User Reviews

This is the third Gunsmoke episode to feature the family of "hill people," that includes Merry Florene and her half-brother Elbert Moses. In this installment, Roland Daniel has been replaced by "Cousin Smiley." Elbert Moses and Smiley are in Dodge City running the old shell game scam until Matt catches them cheating the Dodge citizens and runs them out of town.

The two bumbling, would-be criminals run across an old miner outside Dodge. When the miner gives them $20 in accumulated gold dust and title to the mine, Smiley comes up with an idea to trick the Dodge folks into thinking the gold mine is lucrative and can produce large amounts of gold. Smiley and Elbert Moses subsequently establish "Gold Town," and many of the people in Dodge make their way to the new town to seek their own fortune in gold.

Matt is suspicious, but he has to leave town (of course) and asks Festus to investigate the situation. Festus knows Elbert Moses and Smiley are "crooked-er than a dog's hind leg," and the results are predictable.

Anthony James, who appeared on Gunsmoke during this time almost as frequently as any of the regular cast members, reprises his role as Elbert Moses. The always memorable Lane Bradbury returns as Merry Florene. Bradbury's real-life husband at the time, Lou Antonio, plays Cousin Smiley. Viewers should also keep an eye out for a young Eve Plumb, who would begin playing Jan Brady on The Brady Bunch in a few months.

Despite a good cast, there isn't much to recommend about this episode. It is a mostly light-hearted episode, but the attempts at both humor and drama fall short.

Merry Florene and family should have stayed in the hills but seem fit to return in this episode. From 'Hill Girl' in season 13, this season 14 episode features the same cast of clowns as Merry Florene's cousins Elbert and Shorty come up with a scheme to get the residence of Dodge to invest in spot of land in an abandon gold mine.

It began when Elbert and Short came across an old-timer miner that had been working for twenty years with little to show in this mine. The old timer was leaving and gave the two his bag of gold flakes that obtain for the last twenty years. Now Albert and Shorty go into Dodge and show off the gold flakes and pretend they just dug the gold up in hours. There is a rush to pay ten dollars to dig near the mine which Elbert and Shorty named Gold Town. They send for Merry Florene and grand-ma to help start the new city. Which we all knew was not going to work out well for anyone.

It was nice to see Merry Florene and Newly together again but little else is remarkable in this episode. It is perhaps time to shelve the hill people and develop more interesting characters.