18 split buckshot.

Pahoo’s shotgun could blow a hole in a wall big enough for a cattle stampede to rumble through! I was really little when this aired for, regrettably, only one season, but I recall that most eps ended with Yancy facing death and Pahoo showing up and blowing the toadstools out of everything! Pahoo spoke very little. Pahoo was the Native American epitome of Teddy Roosevelt’s maxim, “Speak softly, and carry a big stick.”

And that was okay by me. Even as a little boy, I could tell that Yancy and Pahoo were cool. Pahoo’s shotgun was sort of the precursor of Harry Callahan’s Magnum more than a decade later. With the benefit of historical hindsight, it was very progressive for a 50s US Western TV show to give a Native American so much power. The only other TV Westerns that were similar in respecting minorities were The Lone Ranger, with Tonto, and (not surprisingly) Have Gun, Will Travel with the Chinese character Hey Boy, followed by Hey Girl. They were servers in the restaurant of the San Francisco hotel where Paladin (Have Gun’s protagonist, played by the amazing Richard Boone) lived, and he always treated them with respect, dignity and fondness. I recall the episode where he, a gun for hire (and, for my money, the most impressive gunslinger in ALL of 50s US Westerns) went to the freaking MAT ((gratis) to save Hey Boy’s family! Paladin and Derringer were in fact similar: exceptionally intelligent, polished, professional and well-balanced men who saw the world with enlightened eyes. Interestingly, Jock Mahoney went on to play Tarzan in the movies after CBS cancelled Yancy Derringer.

You know, shows like these, Alfred Hitchcock Presents and The Twilight Zone make me ask: even taking into account all the changes in cultural values and economic imperatives and the explosion in unregulated (uncensored) entertainment choices that have happened over the last 60-plus years, what the hell happened to broadcast network TV?