (i.e., suburbs) in the recent past, the pioneers' search for a new life suggesting the promotion of upward mobility in the 1950s. The linear, forward right-to-left movement of the California-bound train, in the most vehicular western in TV history, also suggested another modern marvel to the viewers: the real-world interstate highway system that was only then, in the 1950s, starting to be built and put in use.

And yet, despite the aforementioned limitations, the show still had a big budget. It was big enough, for instance, to afford the wagons themselves, plus accommodate (occasional) location filming, presumably a California desert like the one used in M*A*S*H, and attract a galaxy of guest stars. And they were able to pull it off for eight seasons, including one as the number one show on television.
When it began, the show's star was clearly grizzled western veteran Ward Bond. I was most familiar with him from a non-western role, interestingly enough: Bert the cop in "It's a Wonderful Life." (He did often play cops, too.) Bond's western-heavy movie resume dated all the way back to a spiritual grandparent of the show, a 1930 movie called "The Big Trail" about another wagon train. His character, civil war veteran Major Seth Adams, was more than just the wagonmaster and leader; he was clearly its moral compass. Despite his toughness and world-weariness, he never forgot he was in charge of a lot of everyday men, women and children, and their dreams. And when someone was accused of something awful and "put on trial" (the wagon train had its own justice system in the old west) it was Adams who made sure it was a fair trial.

Joining Bond for season one were Robert Horton as trail scout Flint McCullough, a much younger man. Rounding out the cast were Terry Williams as Bill Hawks and Frank McGrath as Charlie Wooster, the train cook and comic relief character. (And like comic relief characters on other "adult" westerns, Wooster was pretty much a hidden badass. In one flashback episode, Wooster, a Union army solider in the Civil War, had to be physically restrained by Adams from running into the line of fire, Rambo-style, to rescue another soldier.) Williams and McGrath would be the only two regulars who would stay throughout the series' entire eight season run.

Frank McGrath as Charlie Wooster

Realistically, many real-life wagon trains were believed to be easier to manage in groups of 20 or 40 wagons, which at first glance would seem to better suit a series like this one. But the writers clearly wanted us to believe the wagon train on Wagon Train was usually a 100 wagon affair (with as many as 300 people by season 7), and apparently the reason for that was because the show was built around its guest stars. It would make more sense for faces to rotate in and out of a larger wagon train. Those stars often brought their individual stories into, out of and sometimes close to, the wagon train on Wagon Train. (I'm loathe to use the term "character anthology" anymore as I'm starting to hear from classic TV fans who misunderstand it.)

Among the guest stars over the years: the very first one, Ernest Borgnine, as a drunken, washed-up boxer in the show's pilot. The very next episode featured Ricardo Montalban as a Frenchman with a gambling problem, who kills someone in self-defense in one of those towns that has a "town boss" who seems to own everything and everyone. Others throughout the years included Bette Davis, Linda Darnell, Leonard Nimoy, Frances Bavier, Lee Marvin, Mike Connors, James Whitmore, Cesar Romero and Barbara Stanwyck. Future Bewitched co-stars Elizabeth Montgomery, Dick York, Agnes Moorehead, Sandra Gould and even "second Darren" Dick Sargent, appeared in separate episodes. Past western stars like Guy Madison and Andy Devine (both of Wild Bill Hickok); the then-current host of Death Valley Days, Ronald Reagan; and future western stars like Lorne Green and Dan Blocker (Bonanza), Jack Kelly (Maverick), James Drury (The Virginian), Leif Erickson and Linda Cristal (both of The High Chaparral), Linda Evans and Peter Breck (who would later join Barbara Stanwyck on The Big Valley), and Chuck Connors and Johnny Crawford, who would play father and son on The Rifleman. Comedians like Ed Wynn, George Gobel and Lou Costello made rare dramatic appearances on the show, Costello's performance being especially heartwarming as a drunken bum traveling with an orphan. (In fact, alcoholism, and how it often threatened the progress of the wagon train, was a recurring theme.)

