User Reviews

This is a hallmark Gunsmoke episode, one of the meaty plots that take twists that are unexpected, but what allowed this series to become the all time classic that it became.

It starts as a standard kidnapping story, which for the frontier west naturally involves American Indians performing the kidnapping, in this case a leader of the Kiowa tribe.

As the story unfolds, it becomes clear that the daughter's father is deeply conflicted and emotionally tormented. The reasons are not clear until near the end when the situation starts to unfold. The father of the kidnapped daughter is far more knowledgeable of the Kiowas than one might have expected, but for a reason that resonates quite powerfully.

**** SPOILER ALERT *****

In the end, the kidnapping is a desperate effort to reunite a daughter with her mother just before she dies of an apparent illness. That reality becomes clear before the climatic scene.

Distraught with emotion, and rage over having the details of his life which he'd rather remain hidden, the father uses his knowledge of Kiowa tradition to demand a personal battle with the Kiowa chief, saying that the challenge of the broken lance happened before the subsequent sign asking for talk vice violence.

The father wins this battle, but is wise enough to avoid killing the chief, further cementing the long relationship the father and Dillon have forged, which is one of hard won mutual respect.

At the end, we have a reunion of daughter with father and mother, as the mother asks lovingly, "Why have you denied your blood, Kaimon?" It is then that we learn that the father was a part of this very Kiowa tribe long before the daughter was born and he married her mother. This family, the father forsaken to abandon the tribe and ultimately marry the mother of his two sons, none of whom knew of their father's and husband's past.

In the end, we have a complex and interwoven narrative, the kind of story that made Gunsmoke the series that has stood the test of time, and likely will continue earning new viewers even well past the lives of the actors and producers who created the work.

SPOILERS: This episode was confusing. I am going to ask questions for you to ponder. At first I thought that Melissa's mother was the Native American woman. But now I wonder if it was her grandmother. At the very, very end Victor French asked the wife "Did you know all along?" Now, if she did not give birth to the girl OF COURSE she would have known all along. So that means she must have been speaking about the fact Victor French was half Kiowa. So I have been wondering if the Kiowa woman who was dying was actually Victor French's mother (making her the grandmother of the girl)? Because otherwise, we are asked to believe that Victor French's wife raised a child that was not her's but a result of a fling with the Kiowa woman.

Victor French is great as an extremely intense, troubled, basically very good guy (one of his perennial character types in Gunsmoke, and Bonanza too! When he doesn't do this character, he does extremely intense, troubled, evil guys) and all's well at the end of the hour.

I'd much rather see Victor French in these TV westerns than in his later collaborations with Michael Landon, which I find treacly and usually painful to watch possibly because I'm just not a Michael Landon fan.

Matt Dillon is the other major figure in this one, powerful, gorgeous, heroic and wise as ever.

The womens' roles in this story are slightly smaller than the mens', but the women are absolute essential to the story and the outcome and that's a nice touch, too. And that's all I'm going to reveal - watch this one when it's on!

cheerio

****Spoiler Alert!!**** Just finished watching this episode and found it to be one of the more enjoyable episodes except for one confusing thing. The episode starts out with a older teenage girl being kidnapped from her family's barn. The father agrees to take along a preacher, at the insistence of his wife, with his two adult sons to track down and kill the Kiowa Indians who took his daughter, but refuses to bring Matt Dylan. Later Matt catches up on the trail after being informed of the event by the wife. We later find out that the daughter is the daughter of a Kiowa woman who lays dying. The Indians had brought her to her unknown birth mother as a dying wish. The major plot hole comes due to the fact that Hollywood insists on hiring people who are well into their late 20's to play teenagers. I came away with unanswered questions. Did this farmer cheat on his white wife and have an affair that produced a daughter, but is father to all three children? Are all three kids the children of the squaw and the white wife the step-mother? Did a widow mother with two extremely small sons marry a man with a small daughter and raise them together as if they were related? The two actors playing the sons are very obviously older that the actress playing the sister, but one reviewer who also points out this plot hole believes the sons are supposed to be younger. In the Indian village during the reveal the sons when learning their father is half white/half Indian says "that means we are....", but during the barn scene at the end the father tells the boys that they are his sons " nothing more, nothing less...". So are they his step-sons or his full blooded part Indian sons? The white wife has a scene before this with her husband where she states she knew he would tell her when the time was right. Extremely loving woman if her husband suddenly showed up with an infant which leads me to believe my two widowers marrying theory. They probably filmed a better explanation for the ending but had to cut it down due to time restraints. Imo they could have taken time from Kitty's birthday scene easily but maybe the contracts of the other actors required a certain amount of minutes if they actually appear in an episode, idk. Anyways, in spite of the ending confusion this episode is well worth watching! I would have rated it ten stars if the relationship wasn't so poorly edited in the final cut. I'm assuming what was shown on MeTv was an unedited cut since another had the same questions years previous in their review of this episode. If someone has seen a different unedited version please be kind enough to answer the relationship questions of this family.

