Gunsmoke: every Leonard Nimoy episode, and the character he played
Before he became Spock, Leonard Nimoy was a working actor making the rounds on TV Westerns.
He appeared in Gunsmoke four times across eight years, playing a different character each time.
The complete list
- "The Search" (Season 3, 1958) — Nimoy plays Arnie, in one of his earliest TV appearances.
- "A Man a Day" (Season 7, 1961) — Nimoy plays Elia Grice, a member of a vicious gang that threatens to kill one Dodge City resident per day unless Marshal Dillon steps aside so they can rob the bank.
- "I Call Him Wonder" (Season 8, 1963) — Nimoy plays Holt, a bigoted character involved in a story about a drifter who has taken in an orphaned Native American boy.
- "The Treasure of John Walking Fox" (Season 11, 1966) — Nimoy plays John Walking Fox, a Comanche man whose deceased companion supposedly knew the location of a lost gold shipment. This was his most memorable Gunsmoke role and the last job he did before shooting Star Trek.
The Walking Fox episode
Nimoy recalled this one fondly in multiple interviews. His character devises a scheme to flush out the men who killed his friend: he lets them believe in a nonexistent treasure, and their greed destroys them one by one. Marshal Dillon figures out what's happening but can't quite prove it. Nimoy called Walking Fox "enigmatic" — a character who achieves justice through cleverness rather than violence.
The episode is also notable for being a product of its time. Like many of his early roles, Nimoy — a Jewish man of Ukrainian descent — was cast as a Native American character, a practice that would not hold up today.