TLDR: Rawhide ran on CBS from 1959 to 1965, starred Clint Eastwood as a hot-headed ramrod and Eric Fleming as the authoritative trail boss, and is best remembered as the show that made Eastwood famous enough for Sergio Leone to notice him.
Fleming left the show before it ended and drowned in the Amazon river a year later at age 41.
Eastwood went on to win two Academy Awards. Sheb Wooley, who played the scout, recorded “Purple People Eater” between seasons. The show was never boring.
Most TV Westerns of the late 1950s picked a spot and stayed there.
Gunsmoke had Dodge City. Bonanza had the Ponderosa. Rawhide had a cattle drive that never ended.
Three thousand cattle, a rotating cast of drovers, and a trail stretching from San Antonio, Texas, to a railhead in Sedalia, Missouri.
Every river crossing was a crisis. Every stranger on the horizon was a problem. Every episode was set somewhere different, which meant the show could reinvent itself constantly without anyone noticing.
It premiered on CBS on January 9, 1959, and ran for eight seasons and 217 episodes.
The theme song was performed by Frankie Laine and became one of the most recognizable pieces of music in television history. “Head ’em up, move ’em out” entered the American vocabulary.
If you know it from the Blues Brothers movie, that’s fine too, but the original was something different entirely.
Clint Eastwood (Rowdy Yates): The Man Who Was Digging Pools Before This
Before Rawhide, Clint Eastwood was nobody. Born May 31, 1930, in San Francisco, he spent his twenties doing manual labor: logging, hay baling, steelwork, Army swimming instructor at Fort Ord during the Korean War.
Universal Pictures signed him in the mid-1950s and gave him bit parts in B-movies: an uncredited lab assistant in Revenge of the Creature, a military pilot in Tarantula.
Universal eventually dropped his contract. He went back to digging pools.
His break at Rawhide came the way a lot of Hollywood breaks came in that era: he was in the right hallway. Visiting a friend at CBS Studios, a passing executive noticed his 6’4″ frame and told-you-so jawline, and he ended up auditioning for the role of Rowdy Yates.
Producer Charles Marquis Warren cast him. Eastwood later described it simply: “That was my first steady job.”
He played Rowdy with something close to professional frustration on and off screen. The character was young and hot-tempered and kept needing to be rescued from his own decisions by the older trail boss.
Eastwood lobbied the writers constantly to make Rowdy more mature. They largely ignored him.
What the show gave him instead was something more valuable: seven years of weekly on-the-job training in how television is actually made, from camera angles to pacing to working within the constraints of a production schedule that never stopped.
During a production hiatus in 1964, an Italian director named Sergio Leone came looking for an American actor.
He had been turned down by James Coburn and Henry Fonda for a low-budget spaghetti Western. An American actor working in Italy named Richard Harrison suggested Eastwood and showed Leone a specific episode of Rawhide: “Incident of the Black Shear.”
Leone was transfixed not by the dialogue but by Eastwood’s physicality.
The deliberate walk. The squint. The way he moved like he had all the time in the world.
Leone recognized that the boyish energy of Rowdy Yates could be stripped down and rebuilt into something morally ambiguous and genuinely dangerous.
A Fistful of Dollars came out in 1964. Then For a Few Dollars More. Then The Good, the Bad and the Ugly. Then Dirty Harry. Then two Academy Awards for Best Director, for Unforgiven in 1992 and Million Dollar Baby in 2004.
Clint Eastwood is 94 years old and still directing films. It all started on a cattle drive that never arrived anywhere.
Eric Fleming (Gil Favor): The Trail Boss Who Survived Everything Except Peru
Eric Fleming was born on February 4, 1925, in Santa Paula, California, and his early life reads like a survival manual. At age eight he fled an abusive home and lived in hobo camps during the Depression, surviving on petty theft.
He eventually returned to his mother, dropped out of school, worked manual labor jobs. During World War II he joined the Navy as a Seabee.
While on active duty, a 200-pound steel block fell directly onto his face, shattering his jaw, nose, and forehead. He required extensive reconstructive surgery.
The surgery, in one of those accidental blessings that occasionally interrupt terrible situations, left him with a chiseled, rugged handsomeness that became his greatest professional asset.
He came to Rawhide as a theater-trained professional who took the work seriously, which put him in natural contrast with Eastwood’s more instinctual approach.
Fleming was top-billed with a significantly higher salary. Eastwood was the one the teenage girls were writing letters to. Co-stars and crew described the dynamic as defined by mutual quiet respect rather than anything uglier, with Fleming acting as a natural leader for the younger cast members.
By the end of Season 7, CBS was looking to cut costs and revamp the show. They let Fleming go. The final season wrote Gil Favor out entirely and promoted Rowdy Yates to trail boss. Fleming relocated to Hawaii and tried to live quietly for a while.
