Sam Tuttle’s Treasure
By DEACON JAMES J. TONER Have Gun Will Travel was a most unusual western series, running on CBS from 1958 to 1963. Its hero was Paladin (played by the inimitable Richard Boone), a cultured and well-educated San Francisco gentleman who made his living by hiring out as, well, a principled gunslinger (oxymoron?) in the Old West. On Paladin’s holster was the image of a chess piece — a knight. Paladin was supposedly a graduate of West Point and a Union officer in the Civil War; he was as fast with a Shakespearean quotation as with his gun, and he invariably struggled to do the right thing in the challenging circumstances drawn up for him by the show’s writers. Among those…Continue Reading