Gunsmoke — Season 16

Chato is a mixed-race Native American with a serious grudge against lawmen. He also has a remarkable athletic ability: he can run and jump over mountain ledges while keeping up a steady fire with his rifle. After an exciting duel, he kills a friend of Matt Dillon's who was tracking him. Matt comes to New Mexico and engages him in a duel of wits with Chato to catch him. Chato's one soft spot is his common-law wife. She is shot and severely injured by a group of renegade tribesmen who were also gunning for Chato. Chato calls a truce with Matt so the group can escape and get her to a doctor - but it's only a truce.

Ex-con Fred Garth seeks to exactly re-create the hanging death of his father by casting Doc as the father and Matt Dillon as the young Garth (who was shot in the leg and tied to a post while his father swung). Garth kidnaps Matt, Doc, Kitty and Festus and isolates them in a deserted town.

Adam Bramley, an immature selfish young man, has escaped from prison. Lewis Stark is a bounty hunter who catches him, then blackmails him for money with Bramley's father, John, a rancher with a serious heart condition. Adam's strong-willed sister Glory, has the ranch hands beat up Stark, while John pays him off to leave. Adam finally has an epiphany just as his father is dying of a heart attack.

The arrival of the first woman doctor in Dodge City, Dr. Sam McTavish, riles Doc Adams. However, she soon wins his confidence and that of his patients, and the two physicians make a startling medical discovery.

The Gentry brothers catch old trapper Floyd killing another cow on the ranch and in an attempt to scare him they string him up for a fake hanging that goes wrong resulting in Old Man Floyd's death.

Matt, Doc, and Festus are aboard a train in snow covered mountains when it is stopped by Indians who want 2 unknown passengers turned over to them for selling poisonous whiskey to them earlier.

Matt avoids capture by the three Indian braves and continues on to the telegraph station. Exhausted, he finds out the telegraph lines are down. However, an advisory was issued before while the lines were still operating and Matt finds out who aboard the train sold the bad whiskey to the Indians. Matt borrows a horse from the telegraph operator and heads back to the train. Festus, meantime, is overpowered by panicky train passengers determined to give the Indians the guilty parties. They settle on two men who, it turns out, are deserters from the Army. The men protest, saying they had nothing to do with the whiskey. Matt gets back just in time to prevent the Indians from killing the soldiers. One of the guilty passengers tries to shoot it out with Matt but is killed. The other, whose pregnant wife is aboard the train, prepares to turn himself over to the Indians. Matt, however, convinces the Indians to let the surviving guilty man stand trial. The ordeal, while resolved, will cause major changes in the lives of the passengers, including an engaged couple, a pair of spinster sisters and a con man posing as a priest.

A man brings his badly wounded outlaw partner into Dodge and pays a saloon girl to comfort him by pretending to be his daughter.

A teenager meets up with a notorious fleeing gunman whom he kills in self defense and that makes him a target for every gunslinger looking for a reputation.

Piney Biggs wanders tired and thirsty into what's left of a family's camp site that has been massacred with no survivors. As he is scavenging through the remains a band of Indians come by and Piney is forced to play dead. He later identifies them as the attackers and tells the people of Dodge that he had been traveling with the family and he is the only survivor. A posse is formed to hunt them down. The Indians are captured by a slimy band of bounty hunters who find Piney's story suspicious.

When Ira Pickett is accused of murdering a man in a gunfight, his father Osgood comes to Dodge City to get rid of the witnesses by one means or another.

Matt Dillon boards a train looking for a fugitive named McCabe wanted for robbery. When he finds him, McCabe, with a woman at gunpoint forces Dillon to make a deal. Dillon agrees and they set off for McCabe's farm where his wife lies dying. She dies before they arrive and McCabe's son Dodie feels nothing but anger and bitterness towards his father for leaving them alone all these years. Dodie alerts the nearby town, where he is wanted for a far more serious crime, that his father is back.