He was eventually persuaded to return to acting, signing with MGM for a two-part adventure film called High Jungle intended for a television anthology series.
He arrived in Lima, Peru, on August 17, 1966, to film on location in the Amazon basin. On September 28, 1966, six weeks into the shoot, he and his co-star Nico Minardos were in a dugout canoe filming an action sequence on the Huallaga River near Tingo María.
Despite warnings from local guides, the canoe went past the designated safety zone and into a violent stretch of rapids.
It capsized. Minardos made it to shore.
Fleming, who was 41 years old and by all accounts an extremely capable, athletic man, was swept away immediately. His body was recovered three days later, downstream.
Eastwood was devastated.
He publicly described Fleming as a generous colleague who had shared the spotlight willingly and helped lay the foundation of his own career. MGM cancelled High Jungle immediately and permanently.
Paul Brinegar (Wishbone): Eight Seasons, Zero Days Off, One Iconic Hat
Paul Brinegar was born on December 19, 1917, in Tucumcari, New Mexico. He was a character actor of the highest order: weathered features, expressive voice, the kind of face that television Westerns ran on.
He played George Washington Wishbone, the camp cook, across all eight seasons of Rawhide, making him one of the few people on the entire production who never left.
Wishbone was the domestic heart of the cattle drive. While Favor and Rowdy handled the external crises, Wishbone fed people, tended injuries, dispensed advice nobody asked for, and defended his cooking from constant ridicule.
Brinegar played it with perfect comedic timing and genuine warmth.
The character became the most beloved supporting figure in the show’s history, which is remarkable given he was essentially a cook in a Western about cowboys.
After the show ended, Clint Eastwood hired him to play a bartender in High Plains Drifter in 1973, which tells you something about how Eastwood remembered his colleagues.
Brinegar died of emphysema on March 27, 1995, in Los Angeles. He was 77.
Sheb Wooley (Pete Nolan): The Man Who Recorded “Purple People Eater” Between Seasons
Sheb Wooley was born on April 10, 1921, in Erick, Oklahoma, grew up working on his father’s farm, became an accomplished rodeo rider, and somehow ended up with a dual career as both a Western dramatic actor and a chart-topping novelty singer.
In 1958, just before joining Rawhide, he recorded “Purple People Eater,” a nonsense rock-and-roll comedy song about a one-eyed, one-horned flying creature that wanted to be in a rock band.
It sold millions of copies and went to number one on the Billboard charts.
He also, for the record, provided the “Wilhelm Scream”, the famous vocal sound effect recorded for Warner Bros. in 1951 that has appeared in hundreds of films ever since. And he played one of the outlaw brothers in High Noon in 1952. Sheb Wooley contained multitudes.
On Rawhide, he played Pete Nolan, the veteran scout. It was a solid, understated performance, the kind of reliable work that holds ensemble casts together.
He left during Season 5 because his music career had exploded and the filming schedule was impossible to manage alongside it.
He later appeared in The Outlaw Josey Wales alongside Eastwood and became a regular on Hee Haw. He died of leukemia on September 16, 2003, in Nashville. He was 82.
Where to Watch
Rawhide is currently streaming on Paramount+, Pluto TV, Heroes and Icons, and MeTV. Eight seasons and 217 episodes. The cattle still haven’t reached Sedalia.
That’s the joke. There never was a destination.
What happened to Eric Fleming from Rawhide?
Eric Fleming, who played trail boss Gil Favor on Rawhide, drowned on September 28, 1966, while filming a movie called High Jungle in Peru. He and a co-star were in a dugout canoe on the Huallaga River near Tingo María when it capsized in rapids. His co-star Minardos reached shore but Fleming, who was 41, was swept away and killed. His body was recovered three days later. He had left Rawhide a year before his death when CBS dropped him during budget cuts.
Was Rawhide Clint Eastwood’s first TV show?
Yes. Rawhide was Clint Eastwood’s first steady acting job. Before the show he had minor uncredited roles in B-movies and had been dropped by Universal Pictures. He played Rowdy Yates, the cattle drive’s ramrod, from 1959 to 1965. During a production hiatus in 1964, Sergio Leone saw an episode of Rawhide and cast Eastwood in A Fistful of Dollars, launching his international film career.
How did Sergio Leone discover Clint Eastwood?
American actor Richard Harrison, who was working in Italy at the time, suggested Eastwood to director Sergio Leone and showed him the Rawhide episode Incident of the Black Shear. Leone was struck by Eastwood’s physical presence, his deliberate gait, and his natural squint. He cast Eastwood in A Fistful of Dollars (1964), the first of the Dollars Trilogy that made Eastwood an international star.
Where can I watch Rawhide?
Rawhide is currently streaming on Paramount+, Pluto TV, Heroes and Icons (H&I), and MeTV. The series ran for 8 seasons and 217 episodes on CBS from January 9, 1959, to January 7, 1966.