The show's regular cast, however, had quite a turnover. The first, and saddest, one happened midway through season four when Ward Bond died unexpectedly of a heart attack while the show was on hiatus. His final episode, "The Beth Pearson Story," was about Adams falling madly in love with a woman who bore an uncanny resemblance to the late love of his own life. Even though it didn't write Adams out of the show, it was a near-perfect finale for him, as it touched on themes such as loss, love, retirement and legacy.

John McIntire as Christopher Hale, wagonmaster

The episode that introduced his replacement, Christopher Hale (John McIntire), showed everyone awaiting a new wagonmaster with nothing but our imaginations to go on as to whatever happened to Seth Adams. The wagonmaster in that episode ("The Chris Hale Story"), Jud Benedict (played by Lee Marvin) evolves in the episode from a cold, no-nonsense manager to a sadistic, near-psychopathic tyrant. The differences between Benedict and Hale are almost cartoonish: Benedict and his men arrest Hawks and Wooster ("giving too much lip" appears to be the crime), beat up old men and threatens them even when they're wearing a cast, while Hale, a wagon passenger and retired wagonmaster himself, repairs a child's doll. If I'm reading things right, the apparent subtext is a critique of McCarthy-era politics, and of corporate greed in particular. (The company that hired Benedict apparently liked the way he moved wagon trains so quickly despite the fact that he did it so dangerously, often killing passengers in the process.)

We eventually hear Hale's hellish, emotionally scarring backstory as to why he's so reluctant to get back in the saddle again: he was about to retire and settle down when Apache Indians burned down his house and killed his wife and children...something that wouldn't have happened if he'd been there. The episode ("The Chris Hale Story") ends with the ferociously mean (but hyper-sensitive to criticism) Benedict going mano-a-mano with Hale and getting his ass royally handed to him. When the beaten, losing Benedict goes for a gun, he gets shot, and the wounded Benedict and his bully co-horts leave the wagon train with their tails between their legs. Chris Hale is now their new reluctant leader, having firmly won the trust of the party that Benedict, with all his power and terror, could never get.

Robert Fuller as Cooper "Coop" Smith

Robert Horton made it to the end of the next season before he left the show in 1962. Hale handled everything himself, with the existing regulars, until former Laramie co-star Robert Fuller (himself a one-time Wagon Train guest star) joined the cast for the 1963-64 season. I mainly remember Robert Fuller as Dr.Kelly Brackett from Emergency!, and from his appearances on The Hollywood Squares in which his ability to give a false, "bluff" answer with a completely straight face tripped up many a contestant.

Michael Burns as Barnaby "Barney" West

Two other regulars joined and stayed for the remainder of the series: Michael Burns as Barnaby West (the youngest member of the train) in 1960, and Denny Scott Miller (a former movie Tarzan who I remember from two appearances on Gilligan's Island) as Duke Shannon.

Denny Scott Miller as Duke Shannon

The show's own journey can be reflected in its choice of theme songs, a tune changed three times during the show's run. During the first season it was a generic, western-sounding theme; in season two it was a much faster-tempo song (with lyrics under the closing credits), an odd choice given that wagon trains are known to move slowly. In season three the show adopted its best known theme, the Jerome Moross work the show would keep until the end of the series, which suggests a large, slow-moving wagon train through a large valley under a wide open sky.

In the meantime, the show had made it all the way to the top of the ratings, being number one for the 1961-62 season. After that season, ABC, having never had a top five hit at that point, spent a (still unknown to this day) pile of money to steal it away from NBC. It wouldn't work; the show's ratings plummeted and never recovered.

