While John Wayne starred in over 80 different Western movies, his sole acting performance in a TV Western came in a 1960 episode of the hit show Wagon Train . The Duke had apparently been lined up for the role of Matt Dillon in Gunsmoke five years earlier, only to pass the part onto his friend James Arness instead.

As a result, despite several decades of John Wayne movies , the actor never played any substantial role in a TV series, even though small-screen Westerns became some of the hottest tickets in television from the late 1950s onwards. Instead, he remained a standard bearer for Hollywood’s Golden Age on the big screen.

Yet, his solitary performance in a TV Western would prefigure Wayne’s role in a John Ford Western movie just two years later, demonstrating that there w

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