What I watched: The twenty-seventh episode of the first season of The Lone Ranger, a kid-oriented Western created by George W. Trendle. This episode starred Clayton Moore as the titular hero and Jay Silverheels as Tonto, with guest appearances by Frank Fenton, John Cason, Billy Bletcher and DeForest Kelly. This episode was directed by George B. Seitz and written by Seitz and David Bramson. “Gold Trails” aired on Thursday, March 16, 1950 at 7:30 PM on ABC, and is available to watch on YouTube.
What happened: We open on a stage robbery. The leader of the group insists on killing all the passengers. It emerges that his name is “The Dude”, and I immediately become pleased. This Dude (Fenton) is actually pretty well-spoken. His plan is to impersonate one of the men killed, the vice-president of the banking company. Gee, impersonation, how original. The group sees the Ranger, and also decides to set him up as The Dude. Our hero discovers the dead bodies, and sets out on his circuitous adventures.
The bad guys come into town, and immediately piss off a short guy with a mustache by treating the horses badly. His name is HORSEFACE (Bletcher). I don’t know if the names in this episode are genius, lazy, or both. The banker seems very impressed by the presence of a vice president, of any organization at all it seems. The banker and the town sheriff (Kelley) take the bad guys right to $100, 000 in gold.
Back at the corpse pit, the Ranger has discovered that one of the men is still alive. He rides into town looking for a doctor, and immediately impresses Horseface with Silver. But the local sheriff has already been misinformed by the villains, and holds the Ranger at gunpoint. He’s about to unmask the Ranger, but The Dude is in too much of a hurry for this. He rides away, with the Lone Ranger safely in jail.
Tonto comes in and realizes that his white buddy has got arrested again. Horseface decides to help him by distracting the sheriff. He proclaims that he’s “a rip-snorting gollywumpus and it’s my day to howl” and shoots his gun in the air. This allows the Ranger to grab the sheriff’s gun and put him back in the jail.
Out in the wilderness, the Dude shoots a man who knew Sam Martin. He tells his lead man, Rawhide (Cason, with another great name) to kill the other two so they each get twice as much money, and then make a run for the border. The Ranger and Tonto come upon this fight and decide to ambush the baddies. But the Dude gets the jump on him and is once again about to unmask him.
Fortunately, the Ranger outsmarts the Dude by, um, having Tonto come in and punch people. The posse from the town arrives, looking for the escaped Ranger. The wounded man identifies the real Dude, which apparently makes the sheriff okay with the whole jailbreak and escape. The Ranger rejects the reward, and says to give it to Horseface.
What I thought: In retrospect, it should have been obvious that The Dude was immortal. His air of divinity is unmistakable, and having an eternity to live does explain why he was so laid-back. Still, this important bit of backstory jars a bit with the character of the Dude we know. We can only speculate as to what happened between that jail cell in the old west and the room tied together by a rug in the 1990s.
The Dude, as we see him here, is not one to relax and let the world go by. He’s actively hatching schemes and committing very un-dudely acts of violence. He also shows a lack of loyalty to his colourful companions, something that the 90s dude certainly couldn’t be accused of. In fact, other than the striking baritone performance from Fenton, he seems to be a very standard Lone Ranger villain.
But 140-odd years is a long time. Presumably the Dude went to prison after the events of this episode, perhaps after the hangman’s rope had proved ineffective on his immortal self. He would have lived through the Civil War and both World Wars Perhaps all the slaughter around him gave him perspective, lead him to turn away from his quest for gold and towards more spiritual matters.
I also wonder about the character who appears in this episode as the Dude’s nemesis, one who instantly sees through him: the being known as Horseface. There’s something impish about this man: the Dude may have encountered him in past ages as a sprite or goblin. Perhaps he is represented in The Big Lebowski as the titular high-strung employer, or as one of the nihilists who confront the Dude in a bowling alley parking lot. Admittedly, here he appears as someone with a strong deontological belief in moral character, based on the treating of animals, but 140 years of conflict has obviously destroyed many of the Dude’s convictions and it may have done the same for Horseface.
So, while this initially appears to be an extremely by-the-book Lone Ranger episode, it actually provides some important context for one of cinema’s most enduring characters. Still, much remains left to be discovered about the backstory of the Dude. Hopefully the rumoured Big Lebowski sequel will give us some more clues about his history in the old west and the connection his mysterious nemesis Horseface.
Coming up next: Another entirely serious entry.
The Eternal Couch Potato 