Western drama (adult Western) · CBS
Gunsmoke
April 26, 1952 – June 18, 1961 · 486 broadcasts
Often called the finest "adult Western" ever broadcast, Gunsmoke ran on CBS Radio from April 26, 1952, to June 18, 1961, following U.S. Marshal Matt Dillon as he kept a grim, uneasy order in 1870s Dodge City. Deliberately somber and morally complex, it let villains get away and endings turn bleak, with then-shocking content -- violent crime, scalpings, opium addicts -- and a marshal as scarred as the men who drifted into his town. It began when CBS chairman William S. Paley asked for "a Philip Marlowe of the Old West." The casting became the character. William Conrad won the role on a last-resort audition and so defined it that producer Norman Macdonnell said "you can't tell where Matt Dillon begins and Bill Conrad ends." Alongside Howard McNear's Doc, Georgia Ellis's Kitty, and Parley Baer's Chester, the show was famous for layered sound design that gave a palpable sense of the prairie -- John Dunning recalled hearing "the inevitable dog barking" a block away. Routinely placed among the best radio dramas of any era -- many enthusiasts prefer it to the celebrated 20-season TV series it spawned -- Gunsmoke proved radio drama could be literate, realistic, and unflinchingly adult.
Collection status:
479 of 486 held (99% complete)
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Episode Spine
Grouped by year. Jump to the full list below, or open a season on its own page.
- 1949 (2 episodes)
- 1952 (36 episodes)
- 1953 (52 episodes)
- 1954 (56 episodes)
- 1955 (53 episodes)
- 1956 (53 episodes)
- 1957 (53 episodes)
- 1958 (52 episodes)
- 1959 (52 episodes)
- 1960 (52 episodes)
- 1961 (25 episodes)
1949
June 11, 1949
Audition Show 1
July 13, 1949
Audition Show 2
1952
A Dutch immigrant faces a lynch mob when Dodge decides he is a murderer, and Dillon races to find the real killer before the rope does.
Pete Jaliscoe and his gang butcher a settler's family and dress it up as an Indian raid, but Dillon refuses to take the bait.
A run of knifings that only claims lucky gamblers leads Dillon toward a killer nobody in Dodge would suspect.
With the army payroll stolen and a major threatening martial law, a pretty girl keeping bad company becomes Dillon's key to the crime.
The hide of a rare albino buffalo is the one clue when two hunters and their father are found murdered.
A father and his grown son and daughter pull off a $50,000 train robbery and gun down a clerk; Dillon and Chester ride them down.
June 21, 1952
Heat Spell
Escorting the killer Leeds Martin on a three-day ride back to Dodge, Dillon fends off a Cheyenne ambush in a tense two-hander that ends with Chester's brief help.
After two drunken Texans drag Chester behind a horse for sport, Dillon walks in to arrest them -- without his guns.
A stage robbery costs $50,000 and a kidnapped bride-to-be, who turns out to be in no hurry at all to reach her groom.
Doc Holliday rides into Dodge to settle a score with Big Jack Finley, but it is the gunman's son who becomes the real threat.
Ed Beaudry comes to town swearing to kill Bert Wells, but the showdown never comes off -- Beaudry is found dead first.
A gunrunner arming the Cheyenne with new Sharps rifles kills two cowboys, and Dillon sets out to run him to ground.
A hard-drinking old man with a secret, his scheming kin, and a mountain girl bring a lethal Kentucky feud to Dodge.
Dillon hunts for proof against the leader of a lynch mob after a man is hanged with no trial at all.
A crazed Shakespearean actor turns to murder as a merciless heat wave bakes the Kansas plains.
A slow-thinking rancher is framed for stealing from a crooked gambler's table, and Dillon works to clear him.
Two men say they have come to Dodge to sell horses, but the truth about the Thompson brothers carries a nasty twist.
Stranded on the open prairie, Dillon is forced to amputate a settler's leg while a jealous suitor eyes the man's daughter.
A tight-fisted rancher fences off the last water in a drought, and a thirsty herd pushes Dodge toward violence.
An old widow refuses to give up her land for the railroad's right-of-way, and Dillon is caught between the settler and the line.
A quiet, consumptive musician buys a gun in Dodge to kill a man he has never even met.
A brash woman named Mamie seizes control of the Longhorn, whose former manager has vanished.
A reformed wild man returns after a year to claim the girl who is about to marry another, and trouble follows him in.
The law is entirely on a banker's side as he forecloses on a struggling family, and Dillon is nearly powerless.
Taking an escaped killer back to Dodge by stagecoach, Dillon and Chester find the ride anything but quiet.