Pursued by Marshal Matt Dillon, a Mexican bandit seeks sanctuary with his twin brother, a priest. 

An Army sergeant is accused of desertion and the theft of an Army payroll.

A strict judge interferes when Newly allows an outlaw to make arrangements for his 10 year old daughter, and to surrender afterwards. 

Boston whaling captain Aaron Sligo suddenly forsakes the sea entirely. He moves to Kansas, buys a ranch and ceremoniously sets up a plaque on the 100th meridian of longitude, which he says is as far from the sea as possible in the United States. He then becomes a cattle buyer, ordering a shipment of cows from Texas, while courting the widow next door. The widow resists his courtship until he proves that he can grow corn, knowing the soil on Sligo's lot is notoriously infertile. But Sligo hasn't lost all of his seafaring identity or his skills. He still dresses in full uniform, builds his house in the shape of a ship, and brings his first mate along to serve as ranch foreman. When a rival cattleman pulls a dirty trick on Sligo which prevents him from bringing his cows to market (by spreading a rumor of brucellosis among the herd) and when the rancher's hands beat the first mate to a pulp, Sligo uses his pugilistic skills to even the playing field -- and some mysterious skill to get the corn to grow.

Festus is severely dehydrated and seeing blurred images, when he kills a man in a ghost town, and it's not a clear case of self defense. 

Festus tries to go into the freight business and it nearly results in matrimony. 

Carl Jaekel and Beth Wilson were a couple a decade ago, when his temper caused him to kill a man who had insulted her. After eight years in prison, he foils an escape attempt by killing two other prisoners, and is granted a pardon. What the warden doesn't know is that Jaekel has gone completely psychotic and engineered the escape attempt himself, killing his partners in an attempt to look heroic when they were found out. What Jaekel doesn't know is that Beth, who wrote sympathetic letters to him throughout his imprisonment, is actually deathly afraid of him. Without telling him, she found a kindly gentleman whom she married, and now is the mother of a young daughter. Beth keeps up the charade for a while when Jaekel gets out, but he's bound to find out eventually -- and he does, kidnapping Beth's daughter in an effort to force her into repudiating her husband and taking up with him again.

A marshal with a warrant to legally execute ten outlaws upon capture, enlist Matt's help, and finds out one of the men is his rebellious son.

Cleavus, an old friend of Festus, has been dogged by poverty and hard luck all his life. He stumbles into a gold mine looking for help -- only to accidentally kill the miner. While driving the miner's corpse to a farm for burial, Cleavus finds $200 worth of gold dust -- a big chunk of money for 1873 -- in his clothing. This gives Cleavus an idea. In Dodge, he learns that the miner's claim hadn't been registered yet and falsely claims title to it himself. With his new money, he buys fancy store clothes and affects himself as a dandy. He even begins paying court to Kitty Russell. Festus finds out part of the truth about Cleavus and Kitty finds out the rest -- the mine actually held only the limited amount of gold and a lot of iron pyrite -- "fool's gold." Cleavus's luck goes downhill from there

Lavery is a ne'er-do-well small-time crook who does pretty much what he wants -- much to the distress of his wife, who's a Long Branch saloon-hall girl. Now Lavery is on the run for horse theft (he actually left his tired horse at the barn in trade for a new one). Lavery gets his chance at redemption when he sees a thug about to bushwhack Matt and shoots the thug dead. Matt has a talk with the stable owner and clears Lavery of the charge, and gets him a job tanning hides. But Lavery's two outlaw buddies soon show up to try to get him to start stealing again. Added to the confusion is the fact that Mrs. Lavery, who quit her job at the Long Branch when her husband got a job, is now pregnant.

Riding away from Dodge after a $2800 robbery, four bandits escape into the windy night. With one of them wounded it seems like a three-way split until Pike, the wounded one, surprises the other three. 

Dirty Sally becomes smitten with the outlaw Pike as he continues to heal up and the gang begins tracking Pike down.The friendship between the two grows as Pike is faced with leaving or standing his ground with the gang.