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In the TV series Rawhide, Gil and his men are herders moving cattle north. Along the way they run into obstacles. For this assignment I watched season one, disk seven. There were four episodes on this disk and they included, Incident of The Judas Trap, Incident in No Man’s Land, Incident of the Burst of Evil and Incident of the Roman Candles. In the first episode Gil and Rowdy are trying to fend off wolves form eating the cattle. In there search for a wolver they get what they need and then some. The wolver ends up being a killer. In the end they get rid of the wolves and kill the wolver in true cowboy style with there six shooters. In the second episode the men are worried about blasting going on at a prison camp just away from the herd. Things get worse when the prisoners make there escape and try to still the herder’s horses. The men fend them off the convicts and move along the range. In the third episode the herder’s are attacked by Comancheros. These are men that have gone wild; they kill everyone that doesn’t join the group, and take everything. Fortunately Gil and Rowdy fend them off and the locals are very happy for the defeat. In the last episode they find a boy lost on the range, so they think. The boy ended up lying about what had happened to his family and in-fact his family was in worse danger. In the end three criminals are killed and life is back to normal on the plains.

In all I thought that the episodes depicted the life of a cattle driver more exciting that it really would have been. The fact that they had to deal with wolves, lady problems, and the herd scaring seemed to me very real. However there seemed to be a lot of killers on the loose. Now I know these were lawless days on the range but what are the odds that drovers would run into four sets of killers in four days. Not likely! I suppose they had to make the episodes more interesting though. Over all I thought the episodes were not too bad and I might want to watch the rest of season one… when I have a lot more time on my hands.

Jordan Voller