The Texan is a Westerntelevision series starring popular B movie actor Rory Calhoun, which aired on the CBStelevision network from 1958 to 1960.[1][2]
. . . The Texan (TV series) . . .
In The Texan, Calhoun played Bill Longley, a Confederate captain from the American Civil War who on his pinto horse, Domino, roams the American West, but stops to help people in need. A fast gun and the enemy of all lawbreakers, this “Robin Hood of the West” seems to appear nearly everywhere in the postwar years, not just in Texas.[3]
Often, the plots center around Longley helping an old friend or a relative of an old friend. Though known as a fearsome gunfighter, the fictional Bill Longley of The Texan is in no way the real Bill Longley. That Longley killed his first man in 1866, when he was 15, and was hanged in 1878 in Giddings in Lee County in Central Texas. A more accurate version of the real Longley is Douglas Kennedy‘s rendition in the syndicated series, Stories of the Century, starring and narrated by Jim Davis, and the first Western series to win an Emmy Award.[3]
The Texan offers several multipart episodes. In a four-parter, Longley portrayed the boss of a cattle drive; in another, he was a railroad construction supervisor. In still another, Longley pursued the bandit El Sombro in the fictitious corrupt community of Rio Nada. In this episode, Barbara Stuart made one of her three appearances as Poker Alice, an unlikely frontier gambler, the mother of seven children who had once been a dealer at Bob Ford‘s saloon in Creede, Colorado, but lived thereafter primarily in Deadwood and Sturgis, South Dakota. Calhoun’s then-wife, Lita Baron, appeared in several episodes, including a three-parter.[3]
. . . The Texan (TV series) . . .