On a mapping trip, Daniel encounters an old friend - free African-American trapper Orlando (Don Pedro Colley) and his son, namesake Little Daniel. Dan offers to take LD to Boonesborough while Orlando continues to gather furs, but en route the two of them are ambushed by Winnebagos and LD abducted. LD escapes, and Dan and Orlando track his trail to the edge of a waterfall. Crazed with grief, Orlando doubles back to Boonesborough and vows revenge by kidnapping Israel.
A landmark episode for DB in that its the first to feature such a full portrait of an African-American protagonist, and this is an instance where Fess Parker's late-series tendency to carry a light load well serves the story. Colley, who enjoyed a varied TV career, is a convincing grieving father. The script is unafraid to let him demonstrate a wide range of good and bad judgment, plus he is allowed with Cincinattus to pull the leg of a Boonesborough local with some 1968-tame racial humor. The drama is heightened when Boone is allowed to be less-than-Superman for the first half, then has to scramble to set things right.
African-American characters will show up more frequently in the remaining seasons of DB, and Colley is scheduled for three more as Orlando. By this point the networks were hardly impervious to the changing racial climate in the nation, and realized space had to be made for African-American actors and stories. And notably, this hour debuted on March 7, 1968 - three days after the Martin Luther King assassination. NBC might have pulled and aired it out of sequence to put on something more relevant than the usual yuk-yuks about boorish trappers or damsels in distress, or the air date could just be coincidental.
Orlando's character - fairly accurately costumed as a period French-Canadian voyueger - is introduced via conversational backstory, though such a good pal of Boone's is not seen previously in the series, perhaps a casualty of a rejected script draft. His free status is explained by making him a naturalized Canadian, though the concept of Canada as refuge for escaped and emigre U. S. Blacks belongs more to the pre-Civil War Underground Railroad years than to the 1780s and 90's. Kentucky became a slave state fairly early, and would not have been a hospitable place for escaped or freed slaves.
In an effort to more equitably share villain-of-the-week duties, the Shawnee are given the week off and the Wisconsin-dwelling Winnebagos are called in; why they would trek to Kentucky to kidnap an African-American child is never explained. Finally, the historical context of these Boone adventures requires another reminder that despite NBC's efforts to portray him as a proto-abolitionist, the real Boone was a slaveholder (though not a plantation-scale one), and the historical record is scant as to his interaction with free-African-Americans.
A rare but effective attempt by the DB writers to reinvigorate the series formula late in the game, and one of Season 4's better adventures.
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A landmark episode for DB in that its the first to feature such a full portrait of an African-American protagonist, and this is an instance where Fess Parker's late-series tendency to carry a light load well serves the story. Colley, who enjoyed a varied TV career, is a convincing grieving father. The script is unafraid to let him demonstrate a wide range of good and bad judgment, plus he is allowed with Cincinattus to pull the leg of a Boonesborough local with some 1968-tame racial humor. The drama is heightened when Boone is allowed to be less-than-Superman for the first half, then has to scramble to set things right.
African-American characters will show up more frequently in the remaining seasons of DB, and Colley is scheduled for three more as Orlando. By this point the networks were hardly impervious to the changing racial climate in the nation, and realized space had to be made for African-American actors and stories. And notably, this hour debuted on March 7, 1968 - three days after the Martin Luther King assassination. NBC might have pulled and aired it out of sequence to put on something more relevant than the usual yuk-yuks about boorish trappers or damsels in distress, or the air date could just be coincidental.
Orlando's character - fairly accurately costumed as a period French-Canadian voyueger - is introduced via conversational backstory, though such a good pal of Boone's is not seen previously in the series, perhaps a casualty of a rejected script draft. His free status is explained by making him a naturalized Canadian, though the concept of Canada as refuge for escaped and emigre U. S. Blacks belongs more to the pre-Civil War Underground Railroad years than to the 1780s and 90's. Kentucky became a slave state fairly early, and would not have been a hospitable place for escaped or freed slaves.
In an effort to more equitably share villain-of-the-week duties, the Shawnee are given the week off and the Wisconsin-dwelling Winnebagos are called in; why they would trek to Kentucky to kidnap an African-American child is never explained. Finally, the historical context of these Boone adventures requires another reminder that despite NBC's efforts to portray him as a proto-abolitionist, the real Boone was a slaveholder (though not a plantation-scale one), and the historical record is scant as to his interaction with free-African-Americans.
A rare but effective attempt by the DB writers to reinvigorate the series formula late in the game, and one of Season 4's better adventures.
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