What I watched: The twelfth episode of The Gene Autry Show, a kid-friendly Western starring the titular singing cowboy and his sidekick Pat Buttram. “The Poisoned Watering Hole” was directed by Frank McDonald and written by Polly James, with guest stars Sheila Ryan, William Henry, Chief Thundercloud, and Leonard Penn. The episode originally aired at 7:30 PM on Sunday, October 8, 1950 on CBS, and is available on Shout Factory TV.
What happened: Gene and Pat are on the road and come by a poisoned watering hole. They know it’s poison because they find a broken bottle marked “POISON.” Gene resolves to tell the sheriff, but they’re interrupted by an Indigenous dude shooting a bow and arrow at them. Gene gets the edge by climbing up a tree and clotheslining him. The guy turns out to be a friend of Gene, Chief Tehome (Thundercloud).
It turns out that there’s a dispute over the local land, with a railroad company wanting to obstruct the watering hole. Gene’s compass is also going screwy, leading Pat to try to explain magnetism to Chief Tehome. In town, Pat confronts the railroad men, and it immediately descends into fisticuffs. After beating them up, Gene rides off so that he can sing a song.
They ride over to Kate’s Boarding House, where a man is pouring poison into a flash. Gene senses trouble and heads in. In the meantime, Gene and Tehome are waiting outside the lodgings, trying to get a room. The bad guy is just wandering around with the poison bottle, and Pat spots it. He eavesdrops on a man and a woman while stealing the pie they have on a windowsill. The bad guys notice that someone’s been fooling around with the door, but Gene and Pat beat them up. Pat steps in a pie, but is able to reveal that the culprit is local chemist Paul Judd (Henry), despite seeming not to have a motive.
Gene poses as a client of Judd, getting ores assayed. Everyone takes turns looking into the microscope and learn that there’s a silver deposit that the railroad is trying to capture. Kate herself (Ryan) intrudes, but Gene easily grabs her gun. She’s married to Paul and is certain that he isn’t doing anything wrong, despite having done crimes in the past.
The crew rides to a watering hole. When Gene provides evidence that the company is up to no good, they flee, and he chases them down. He ends up lassoing one of the guys off his horse. In the meantime, Pat and Tehome get captured by a sheriff who blames them for the recent run of crimes. Tehome, of course, uses his tomahawk to drag the keys to the cell over to him. The security at these jails is terrible. They end up locking up the sheriff.
A whole bunch of bad guys, led by someone named Ben Craig (Penn), show up and confront Gene. Gene says that he’s already passed along the information to the district marshall. They shoot at Gene, and eventually corner him, but Pat intervenes with a lasso that he promptly trips over. The sheriff is convinced to change his tune after seeing letters on a horseshoe pointing to the rail company. In the end, Paul turns out to be innocent, having been tricked by Kate’s brother who said he was working an abandoned mine. Pat runs off to avoid being convicted for his theft of the pie.
What I thought: One of the unusual feelings you get when watching older media is seeing a trope or idea that you’ve only seen parodied or presented ironically before be used in all sincerity. This episode of The Gene Autry Show falls into a lot of that. “The Poisoned Waterhole” immediately conjures, at least for me, one of Woody from Toy Story‘s automatic lines, meant to be a parody of corny old Western shows just like, well, The Gene Autry Show. A lot of this episode feels like a stagey Western parody, from the giant “POISON” barrels to stealing pies off windowsills, but I’m sure that for the kids watching it the events were deathly serious.
This would seem to mark a significant shift from most of the previous episodes of The Gene Autry Show, which often saw Gene as a man situated in a community. Here, Gene and Pat are more like the Lone Ranger and Tonto or other archetypal wanderers. There’s a little more action, and a little less warmth. If I was a kid at the time, I would probably like this episode a lot more than something like “The Star Toter” but as an adult it feels disappointing to see Gene Autry losing a bit of what made it distinct. Hell, even the song feels out of place here.
One particular trope that perhaps hasn’t aged the best is the Native American character, Chief Tehome. Tehome and the Indigenous tribe are ostensibly on the good guys’ side here, fighting off an illegal incursion by greedy miners. Like The Lone Ranger, The Gene Autry Show avoids the more old-fashioned trope of Indigenous people as savage enemies and instead presents them as noble people abiding by treaties. Gene notes that the area has been calm “since the white people made peace with the Indians”, although I’m sure that Native Americans would have a slightly different interpretation of what happened.
The portrayal of Chief Tehome, however, suggests that he is anything but an agent in the story. Instead, he seems closer to Pat’s status, someone who is typically the but of the joke and needs to be rescued. He has the same simplistic English as Tonto, but at least Tonto sometimes gets to do something and doesn’t wear the costume designer’s best impression of an “Indian” outfit. Ultimately, Native land is just the spark for conflict between good and evil white men. Actor Chief Thundercloud, incidentally, was the first man to play Tonto on screen in two Lone Ranger film serials, although it’s unclear whether or not he was actually Indigenous.
Deconstructionists need something to deconstruct, and a lot of revisionist Westerns I love like Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid or The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly probably couldn’t exist without a legion of straightforward Western stories full of purely good heroes, black-hearted villains, and meek Indians. But I do hope that the future of The Gene Autry Show doesn’t have that many poisoned waterholes in store for me.
Coming up next: Studio One takes us back to Europe with “The Spectre of Alexander Wolff”
The Eternal Couch Potato 