Season seven, 1963-64, was the year the show switched to full color and expanded each episode from an hour to 90 minutes, apparently inspired by the success of NBC's The Virginian. The new format meant each episode usually had more guest stars and an "A-story" and "B-story." Although the show was quite a sight to behold in color, it still had its limitations: many ABC affiliates still weren't broadcasting in color yet, plus the built sets looked little more fake (although the location footage was often beautifully shot; still,even scenes that are supposed to be set in the desert are often shot in interior studios at Universal) and the editors were more limited in their use of stock footage. For instance, I'm pretty sure I saw the same wagon turn over in three different episodes if not more. And of course its biggest limitation of all: being scheduled against a powerhouse CBS Monday night lineup that included The Lucy Show and The Andy Griffith Show.

During the show's first two seasons, it had the unique format of making the specific trip a season-long story arc, with the first episode or being all about the departure, and the season finale being about the arrival in California. There were even episodes about the crew's trips by boat or stagecoach back across the country to lead another train (as there were next to no wagon trains heading west to east). Eventually the show moved away from this format and the series was about a perpetually moving train. And the large number of riders made the wagon train a virtual moving community, complete with its own rules, its own justice system and even votes on how to proceed in certain situations, with the wagonmaster explaining all the options and risks. The justice system was especially noteworthy, as  the show often had the travel-weary wagon train passengers so quick to turn into a mob, almost gritting their teeth with impatience for one good chance to use their rope for a lynching party.

And that last point suggests a lot of real-world politics playing out underneath the surface of the series. The constant attempts by Adams and Hale to forgo lynching parties, for instance, was perhaps subtext for the then-in-progress civil rights movement. Corporate business policies and cold-war politics often seem to play out as well, as does concerns about such modern problems as health care, as well as issues over whether a popular vote is the best way to decide whether certain people do and don't have rights. For instance, the wagon train is sometimes vulnerable to Indian attacks, but usually it's made clear the Indians won't attack because Adams or Hale made treaties with them long ago, perhaps a hidden reference to the then-young United Nations.

A bit of Cold War and domestic politics play out in the episode from the week after I was born, "The Geneva Balfour Story," which is all about the whole concept of lying to avoid a panic...and the consequences that go with such an action.

The show opens with the train moving into a town, followed by Hale paying for more than $200 (in 1860s money) for a large amount of groceries--flour, bacon, etc. Judge Arthur Forbes (played by Robert Lansing, who just a year later would be an air corps commander in Twelve O'Clock High) and two other men discuss using the judge's influence to get a military escort. It seems the wagon train route is closed down by the U.S. government due to an Indian war ahead. Instead, Chris Hale announces the first of two decisions that will set up the events of this episode: taking a cutoff through the desert, what Cooper Smith calls "the most miserable 200 miles in the world."  Coop tells Hale there could be trouble from the passengers, so Hale says "We'll wave the flag a bit."

So, with the supply wagon decorated up in patriotic colors, Hale delivers a fiery speech that's made to sound like a military commander speaking to his troops, telling them the enemy is the land. "We can retreat or we can attack," he tells them, saying he has tankers of water from the government and an extra wagon full of supplies for the trip. He at once appeals to their patriotism, their courage and their pride. "You can expect every hardship that the land will dish out. You'll curse every day that will fry your brains, nights that will freeze the marrow in your bone. Worst of all you'll curse me for driving you on...have you the courage to tackle it?"

Judge Forbes tells the cowboy who's riding with him, Ishmael, "Has it ever occurred to you that so much truth can sound like a lie?"

Guest stars Archie Moore and Robert Lansing

Just a quick word about this minor character, Ishmael. It's a guest shot by boxer Archie Moore. This is interesting in that there were a lot of black cowboys in the old west, but you'd never know it from old western movies or TV shows, including this show. So seeing him here is significant.

Guest stars Peter Brown and Sherry Jackson

We then see a crossfaded montage, of Chris Hale over images of the wagon train, rain, lightning, the sun, a wagon turning over, and a grave, among other things. It's immediately after this part we meet Aaron and Geneva Balfour. Aaron is played by Peter Brown. Geneva is Sherry Jackson, a former child actress who played Danny Thomas' daughter on Make Room for Daddy for five years, then because a B-movie sexpot who often played the edgy biker chick (when she wasn't guest-starring on shows like Star Trek). Geneva, who's carrying the couple's child, complains, complains, complains about the conditions. "How many more Aaron dear, how many more before the graves are ours?" She says she'd rather not have their child at all than have it in the desert on a wagon train.

