Watching this Wagon Train story put me in mind of the classic western Will Penny where Charlton Heston, Joan Hackett and her kids are held prisoner and robbed by a family gang of Rawhiders similar to the Charvanaugh clan that J. Carroll Naish heads here. Just about the same set of morals for Donald Pleasance's and his kids as for Naish's fine sons here. I could also very easily compare them to the Cleggs in Wagonmaster and the Clantons in My Darling Clementine. The Charvanaughs could have been in a John Ford film.
They have great modus operandi for their robberies. Naish comes along driving a wagon full of uncured buffalo hides which because they smell so bad no one goes near. After the old codger ingratiates himself with the victim(s), the sons come out from under the hides, no doubt kind of fragrant themselves and strip the victims of everything including most of the clothes off their back and leave them to die on the prairie.
In this case it's Robert Horton who gets stripped along with the Lerner family Dorothy Green and her two children Ricky Klein and Bernadette Withers. They nearly don't make it and fortunately Ward Bond and Terry Wilson are looking for Horton. After that there was no stopping Flint McCullough who had been Green and her kids to join her husband in a place he settled in.
Naish and the sons are really an evil group and Naish when he shows the other side of his character you are fascinated and repelled by such an evil creature. Naish was one of the most chameleon like of actors in those studio days, he could play anything and the man was never out of work.
I liked the episode, but I would have liked it a whole lot more had he and the boys, one of them is L.Q. Jones had met an end similar to what those evil clans in those cited movies did. It was a let down in the climax.
Still something to see though.