Heyes and Curry ride through the desert. Curry is worried because he doesn’t feel like they’re being watched. Now Heyes is worried because Curry’s being worried that there’s nothing to be worried about worries him. What Heyes said doesn’t make sense to Curry. He tells his friend, “You know, you’re really beginning to worry me.”
GUEST CAST
GLENN CORBETT — MARTY ALCOTT
CHRISTINE BELFORD — ELLIE ALCOTT
FRANK CONVERSE — CRESS TRUETT
MARK HOLLY — JAKE HORN
EUGENE “SONNY” SHIELDS — PHIL WESTERLY
MICHAEL CONRAD — MIKE MCCLOSKEY
TODD MARTIN — PETE
BUDDY FOSTER — ALONZO TAYLOR
CHARLES H. GRAY — SHERIFF WIGGINS
FORD RAINEY — TESHMACHER
“The history of the Wyoming Stockgrowers Association is a vile history, and we can say so,” [25] Roy Huggins told writer David Moessinger. The plot of this episode revolves around the battle between the small ranchers and the cattle barons that was a part of life in Wyoming throughout the 1880s and eventually led to the infamous Johnson County War in 1892.
In the 1880s, the cattle industry was booming and fortunes could be made. This proved attractive to investors and between 1880 and 1884, a stream of cattle corporations, many of them foreign-owned, set up shop in Wyoming. To protect their interests, these cattle barons formed the Wyoming Stockgrowers Association, a powerful group that soon controlled not only the cattle industry, but also politicians, newspapers and courts. They instituted rules governing every facet of the cattle business, rules designed to drive out homesteaders with small herds.
The Association’s desire to get rid of the small ranchers derived from their own greed and shortsightedness. To increase their profits, they increased the size of their herds, giving no thought to what the land could support. By 1885 the range was severely overstocked, driving down prices and contributing to a depression. The ranchers were faced with more problems in 1886, when a summer drought, which weakened the cattle, was followed by an exceptionally harsh winter. Sixty percent of the herds perished. To save money, the cattle barons cut wages, began laying off cowboys during the winter and refused to honor the institution of grub line riding (providing food for hungry, out-of-work cowboys) unless a cowboy paid fifty cents for the meal. Cowboys who had the temerity to start their own homesteads and herds were declared rustlers because they often started those herds by rounding up stray cattle, especially calves, and branding them, thereby declaring ownership. This infuriated the Association and the Wyoming legislature obligingly passed a “maverick law” making this practice illegal. [26]
With this history as a basis, Huggins developed the story of Marty and Cress, two homesteaders partnering to make a living as independent ranchers. While the story is a straightforward tale, understanding Marty’s motivation is dependent on understanding the corrupt practices of the Wyoming Stockgrowers Association. Moessinger was not successful in relating this history to the audience in his first draft script, being somewhat confused about it himself, and the second story conference turned into a history lesson, with Huggins explaining in great detail the difference between the Wyoming Stockgrowers Association and the Livestock Commission, making sure his writer learned that “the Commission was three men in the legislature — all members of the Wyoming Stockgrowers Association, and puppets of that Association who passed rules and issued orders under the instructions of the Wyoming Stockgrowers Association.” [27]
Huggins had other quarrels with the first draft, noting that the attitudes of the characters are very important. The story wouldn’t work if the audience didn’t like them. “In the present draft we don’t like Marty very much because of his cocky attitude. We also don’t like the boys very well because they say, ‘Well, gee, we’ve got problems of our own –’ and they’re saying this to a man who saved their lives.” [28] In the scene where Marty tells the roundup foreman he’s removing his cattle, the foreman draws on them, showing his disdain of Marty’s “hired guns.” Curry responds with a threat. “Do that again…I’ll cut you in half before you can even thumb back your hammer.” [29] The foreman found the threat convincing, but Huggins didn’t, complaining “it makes Curry look like a troublemaking crumb.” [30] The second draft of the script still didn’t satisfy him and after covering almost every page with scribbled rewrites, Huggins gave it to his secretary with the note, “Do a complete re-type on this so I can re-write it again!” It took two more drafts to get the script where Huggins wanted it to be — a careful balance of story, characters and history.