That night, another woman is trying to give birth; we hear it mentioned she's been in labor for 12 hours. Geneva holds her own baby bump as she hears the other woman moan and scream. But sadly, that's followed by the weeping of the father and husband: mother and child died in labor, in those high infant mortality days. Or as the midwife announces, "She belongs to the angels now."

Hale announces there will be a funeral just before they pull out at daybreak, and assigns people to burial detail. One man begs out of it, saying he had it last time. This prompts Geneva to get in Hale's face. "Is that all death means to you? A mess to clean up?"

The next day, Forbes is present as Hale and Coop look ahead to Castle Rock Butte. Coop says there was a fort there when he visited three years ago, but doesn't know if it's still there. Hale says he's sent Duke Shannon ahead to see if it's still there. When Forbes, who's been speaking to Chris Hale on behalf of the passengers, questions the idea of betting everything on the fort being there, Hale (and not for the only time this episode) tells him to leave the wagonmaster's job to him.

Aaron finds Geneva watching the burial crew digging the grave. He asks what she's doing and she says, "Waiting my turn." She then begs him to take her home. "Just once believe in me, just once believe in me?" he begs in return. She says that's what she did when he talked her into leaving "safe" Boston. Aaron explains her father and his money had way too much influence on their marriage. "You weren't my wife, you were his daughter," he says, to which she responds, "Put that on my tombstone." Clearly the writers don't want us to feel too sorry for Geneva, with all her histrionics. But it's about to get worse.

Duke Shannon returns and tells Chris Hale the bad news: the fort is abandoned. But he does have one silver lining as he hands Hale a can of sardines. Shannon says he got that can from a prospector who says there's a mining camp west of the fort, and if he can find him, he can find that camp. Hale responds the way emergency and political leadership often did in those days: with what we would, in a few short years, call a "cover-up." "I don't want these people stirred up more than they already are," Hale says, as he tells Shannon to keep quiet to everyone, even Coop.

The funeral takes place. A large number of pallbearers carry the coffin that contains the unnamed mother and child to their final resting place. (It wasn't unusual for there to be funerals and burials along the route.) Geneva watches the procession go by, then heads the other way to get to work making everyone, including the audience, hate her. She grabs a couple of cans of kerosene and douses it onto the red, white and blue supply wagon. Aaron is looking for her, and walks up just in time to see her set it on fire.

"Let it burn! It's the only way we can go home!" she screams as Aaron tries frantically to put it out. We immediately cut from that to Hale finishing up a prayer that ends the funeral, and as everyone puts their hats back on, one of the women yells "Fire!" Everyone runs back to camp to see Aaron trying to put out the fire.

Guest star Kathleen Freeman

Naturally, the passengers, being in a constant near-mob state, see Aaron next to the fire, and the fact that he was trying to put it out is lost on them. "He did it! He was the only one around!" shouts one especially mean, angry woman who will emerge as the leader of angry Greek chorus women during this episode. (She's played by character actress Kathleen Freeman, who's better known for her comedy roles. Just a few weeks after this show, for instance, she'll have a hilarious role as a hotel owner on The Dick Van Dyke Show.)

A mob actually starts to descend on Aaron before Hale fires a shot in the area and has his men put Aaron in the jail wagon. Hale then tries to address the crowd, with Freeman's character, who I'll call "the lead harpy," shouts "...because of him we're all going to starve!" Hale then goes from cover-up to flat out lie as he says there's an active army base at Castle Rock that's chock brimming full of food and supplies. "We can turn around and die, we can stay here and die, or we can move on ahead," is how Hale puts it to the passengers. Forbes, his role suddenly more important, tells everyone, "I saw we head to Castle Rock!" and the crowd calms down.

