Rawhide premiered on January 9, 1959 on CBS and ran until January 4, 1966. The series was produced by Charles Marquis Warren, who also produced several early episodes of Gunsmoke. Warren used his 1958 film Cattle Empire as the basis for the series. He had directed the movie, and screenwriter Endre Bohem would become a story editor and consultant on the series. Further, Paul Brinegar, Steve Raines, and Rocky Shahan who had all appeared in Cattle Empire, would later join the cast of Rawhide when the series premiered in 1959.
Though Rawhide had completed its original run a few years before I was born, I have vivid memories of the show. When I was a little girl, Clint Eastwood had become a huge star with the spaghetti westerns he made while on his summer hiatus from the series and subsequent mega-hits such as Dirty Harry, Magnum Force, Every Which Way But Loose, and many others. As a result, episodes of Rawhide were aired frequently on TBS, which my brother and I watched whenever we could.
Clint Eastwood's face is the most prominent figure on the box art for Rawhide: The Third Season - Volume One. However the show was very much an ensemble cast and Eastwood's character of Rowdy Yates was one of several square-jawed cowboy types that filled out the cast. In the fifties and sixties, the primetime television schedule was bursting with westerns -- Gunsmoke, The Rifleman, The Big Valley, and Bonanza were all big hits.
Rawhide's plot was tailor made for success on television of the time. There were twenty riders looking after 3,000 head of cattle. The drovers included trail boss Gil Favor (Eric Fleming), ramrod Rowdy Yates (Clint Eastwood), rider Jim Quince (Steven Raines), rider Joe Scarlet (Rocky Shahan), rider Simon Blake (Raymond St. Jacques), scout Pete Nolan (Sheb Wooley), the wrangler, Jesús "Hey Soos" Patines (Robert Cabal), the cook, George Washington Wishbone (Paul Brinegar), the cook's assistant, Harkness "Mushy" Mushgrove (James Murdock), and John Ireland as Jed Colby.
A typical episode of Rawhide involved the drovers coming upon people on the trail in some sort of distress or involved in criminal activity. Occasionally one of the members of the cattle drive would find their way into a nearby town and encounter some sort of trouble from which the other cattle drivers would have to rescue them. The members of the cattle drive were like a family, and used their common sense and tough western exteriors to survive various difficult situations.
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