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SADDLEBAG DISPATCHES
TALKING WESTERNS Terry Alexander
ENTERTAINMENT EDITOR
Don’t Change That Channel! Cochise County Has a Rich Legacy of Television Shows.
C
ochise County, Arizona, has always featured prominently in TV shows and movies about the west. Most of these endeavors featured the Gunfight at the O.K. Corral as their main drawing card. I know of three shows that didn’t mention the Earp brothers or the famous shootout.
Broken Arrow The first is Broken Arrow, a half-hour western drama that ran on ABC from 1956 to 1958, with seventy-one episodes. It
starred John Lupton as Tom Jeffords and Michael Ansara as Chief Cochise. The basis of the show was two men from diverse backgrounds working together to keep the peace between the white man moving into the area and the Indian trying to hang on to his way of life. The show was based on the 1947 novel Blood Brother by Elliott Arnold. The novel told the story of the friendship between Tom Jeffords and Apache chief Cochise. The novel had in turn been adapted into the movie
Broken Arrow, which starred Jimmy Stewart as Tom Jeffords and Jeff Chandler as Cochise. During the filming of the TV show, the producers arranged a date between Ansara and Barbara Eden. They later married and had one child, a son, Matthew Michael Ansara. During its run, several famous people guest starred on the show. Michael Pate played Gokliya in three episodes. Hal Smith, Otis from the Andy Griffith show, played the bartender in three episodes, and Myron Healey played a nameless lieutenant in three episodes. Leonard Nimoy, Robert Blake, Angie Dickinson, and Harry Carey Jr. also made appearances. It received a nomination from the Writers Guild of America for writer John Dunkel for the 1957 episode, “Ghostface.” Michael Ansara was born in Syria. His family moved to Lowell, Massachusetts, when he was two. After ten years, they moved
Production still of actors Michael Ansara as Cochise and John Lupton as Tom Jeffords in Broken Arrow.
