I posted some incorrect information. I thought it was Peter Brady who developed a crush on Jesse James. Turns out it was Bobby. Mike and Carol Brady arrange for an old man to come to the house to tell Bobby how his father was murdered by Jesse James during a train robbery.
Jesse James was killed in 1882. He murdered two men during his second-to-last train robbery in 1881. Burt Mustin, who played the old man, was born in 1884, so his character was a few years older than he was in real life.
The episode was broadcast in 1973.
This is what I never understood about westerns. People are always saying that the Old West was nothing like the movies, so why were the movies like that? Much of that time period was within living memory when westerns were really popular. There were old timers walking around who had lived through at least the tail end of the wild west.
Wyatt Earp worked in Hollywood in the 1920s. Silent film western star William S Hart knew Earp and Bat Masterson. John Wayne knew Earp and reportedly imitated his walk and his speech patterns which might explain a lot, that he modeled himself after an 80-year-old man.
The old show, 26 Men, supposedly based on true stories of the Arizona Rangers had surviving members of the Arizona Rangers introduce episodes of the show.
There are war movies which aren't true to life, but war movies make war seem less traumatic, not more.
From Wikipedia:
In 2013, Marshall Trimble, the board president of the Arizona Historical Society and vice president of the Wild West History Association, documented that Matt Dillon's TV character was shot at least 56 times, knocked unconscious 29 times, stabbed three times, and poisoned once.
That was Matt Dillon from Gunsmoke, which, in fairness, was on TV for twenty years. He was shot on average fewer than three times a year. There were 635 episodes. They did over thirty episodes a year which means some of them were only shown once. There weren't enough weeks in the year to re-run all of them. If they had done only 6 episodes per season like the British, he would have led a much easier life.
There's no way to know, but Jesse James did kill around 20 people, not counting the ones he murdered in the Civil War, and he was only 34 when someone finally shot him in the head. So maybe my whole premise here is wrong.
