Daniel is charged with retrieving a thousand pounds of gunpowder for Boonesborough's defense; he will have to move them from Fort Pitt, Pennsylvania down the Ohio River with the help of a boatman (Leif Erickson) of dubious loyalty. NBC here was redoing the Davy Crockett-Mike Fink pairing of Fess Parker's Disney series.
Recovering nicely from the silliness of "The Lost Colony," the DB series turns in a better entry combining requisite action with at least a few historical touchstones. This is a network-friendly variant of the "Heart of Darkness"-"Apocalypse Now" river journey, though far more condensed and minus the crazed warlord at the end. For good measure the (fresh from a Wyoming visit) Shawnee are thrown in. Guest star power is added through the presence of Leif Erickson (Bill
Sedley) as the rouge boat captain, a few years before his signature role as an Arizona rancher in "The High Chapparel" (1967-71), and future "Dallas" (1978-82) patriarch Jim Davis.
The setting is purportedly a keelboat journey down the Ohio, but Boone and Sedley are the only crew; it took more than two to pole a keelboat and work the mainsail - which this craft does not have. The voyage is from Pittsburgh to Maysville, Kentucky, which would fix it at or after the real Boone's establishment of a trading post at Maysville in 1786. The provision of gunpowder from the State of Virginia is plausible, since Kentucky held county status within Virginia until statehood in 1792, but it is debatable as to whether it would have been faster to transport gunpowder by water to Maysville, then by wagon a far stretch to southeast Ky., or just move it by land over the Cumberland Gap to begin with.
Continental soldier notes: the two guards in Pittsburgh are wearing the blue-gold-white uniform of the 13th Virginia State Regiment - which did end the Revolutionary War at Fort Pitt, though disbanded at war's end in 1783. A nice catch by the DB producers if they were doing some research, though I suspect coincidence more likely. A safer choice would have been the blue-red-white livery of the First American Regiment, which handled Ohio Valley policing duties for the Confederation Congress.
The whole river adventure could have been expanded into a two-parter, but as is provides a well-paced hour of frontier action.