Left: Terry Wilson as Bill Hawks

As the crowd breaks up, Geneva, trying to make sense out of why her plan isn't working like she thought, asks Bill Hawks if they're going back. "No way we can turn back without that extra food," he tells her, giving her a geography lesson that she had failed to take into account (i.e., they were already more than halfway through the desert).

So if you're keeping score, after all of her melodramatics, Geneva Balfour has now, during a funeral, set fire to a supply wagon full of food in the middle of a desert...then let her husband take the fall. She now seems like an easy win for "Worst Person in the Entire Episode" (with Freeman's "lead harpy" character being a dark horse candidate to move ahead). But then again, this is a complicated story in which almost everyone who appears on the screen will become their own worst enemy.

Geneva then stands next to the command wagon where Hale and Shannon--speaking freely inside a wagon covered with non-soundproof canvas--discuss the lie and how Hale acknowledges no one will believe him now. "It's my lie and I want it to be kept my way," Hale tells Shannon, along with his plan to "Delay and pray," until Shannon hopefully returns with the prospector who will be the train's true savior.

Coop and Aaron reach an isolated place ahead of the wagon train, so the mob wouldn't get to Aaron. In fact he rode up front of the jail wagon, not inside it. When they stop, Coop puts axle grease on Aaron's burns, the only thing he has in 1860s wagon train America that strikes him as close to a salve. Coop levels with Aaron: he thinks Geneva set the fire and Aaron is covering for her, which he admits. Aaron says he's concerned about "all of those harpy women" and that the woman carrying his child is mentally "hanging on by a thread." "People already think I'm guilty, we've got to leave it that way," he says to Coop, swearing him to secrecy. Coop, reluctantly, goes along with yet another cover-up. But just then, as Coop puts Aaron back into the jail wagon, Hale and Forbes ride up and Hale declares the wagon train will make its noon stop earlier than usual, and in 30 minutes Aaron Balfour will go on trial with Forbes acting as prosecutor. When Coop protests--both because of the fair trial thing and the need to get to Castle Rock as soon as possible--Hale indignantly points to the jail wagon and says "anyone who doesn't like it can get in there with Balfour."

Geneva Balfour gives the lead harpy some peaches, but the lead harpy calls her out on the bribe and tells her it won't do her any good. Then the women show how viciously bloodthirsty they are by pushing, shoving and attacking the pregnant woman, leaving it to Coop to rescue her from the all-female mob. One woman yells, "who's going to midwife you in the desert, a buzzard?"

Just a quick word here: no, women don't fare well at all in this episode. There's not a single reasonable woman to be found (no female counterpart to Coop or Forbes, for instance) and the ones who don't come off as crazy come off as either coldly indifferent (Geneva) or viciously bloodthirsty (the harpies). But it did strike me that the reason there's an all female mob was because writer Ken Trivey and director Sutton Rolley realized a mob full of men screaming for Geneva's head would've been even worse, very obviously misogynistic even for 1964. There are other Wagon Train episodes with a strong woman here and there, but not many, and this is clearly not one of those episodes.

Coop then confronts Geneva. He says he thinks she did it, and when Aaron takes the fall for her, the trial will find him guilty and he'll be "banished," or abandoned in the desert. He says if she confesses, they won't bring themselves to do that to a woman, especially not a pregnant woman. "That fool's ready to lay his life on the line for you," he tells her. "You better face yourself Geneva, or are you rotten all the way through?"

Geneva, however, goes straight to Chris Hale and tells him she knows everything. She tells him all about the empty post at Fort MacLaren and even repeats his "delay and pray" phrase back to him. Hale tells a skeptical Geneva that if Aaron goes with them to Castle Rock in the prison wagon, the crowd will tear him apart, while he has more of a chance in the desert. He tells her Coop will bring him food and a horse later. Hale calls the hot, tired, angry train a "powder keg" and says her husband lit the fuse. That's when she tells him she did it..and to her surprise, instead of demanding she spill the beans like Coop told her to do, he tells her the opposite. "The lives of 300 people depend on your silence," he says.

