User Reviews

Thinking his 10 year old son, Israel, has become spoiled, Daniel Boone takes him along when he goes out to check his traps. Israel fails to grasp the tricks and tips of tracking Daniel tries to pass along, which disappoints Daniel, and when they're attacked by a couple Shoshones, Daniel drops his pelts and they take off for home before the rest of the raiding party can catch up. Along the way, Daniel's bitten by a rattlesnake; delirious and unable to continue, he collapses and Israel must find his way home alone so that a rescue party can retrieve his father. Overcoming both his fears and a puma that's stalking him, Israel's journey becomes a big step toward becoming the man his father hopes he'll be.

Israel proves something of an ungrateful whelp at his 10th birthday party, getting a jacket and toy cannon but making it known he wants a gun. To show him the need to work for desired things, Dan takes him on an extended hunting trip, which is in short order complicated by a snakebit Dan and hostile Shawnees.

An inevitable requisite episode for DB. Permeating every 1960's TV series was the adult obsession that postwar kids were spoiled and needed to be subject to physical and mental ordeals in order to live up to their parents now-idealized Depression and WW II youth, the better to atone for the sins of missing the CCC and the Normandy invasion. (A favorite period story is Al Gore's father making him run a hand plow uphill - if it had fallen backward we might well have been deprived of the internet's invention and "An Inconvenient Truth.") And presumably DB's traditionalist writers could subtly vent their disapproval of 1967's growing anti-Vietnam protests by submitting an hour about curing indulged youth. But it always evaded the decade's evolving curmudgeons that a fair amount of the same over-pampered youth were risking life and limb fighting in Vietnam, where consequences were a bit more severe than those of a TV drama.

So, Israel (again worth mentioning the real Israel Boone was KIA during the Revolutionary War) is compelled to take on an average 10 year old's duties of rescuing his father from snakebite, defending him from Indian attack, traversing wildlands and dodging predators to bring back help. Presumably his moral character is positively molded by being dragged along on an age-inappropriate expedition, but we won't get to see his evolution into the successor Superman - Darby Hinton aged in real time on the show, and it ended with the Israel character at age 14.

On the up side, its a nice break to see Israel given relief from cute kid duties to assume some real agency. He's allowed to handle firearms; the show code prohibited him from inflicting fatalities, but with a flintlock pistol he does clot a Shawnee on the head and takes down a mountain lion. Dan's main contribution is offing the rattlesnake.

Very little is spent on production values in another around-the-fort episode. Western stalwart Jim Davis shows up briefly as a trapper, and Kentucky's favorite villains, the Shawnee, return in the form of a not very effective two-man war party. At least they do not bring any visible Dakota plains regalia this time.

A modicum of action after Dan's snake bite, but the episode is far too Disneyfied and generationally preachy to warrant an enjoyable hour. Looking at this writing from a 2023 perspective makes me appreciate Bruce Dern's recollection from 1972's "The Cowboys," paraphrased: "John Wayne told me when I shot him (onscreen) I would be hated; I told him 'Yes, Duke, but at Berkeley I'll be a hero!'"