What Happened at the XST?
“What could go wrong?”
Kid Curry
STORY: JOHN THOMAS JAMES
TELEPLAY: JOHN THOMAS JAMES
DIRECTOR: JACK ARNOLD
SHOOTING DATES: UTAH — JULY 20, 21, 1972; STUDIO — SEPTEMBER 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 18, 1972
ORIGINAL US AIR DATE: OCTOBER 28, 1972
ORIGINAL UK AIR DATE: DECEMBER 26, 1973
“Frank Canton was Sheriff of Johnson County, Wyoming from 1883-1887. When he died in 1932, full of honors, he was Adjutant General of the State of Oklahoma, and still calling himself Frank Canton — which was not his real name.”
Those words scroll on the screen as Hannibal Heyes and Kid Curry make their way to Buffalo, Wyoming. Passing a woman driving a buggy, they’re glad to learn from her that Frank Canton is the sheriff there and even happier to realize they don’t know him. Deputies Burk Stover and Orville Larkin take special note of Heyes and Curry as the boys play poker in a Buffalo saloon.
Back at their hotel, Heyes and Curry inquire of the desk clerk if a man named Gorman checked in yet. He hasn’t.
When Heyes and Curry enter their hotel room, the same two deputies are waiting for them, wondering what they’re doing in Buffalo. Just passing through, they say, their friend Gorman may be meeting them here. The deputies aren’t interested in Gorman, but they strongly urge the boys to leave town. If they don’t, the deputies will selectively enforce the law prohibiting firearms to be carried and will throw them in jail.
Heyes laughs after the deputies leave. If they knew who they really were, they wouldn’t be inviting them to move on. Heyes isn’t even curious about why they’re not wanted in town. “Curiosity’s a vice, one of the few I don’t have,” he confesses much to Curry’s consternation. However, it’s April 9 and Gorman isn’t supposed to arrive in Buffalo until the twelfth. They’ll leave town, then sneak back in in three days.
Curry doubts the wisdom of meeting up with Artie Gorman. He probably has a scheme that’s illegal and stupid. But Heyes reminds him they owe Artie a large favor.
Next day as they meander on horseback through the dry landscape, Curry sings all the verses to “I’m a Poor Lonesome Cowboy.” Listening patiently, Heyes knows for sure why the reward on Curry is for “dead or alive.” If he sings one more chorus, though, Heyes promises to turn him in himself. Disregarding his partner’s lack of musical appreciation, Curry sings on.
Three days later, Heyes and Curry pay a boy fifty cents to ask the hotel desk clerk if Artie Gorman has checked in. No one fitting the description has come to the hotel desk. Curry is hungry, tired, and needs a bath so he plans on getting a room in spite of the possible danger. A little later, from around a corner, Deputies Burk and Orville watch them exit the hotel. As Heyes and Curry walk down the sidewalk, Orville calls to them and puts them under arrest. Heyes explains they only returned to see if their friend Artie showed up. They’ll leave in the morning.
Orville points the way to the jail. As they pass an alley, he shoves them into it and a fight ensues between Heyes, Curry, and the deputies.
The boys lose the fight, are knocked unconscious and come to to find themselves dumped out of town. A note pinned to Heyes’s vest advises them to head to Sheridan or Gillette, just not back to Buffalo. The first thing Curry plans on doing is returning to bruise the deputy like he got bruised and to find ou
t why they’re not wanted in town.
They get Deputy Burk alone and beat on him until he reveals what Buffalo’s got against them. Burk says Sheriff Frank Canton ordered them to encourage the boys to leave town. Orville appears and gets the drop on them. Taking their gun-belts, the deputies lead the boys to jail. When the lawmen leave, Heyes begins to work on the cell lock with a pick he had hidden in his boot.
He stops as the door to the jail opens and a man enters whom Heyes and Curry know as Joe Horner. Horner opens the cell door. Heyes and Curry are eager to leave because Frank Canton will be coming soon. “You’re looking at him,” Horner says. Horner is sheriff of Johnson County and is very popular. The Stockgrowers even want to make him chief of detectives, but everyone knows him as Frank Canton. He asked his deputies to get Heyes and Curry out of town because he can’t have them calling him “Joe Horner” when they see him on the street.