The trial, an obvious farce from the getgo, begins with prosecutor Forbes trying unsuccessfully for a continuance since they're in a hurry to get to Castle Rock and he doesn't think Aaron will get a fair trial. Chris Hale is the judge, and it doesn't go unremarked that he's also the one who paid out of his own pocket for all the food destroyed when the supply wagon was set afire. Aaron Balfour then pleads guilty, and as members of the crowd start calling for his head, Coop runs forward and spills all the beans: Aaron didn't do it, he was covering for his wife Geneva, and that Aaron swore him to secrecy. As the crowd starts raising hell, Geneva collapses, and Forbes remarks on how close they came to a miscarriage of justice. The now easily threatened Hale reminds everyone he's the wagonmaster and is ready to prosecute any challengers for "mutiny."

It leads to Forbes sardonically quipping "wagonmaster right or wrong" (a play on the "My Country Right or Wrong" bumper stickers that were all over cars in that real-world era) with one of the other passengers remarking that whenever Chris Hale is wrong, Forbes is right. It's interesting to see the 1960s era politics play out under the surface; in just another year or two as the Vietnam era progresses, the term for everyone seeing something different than those in authority are telling them, and those in authority even giving them differing stories, would be "credibility gap," and it's all being demonstrated here. This whole episode could be a brilliant textbook example of "how to make a political statement in an unlikely work," much like the 1956 movie "Invasion of the Body Snatchers."

"Did you feel like you had to serve him up like a roast pig to satisfy that mob?" Cooper Smith asks Hale when the two are alone. "Go ahead, say it," Hale says back, "I'm ruthless, dictatorial, unjust." "You're none of those things," says Coop, asking what's gotten into Hale. Hale says it's the heat. Coop warns him the wagon train members are looking for a new wagonmaster and seem to like Judge Forbes: "Maybe he doesn't know a cactus from a cauliflower but he's fair and they respect him."

Hale then goes to Forbes and tells him there's a big difference between the courtroom and its laws, and the wagon train. "The only procedure out here is west and the only rule is, get there," says Hale. Forbes tells Hale the people might respect his orders more if he explained them instead of obstinately demanding blind trust.


The color, 90 minute season of Wagon Train would end up as a money-loser for ABC and Universal Studios; the following season, its last, the show would revert to hour-long, black and white episodes. In syndication cycles through the years, local stations would often skip season seven (since the odd running time would disrupt their daily lineups) and even now, those episodes are often rerun separately, perhaps on weekends by the cable networks who rerun the hour-long shows during the week. But they often aroused a lot of curiosity among western fans, enough to where season seven, "The Color Season," was actually the first to be released on DVD in 2008, a full year before the first actual black and white season.

Looking back now, Wagon Train had a unique place among the many westerns in network television. It wasn't the plot or format, which found everyone constantly on the move (Maverick and Have Gun, Will Travel also had main characters all over the place). Yes, it probably glossed over real history at times, like how the white man pushed Native Americans off their land. The characters were similar to other shows; while they did get their individual moments to shine (and even emotional romances and detailed backstories, which are some of the best episodes), in most episodes they were there to guide the often misbegotten passengers, looking for some semblance of a new life, a new chapter. That's what made the show special: a reminder that the pioneers who populated our country in its early years weren't always gunslingers or ruthless railroad or timber barons, just every day people like those watching at home. Every one of them had a dream, whether or not they had any clue on how to get there. That's why almost every episode of Wagon Train is named after a character ("The ----- ------ Story"), one more chapter in the wagon train's logbook. Even in the last episode, the train didn't stop...it simply moved on at the end, like most other episodes, presumably looking for a new life in reruns and DVD sales.

Availability: the entire series is available on DVD.

Next time on this channel: The Price is Right.