Hitch On to These 6 Fun Facts About ‘Wagon Train’

WAGON TRAIN, (back row, l to r): Robert Horton, John McIntire, Terry Wilson, (front): Frank McGrath, Michael Burns, 1957-65 — Everett Collection

For eight seasons, audiences could tune their TVs to Wagon Train each week and follow a new story as Ward Bond’s Major Seth Adams and Robert Horton’s Flint McCullough led their group across the American West on a journey from Missouri to California.

The faces and places of the show, which aired its final episode 60 years ago, on May 2, 1965, changed over the years: John McIntire took over after Bond’s 1960 death, Robert Fuller filled in after Horton’s 1962 departure, the show switched from NBC to ABC for Season 6, and color episodes came and went. But the Western series’ appeal endured, especially with big-name guest stars like Ernest Borgnine, Bette Davis, Jane Wyman, and Ronald Reagan lassoing viewers.

In honor of the show’s lasting legacy, check out six fun facts about the show below.

1 The show had a higher budget than rival Westerns

WAGON TRAIN, (l-r): Terry Wilson, John McIntire, Frank McGrath (ca. 1961), 1957-65

Everett Collection

Wagon Train filmed on location in California’s San Fernando Valley and boasted a budget of $100,000 per episode — about $1.1 million dollars in today’s money — while competing Western TV shows like ABC’s Sugarfoot had budgets of about $70,000 an episode, according to the Museum of Broadcast Communications.

2 Some episodes were broadcast in color to promote color TVs

Everett Collection

As it did with The Joey Bishop Show, NBC broadcast five episodes of Wagon Train in color as part of the network’s “all-color nights,” which were promotions for RCA color TV sets, according to TVShowGraphs.com.

After Wagon Train moved to ABC, the show’s seventh season played in color full-time, and episodes ran for 90 minutes instead of 60, but Season 8 went back to black-and-white 60-minute episodes, perhaps to cut costs, TVShowGraphs.com reports.

3 John Wayne had a secret cameo in an episode directed by John Ford

Four-time Oscar-winning director John Ford helmed the 1960 episode “The Colter Craven Story” as a favor to Bond, a friend who appeared in several of his films, according to Wildest Westerns. And John Wayne, another frequent collaborator of Ford’s, guest-starred in the episode under the name Michael Morris, playing the role of General William Tecumseh Sherman, as the Eugene Register-Guard reported at the time.

4 Robert Horton’s wife told him to quit Wagon Train — and that’s how he knew she loved him

WAGON TRAIN, Robert Horton (ca. 1959), 1957-65

Everett Collection

In 1962, Horton chose not to renew his five-year contract on the show at the advice of his wife, Marilynn, whom he’d married just a couple of years earlier. “One night I went home and asked Marilynn what she thought about my quitting the series, and she said, ‘I think you should,’” he told the St. Louis Globe-Democrat, per MeTV. “That’s when I knew she really loved me.”

Horton’s Wagon Train paychecks were sizable, but Marilynn knew her husband would want other creative opportunities. “Your sights keep growing as you learn more and more about your profession,” Horton explained. “And unless you’re lazy, which I’m not, you want to try and do more and more things.”

5 The show inspired the original Star Trek TV series

STAR TREK, William Shatner, Leonard Nimoy, in Season 1 episode #26, 'The Devil In the Dark,' March 7, 1967.

Paramount/Courtesy: Everett Collection

In his original outline for the original Star Trek TV series — as quoted in the 1968 book The Making of Star Trek — Gene Roddenberry wrote, “The format is ‘Wagon Train to the Stars’ — built around characters who travel to other worlds and meet the jeopardy and adventure which become our stories.”

That’s not the only DNA the two TV shows share: Star Trek actors Leonard Nimoy and Ricardo Montalbán guest-starred on Wagon Train, and Star Trek producer Gene L. Coon, the man who created the Klingons, wrote nearly two dozen episodes of the Western.

6 Ward Bond and Robert Horton clashed on set but reconciled before Bond’s death

WAGON TRAIN, Robert Horton, Ward Bond, 1957-65

Everett Collection

In the biography John Wayne: The Life and Legend by Scott Eyman, Horton recalls Bond getting jealous of the amount of fan mail Horton got and being “very petty” on set, even trying to get scenes and lines of Horton’s cut from the show.

But Bond and Horton had a reconciliatory moment in Bond’s dressing room the night before Bond’s 1960 death, the biography reports. “Bond smiled and put his hand on Horton’s shoulder,” Eyman wrote. “‘Bobby,’ he said, sounding for all the world like Major Seth Adams, ‘we don’t have any goldarn differences.’”