This episode deals with some very primal issues such as prejudice toward others different to you and with human pride for sure.

A father is furious when his daughter is kidnapped by Kiowa. He spews hatred and threatens to kill every Indian he sees. His wife intervenes by seeking Matt and begs him to go after the angry husband in the hope of preventing blood shed. Somehow a bible toting, scripture quoting old preacher who rides a mule gets pulled in to the mix. We don't get a heads up as to why the father has so much hatred for the Kiowa until almost the very end. Then things begin to make sense.

It always amazes me how people can develop a hatred for certain other people with no valid reason other than someone taught them to be that way.

There was just enough mystery and intrigue to keep this interesting and a surprise ending to wrap it up.

While I'm a big Gunsmoke fan and enjoy most episodes, this particular one, "Kiowa," is one of my least favorites.

The plot has a fatal flaw: Mrs. (Martha) Vail told Marshal Dillon that she had been married to her husband, Ed, for 23 years. Their two sons appear to be in their early 20s. Melissa appears to be a youngish teenager (my guess would be 14 or 15). Yet at the end we learn that Melissa is in fact Ed's daughter by the Kiowa squaw who lay on her deathbed.

Melissa's two half-brothers, the offspring of Ed and Martha, are obviously years older than she. That means that they were conceived by Martha years before Melissa was conceived by the squaw, which would place Ed with the squaw AFTER Martha rather than before. (Ed, being half Kiowa and half white, at some point renounced his Native American heritage/blood and was living as a white man.) In order for this story line to work, Melissa should have been older than the two half-brothers since the Kiowa chapter of Ed's life occurred way before the "white" part. Unbelievable that such a glaring problem wasn't caught by anyone before or during production.

This episode is also notable in that it is the second I have seen where Marshal Matt Dillon is seen riding a horse other than his buckskin (the horse's name was Buck). We see Matt ride up to the camp of Ed, the two boys, and the preacher astride a gorgeous black creature. Yet when the party leaves to pursue the Kiowa who kidnapped Melissa, Matt's black steed has magically turned into good ole Buck!! This goof isn't nearly as big as the plot flaw but still worth mentioning.

I rated this one 5 out of 10.

Too many unanswered questions. The most glaring one is that there's no way Melissa's Kiowa mother or that matter ANY of the the Kiowas would've let Ed take his daughter away. There is absolutely no explanation how he ended up with her or why his wife acted like she was their daughter. His wife alludes to the fact that she's been with him for 23 years yet the sons look older than that and Melissa is about 16 which means they would've been around when she was born. Another thing that doesn't make sense is why Martha would insist on Melissa's godfather the Reverend joining them. I assumed at first it was because he was good friend of Ed's, but Ed and the sons can't stand him. And why does the Reverend keep calling the sons Cain and Abel. I see no need reason for the reverend's character in this storyline. Melissa called herself an orphan girl at the beginning when she's milking the cow before she's abducted. That would've worked better for the storyline...if Ed had come home from traveling with Melissa and said she'd been orphaned and he decided to bring her home for Martha to raise as their daughter. Although it still wouldn't have solved the mystery of how Ed was able to leave the Kiowas alive with Melissa. Another mystery is if they knew where he was why did they wait till her mother was dying to come for her?