page_title: Wagon Train
section_title: Flint McCullough and Charlie Wooster
hierarchical_section_title: Wagon Train / Backstories of the characters / Flint McCullough and Charlie Wooster
caption_attribution_description: Photo of Robert Horton from the television series Wagon Train.
context_page_description: Wagon Train is an American Western series that aired on the NBC television network and then on ABC. Wagon Train first aired on September 18, 1957, and would eventually place the TV show in the number one spot in the Nielsen ratings. The series format attracted big-name guest stars who would appear in major roles as travelers in the large wagon train or in the settlements they passed by or visited. It initially starred supporting film actor Ward Bond as the wagon master and Robert Horton as the scout.
  The series was inspired by the 1950 film Wagon Master directed by John Ford and starring Ben Johnson, Harry Carey Jr. and Ward Bond.
context_section_description: In "The Major Adams Story" (1958), Charlie Wooster was a private in the Union Army who, by chance, was assigned to Major Adams's company and promptly proved himself useless for combat but claimed some experience as a cook and, when assigned to that position, did quite well. Wooster did not excel at anything else; so he became a cook in the Army. In the first episode he was clean-shaven, but he quickly grew a beard. McCullough had previously been a stagecoach driver. Douglas Kennedy appears in this episode as Colonel Hillary. Normally, each episode is the story of one person, after whom that episode is named, and their problems are resolved through the program.
  "The Flint McCullough Story" (season two, ep 15 trans Jan 14, 1959) is also largely a flashback to his brief Civil War experience in the Confederate States Army. McCullough had been born in  Virginia, but both his parents died when he was a small child, evidently at Fort Bridger, Wyoming, where he was promptly adopted by the historical real-life frontiersman, Jim Bridger (1804-1881). Circa 1862, at approximately the age of 19, McCullough felt duty bound to enlist in the Confederate Army because of his Virginia birth.  He was recruited by a Col. Taylor who had established a Confederate encampment in Wyoming near Fort Bridger. It turned out that Taylor intended to use his western recruits not as regular soldiers but as a guerrilla force to plunder gold shipments and the like to finance the Confederate cause.  In this episode, McCullough detours from the wagon train to revisit Fort Bridger and learns he will once again meet his former ruthless commanding officer who is responsible for war crimes (including the wanton murder of McCullough's sweetheart), and whom McCullough vowed to kill if he ever tracked him down; at the episode's conclusion we return to the present and the ex-officer turns up, only for a shocked McCullough to discover that misfortune - prison experience and/or some serious illness—has left the hated  man virtually a vegetable, a "punishment" apparently handed down by a higher authority.  McCullough's adoption and training by Jim Bridger is also mentioned in "The River Crossing", and in "The Path of the Serpent" (February 1961).  For some years after his discharge from the Confederate Army, McCullough was a driver for the Jameson Stagecoach line, between Sacramento and St. Louis ("The Stagecoach Story", season 3, ep 1, trans Sept 30, 1959), before becoming a scout for the wagon train.
  "The Artie Matthewson Story" (1961), tells a different story of Flint's early life. Duke finds Flint's dying foster mother who asks Flint to check on her real son Artie who she hasn't seen in five years and has a reputation for getting into trouble with the law. Flint's foster mother dies in his arms.   Yet another story is given in "The Nancy Lee Davis Story" - eight years before working for Chris Hale, McCullough was a prosperous young man (judging from his house, his clothes, his team of horses and his buggy) in a substantial Virginia community, engaged to marry a local debutante, but she was murdered by robbers intent on stealing the wedding gifts and silver plate prepared for the wedding reception and McCullough spent weeks, possibly months, riding the West from town to town hunting the robbers down.  The same "Nancy Lee Davis Story" also described (it was filmed in black-and-white) McCullough's hair as red.
caption: Robert Horton as Flint McCullough
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