Kitty worries over young Tara, an orphaned girl falling for a no-good drifter she cannot seem to give up.
A woman like no other in Dodge leaves three dead men in her wake before Dillon can stop her.
A newcomer's bride disappears just as his first wife did, and Dillon digs into the pattern behind the vanishings.
Defying the town's respectable set, Dillon escorts Kitty to a Dodge dance.
A frightened boy leads Dillon and Chester out to a ranch and to a dark secret about his father.
A beautiful woman arrives in Dodge to see her brother, who sits in jail awaiting trial for murder and cattle theft.
On a lonely stretch of winter prairie, Dillon tells a wary stranger a Christmas story of his own.
Caught in a blizzard, Dillon takes shelter in a cabin held by two mad-dog killers who mean to murder him where he stands.
1953
Dillon and Chester arrest a killer in Abilene to bring him home for trial, but the man's two older brothers mean to stop them on the trail.
Having patched up a wounded outlaw, Doc gives his word never to reveal the man or his hideout -- a promise that puts him in a bind.
A rancher puts up $5,000 in gold for a hired gun to cut Dillon down.
An embittered widow and her drink-sodden son hide a secret bound up with rustled cattle.
Dillon uncovers the hidden past of Doc Adams -- a man once called Calvin Moore, wanted for murder.
A quiet, consumptive musician buys a gun in Dodge to kill a man he has never even met.
When his old friend Zell Matlock pitches in during the round-up, the day ends with Dillon forced to shoot him.
A gang of killers has an entire prairie town paralyzed with fear until Dillon rides in.
The Pueblo gang hits Dodge, robs the stage, and leaves two drivers and a woman passenger dead.
A Texas cattleman's son shoots up Dodge, and the town's merchants would rather Dillon look the other way.
The sudden, secretive sale of the Cyclone Ranch convinces Dillon that something is badly wrong.
A gunfighter who kills only to build his reputation drifts into Dodge hunting a name to add to his tally.
A boastful Missouri man wagers his ranch on a grudge quarter-horse race against a local rancher.
A band of Jayhawkers preys on a Texas cattle drive, and the Marshal takes a hand.
Told to clear out by sundown, Frank Bissell and his gang set up a showdown with Dillon.
Dillon jails two killers, only to have three witnesses swear to their innocence for a strange reason of their own.
Two soldiers run afoul of a rigid commander, and Dillon tries to keep the trouble from turning deadly.
A shy new saloon girl named Tacetta stirs jealousy that erupts into a hanging and two gunfights.
A buffalo hunter hauls a horribly disfigured skinner into Dodge, and soon a homesteader turns up stabbed to death.
A clever con artist works out an ingenious new way to rob a bank.
A crooked lawyer tries to swindle an old rancher out of his land and ends up shot, with the man's son the obvious suspect.
A rancher is being robbed blind by his own foreman, but he cannot figure out how his cattle keep disappearing.
Dillon and Chester find a dying Indian woman on the prairie and suspect foul play in how she got there.
After a stranger is shot dead on Front Street, Dillon realizes the bullet was meant for him, paid for by an earless enemy.
A gambler's lucky charm ruins men at the faro table, and when Dillon orders her out of Dodge she simply refuses to go.
A retired colonel, his hot-headed son, and a cheating gambler collide in a contest that threatens to turn to gunplay.
A wild young man wants to settle down and marry, but his bride's brother swears he will die whether he goes through with the wedding or not.
A lonely homesteader convinced Indians are creeping around his farm shoots a prowler -- who proves to be a cowboy trying to move him off his land.
A boy says his father has been kidnapped, and the old man is found nearly starved to death out on the prairie.
Wild Bill Hickok wires the Marshal that two killers are Dodge-bound, asking him to detain but not jail them.
A smooth operator buys the Long Branch and stocks it with pretty girls, crowding in on Kitty and on Dillon.
A hard-drinking woman is shot dead and the obvious suspect, her would-be husband, flees town in a panic.
A blackjack dealer uses his girlfriend to lure a big winner into an alley, where the man is murdered and robbed.
Dillon and Chester ride two days south to bring back a gunman -- a former partner of Billy the Kid -- who claims he is trying to go straight.
A young man arrives in Dodge with a vicious companion, hunting the man who killed his father.
Dillon breaks up a ring stealing army rifles even though the commanding officer refuses to believe him.
Dodge braces for a dawn Pawnee attack, and Dillon must find who started the panic and why.
The fastest gun alive drifts into Dodge itching for a shootout with the one man who might beat him -- the Marshal.
A woman escapes ten years of Cheyenne captivity, and Dillon must see her and a young Cheyenne girl safely to Dodge.