Canton wonders who Artie Gorman is. They say he’s an old friend who was in prison in Utah but they don’t know exactly why Artie wants to see them. After promising Canton not to get into trouble in his town, they head to the hotel where Gorman has finally arrived.
The hotel clerk has put him in the boys’ room and when they enter, they hardly recognize the sleeping man. Years in prison have changed Artie. After Heyes fetches a bottle of whiskey, Artie begins his story. He and Old Jack Cheseboro had stolen $80,000 from a North Platte bank and buried it thirteen miles from Buffalo. They got caught pulling another job and went to jail. Jack was on his way to dig up the money after he got out of prison but died before he could get to it. In the meantime, a rancher had built an icehouse right on the spot. It’s not dangerous or illegal to dig up the money because the statute of limitations has run out on the crime.
The boys are reluctant to help retrieve the money because it wouldn’t be honest. Artie can’t believe his ears. He acknowledges that they’re trying to go straight but says they owe him. If he hadn’t taken them in when they were sixteen, they wouldn’t have made it to seventeen.
Heyes sends Artie out to get his own room while they discuss his proposition. They realize they do owe him a lot and finally agree to help dig up the loot.
The next afternoon, Artie rides up to the ranch to sound an alarm. He announces that the sheriff has Hannibal Heyes and Kid Curry holed up at the KC and will split the reward with everyone who shows up to help. The ranch hands scurry for their horses and ride off as Heyes and Curry watch from atop a ridge.
At the icehouse, the three men gather with picks and shovels. Heyes says he worked the line crew out of Denver once and learned the secret to a job like this. “Just keep digging.” The boys take turns while Artie supervises. After a long, hot, exhausting time, Curry’s shovel snags the prize. He pulls out a satchel.
Artie gleefully hollers, “That’s my money.” A voice behind him disagrees. They look up to see the Buffalo deputies, guns drawn. The lawmen order them to toss away their guns and head for the barn. Orville commands Artie to tie up Smith and Jones while Burk checks the satchel and counts the money. Then Orville ties up Artie.
Before they leave with the $80,000, Burk wants to kill the three men because they’re witnesses, but Orville knows they are no threat. They can’t accuse the deputies of taking the money without admitting they stole it themselves. He pushes Burk out the door.
The boys immediately begin to fight their bindings; the crowd of cowboys will be on its way back, “saddle sore and slayin’ mad” at the false alarm.
Artie works his way loose and unties his partners. They’re soon on the deputies’ trail and after awhile, they come upon Orville’s corpse and bloody tracks leading off in another direction. Curry can tell by the blood drop spacing that a horse got hit.
Further along, they find Burk’s dead horse. After another short ride, Burk ambushes them. They run for cover. Ordering his friends to stay put, Artie heads up the hill after the deputy. Two ominous shots later, Heyes and Curry run after him. They find Burk dead and Artie wounded. Heyes starts to go after a doctor but Artie dies in Curry’s arms.
Around their campfire that night, Heyes and Curry admit they know what they have to do — take the bodies and the money back to Frank Canton.
Sheriff Canton listens to their story but is not sure they’re really trying to go straight. He realizes they’re feeling pretty stupid about the whole thing but he’s going to let them go mainly because they keep calling him “Joe.” They can take the money too because it’s worthless. The bank that issued it went bankrupt. The boys decline.
At Artie’s funeral, the minister asks what was in the canvas bag buried with the deceased. Heyes doesn’t answer directly except to quote Job 1:21 — “We brought nothing into this world and we carry nothing out.” Frank Canton also attends the funeral lest Artie be buried with no one to mourn him. They thank him for letting Artie take the money with him. As they get ready to leave, Canton wonders if it would do any good for him to mention to Governor Warren that two good, honest men, Thaddeus Jones and Joshua Smith, came passing by Buffalo. It might help, they say, though they can’t tell him how or why.
