Boonesborough never-do-well brothers Ess (Victor French) and Bingen (Med Flory) return, and spy on an Onondaga ritual while hunting for Indian treasure; captured, they promise to return with red-haired Becky Boone to fulfill the tribe's ceremonial needs.
This is the third time out for French and Flory's duo, which is three too many; their stupid antics cease being comedic after the five second mark. This might have also been a spinoff plot that was thankfully strangled in the cradle. "Hee Haw" was highbrowed relative to this.
Fess Parker might have intended this hour as a farewell gift to Patricia Blair, but if so a bouquet would have been more substantial. One of the series long-term disappointments is its failure to grow Blair's character akin to Amanda Blake's Kitty on "Gunsmoke." . She had the right Scots-Irish look for the Kentucky frontier, but the series bible apparently demanded June Cleaver in a log cabin, and thou shalt not deviate. She was always overdressed for a scraping-by frontier wife, mostly shielded from exerting her own agency, and romance with Dan was always kept Disney-chaste in a manner fairly ludicrous for a long-married couple. (Just what else were people supposed to do for recreation in pre-electric bleak frontier outposts?) Blair went on to some thumbnail roles after DB, but might have shone brighter in a later era friendlier to women actors.
Fess Parker again might have been graciously ceding the final spotlight to a colleague by minimizing his screen time, but an equally valid theory is that he wanted to see to getting his studio office packed up.
The series cannot depart without showcasing one more time its determination to inaccurately portray mid-South tribes. Although the Shawnee escape one final swipe, using the Onondaga comes from a very hurried sidewise glance at an "American Indians" encyclopedia entry; they were part of the Iroquois Confederacy in New York and had nothing to do with Kentucky. Add on gratuitous overacting by whites cast as Native Americans plus overuse of Great Plains accoutrements at first hand in the prop closet, and the most glaring weakness of the mid-century Westerns genre receives its 1970's bookend.
Unfortunate that a nominally enjoyable series is finishing with such weak denouements, but let's push on to the end of the trail.