Excerpts from a 2006 interview:
Q: So how did the second season go?
A: This time we shot in color. My producer, Aaron Rosenberg, was a man of his word. And I had Jack Swain, the best of cameramen. However, the writing is where you live and die, and we had script troubles. They were writing Westerns, but we needed Easterns -- stories about people coming through the Cumberland Gap and building log cabins on the Kentucky frontier. But then Ed Ames helped to put us on the map one night.
Q: Are you referring to "The Tonight Show" with Johnny Carson when Ames threw his tomahawk at a wooden cutout of a man ...
A: ... and it stuck just below the belt. That one incident caused millions of viewers to say, "Now, what series was it that Ames is on?" because our ratings jumped that next week and we survived.
Q: Odd casting, a singer as an American Indian with a British accent.
A: Ed had been a singer with the Ames Brothers, then he'd played an Indian in the Broadway production of "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest." When we needed an actor to play Mingo, the connection was made, and so we took a true-life experience -- a British lord had fathered a child with an Indian maiden and then sent the child to Oxford to be educated -- and we turned Mingo into a Cherokee who spoke with that accent.
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