Riding along, Curry poses a hypothetical question to Heyes, “If no one had got killed, would we have turned the money in?” Heyes’s hypothetical answer is to ask if they would have kept it.
GUEST CAST
KEENAN WYNN — ARTIE GORMAN
ED NELSON — FRANK CANTON
WILLIAM SMITH — DEPUTY ORVILLE LARKIN
GEOFFREY LEWIS — DEPUTY BURK STOVER
EVE MCVEAGH — WOMAN
DAVID GRUNER — BOY
WILLIAM D. GORDON — REVEREND SIEVER
DAVE MORICK — HOTEL CLERK
Any one episode of Alias Smith and Jones could inspire viewers to inquire more deeply into some historical facet of it. In the teleplay for “What Happened at the XST?” Huggins provided historical background for the actors and director. In scene four, before we see Heyes and Curry, Huggins described Buffalo as having evolved as a result of the building of Fort McKinney, headquarters of the 6th Cavalry. He put soldiers walking around the streets because the fort was only five miles west of town. The only other reason Buffalo existed was to “serve the cattlemen of Johnson County, large and small, and their cowhands. It was a town of just over 1000 in 1885.” [31]
Canton, he wrote, has “a moustache which turns down in a curl at each end. He has light blue eyes, light brown hair and a slender, strong-jawed face. He is lean and well over six feet in height. Canton was thirty-six at this time…he liked to smoke a pipe and had one in his hand or mouth about twelve hours a day.” [32] No physical descriptions exist for the deputies, but Huggins wanted Burk, in particular, to come off as “a mean sonofabitch. He does not make a good first impression.” [33]
The real Joe Horner was under indictment for cattle rustling in October 1874. He had also robbed a bank in Comanche, Texas, for which he received a ten-year sentence, but he broke out of prison and held up a stagecoach. This time he was sent to Huntsville Prison with another ten years tacked onto his sentence. Two years later, Horner escaped while working on a chain gang. He disappeared and changed his name to Frank Canton.
Meanwhile in Johnson County, Wyoming, cattle barons aimed to stop small ranchers from doing business. They imported Texas gunfighters and deployed them against local ranchers and homesteaders they accused of being cattle thieves. They also recruited some local talent including Frank Canton who’d recently served two terms as sheriff of Johnson County. Even with the legendary lawman on their side, the cattle barons lost the war. A stand of two hundred local settlers massed against the gunfighter army and restored legitimate law and order to the county. Canton was prosecuted on two separate murder indictments for shooting Nate Champion and Nick Ray, but after a year of legal maneuvering, the charges were dropped. Canton left Wyoming.
In 1894, he sought an audience with Texas governor James Hogg. In a startling confession, Canton revealed that he and Joe Horner, who had terrorized Texas in the 1870s, were
one and the same. Governor Hogg granted him a full pardon. Although he had made peace with his past, Frank Canton would remain a shadowy figure in the history of frontier justice. Huggins was aware that Canton had been a cold-blooded killer but that “does not have to be brought out in our story.” [34]
For many viewers, the title is confusing. Some fans, though, may have reasoned out that XST could stand for est, Erhard Seminar Training, an awareness program first taught by Scientologist Werner Erhard in 1971 that offered attendees a new life after a marathon $250 seminar. According to Erhard, the program would force you to “throw away your belief system, tear yourself down, and put yourself back together again.” A person trained in est comes to view the entirety of his life as superfluous to who he really is and glorifies the self at the expense of all social connections. est teaches how to ignore a problem in such a way as to deny that something is being ignored. [35]
Artie Gorman was happy to ignore the problems that went along with retrieving the stolen money, leaving those details to Heyes and Curry. What happened at the XST is that three men died because of Artie’s and the deputies’ greed. Heyes and Curry were “saved” because they did not throw away their belief system. Instead, they kept on the track that they had set for themselves of becoming honest citizens.
Roy Huggins explained his title like this: “[XST] is an existentialist story. Everything is meaningless…The ultimate meaninglessness is that even the money isn’t worth anything. People have died, and everything else has happened…It’s a meaningless title. At the end, our audience might be wondering what the XST was — and a few people in our audience might guess.” [36]
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