Two gamblers Dillon is running out of town hire an old friend of his to kill him.
After Dillon shoots a drunken cowboy, the dead man's brother swears to gun the Marshal down from behind.
A boy reports his father kidnapped and his horses stolen, while the man's stepmother proves to be trouble of another kind.
A buffalo hunter hauls a horribly disfigured skinner into Dodge, and soon a homesteader turns up stabbed to death.
A tough hombre Dillon suspects of a stage robbery lives by the creed that every man should kill his own snakes.
Dillon and Chester ride the prairie after two men who shot a rancher and made off with his horses.
A traveling professor peddles a cure-all tonic that works suspiciously well -- because it is laced with opium.
A stranger murders an old man and Dillon cannot prove a thing against him.
A proud old army scout vows to kill the two men who humiliated him with a cruel practical joke.
Colorado's fastest gunfighter comes to Dodge, and so does the man determined to face him down.
When Doc fails to save a rancher's wife, the grieving husband swears revenge and nearly gets it.
A saloon girl's old fiance follows her from Philadelphia to Dodge, bent on taking her back.
A simple, penniless drifter arrives with only a mule and a guitar and is promptly set upon by bullies.
1954
Two robbers hold up the stage while Dillon dozes aboard as an unsuspecting passenger.
Three men lynch a rancher for horse theft, and when two of them are shot, the last one lives in fear.
A good-natured big man is about to marry when a practical joker pushes his pranks one fatal step too far.
An army scout parts from his pregnant Mexican wife in town, and a bully's cruelty ends in tragedy.
After the Pawnee wipe out a homestead with smuggled rifles, Dillon and a scout track the Indians to find the white gunrunner behind it.
A burly, gun-handy woman called Lena Wave rolls into Dodge and starts throwing her weight about.
A cowardly gunman who kills only when he is sure of winning becomes Dillon's problem before more men die.
Two seemingly harmless old men visit Dodge and charge that Kitty tried to kill them -- perhaps they aren't so harmless.
A young man is led into cattle rustling and murder by a bad-influence friend.
A Philadelphia gambler in love with a local woman heads for a showdown with a brutal bully.
A fired ranch hand is blamed when his old boss is bushwhacked, and the wounded man swears revenge.
Unable to bribe the Marshal, a gambler hires an old acquaintance of Dillon's to kill him.
A likeable drifter with a bounty on his head saves an ungrateful man's life -- and gets no thanks at all.
A desperate, near-starving man caught stealing seeds finds his wife accused of rustling a rich rancher's calf.
A stage holdup leaves one robber dying and Doc kidnapped by the rest of the gang.
A whiskey drummer warns of a plot on Dillon's life; when the Marshal plays dead, two different men boast of the killing.
A likeable man is ambushed and shot, and the deputy holding a warrant for his arrest is anything but likeable.
A gang rides toward Dodge to rob the bank, and Dillon fears his old sweetheart is riding with them.
May 4, 1954
The Cover-Up
A man plots to kill his enemy, but both turn up dead, and the blame falls on a third man.
May 5, 1954
Going Bad
A young man falls in with a cold-blooded hard case, and one murder leads to the next.
Pressured to ease off, Dillon swears to make no more arrests, so the town hires a most unusual constable to keep the peace.
May 11, 1954
Claustrophobia
A claustrophobic man who would rather hang than be caged is instead sentenced to life in prison.
An arrogant lieutenant wins a horse race against a rancher, but a Cheyenne chief's horse is another matter entirely.
A St. Louis 'businessman' sets out to corner the Dodge freight trade with a hired gun to back his play.
A blood feud out of the Ozark mountains follows two families onto the Kansas plains.
A good-natured German blacksmith who answered a mail-order marriage ad is hounded by a bully once too often.
A man plots to kill his enemy, but both turn up dead, and the blame falls on a third man.
A young man falls in with a cold-blooded hard case, and one murder leads to the next.
A claustrophobic man who would rather hang than be caged is instead sentenced to life in prison.
Having treated a wounded outlaw, Doc gives his word not to reveal his criminal patients -- and it costs him.
A coward hires a professional gunman -- an old friend of the Marshal's -- to shoot Dillon down.
Dillon threatens to bar a Texas trail crew from Front Street unless they surrender their murderer.
An educated Chinese cook comes to Dodge, and when two bullies cut off his queue he swears to kill them.
Accused of murdering a man he ran out of town, Dillon is arrested by Wild Bill Hickok to stand trial.
Dillon quietly kills off the members of a gang who have been scalping settlers and blaming the Pawnee.
A savage 'marshal' rules Elkader by force until Dillon arrives.
A beautiful young woman arrives by wire announcing she has come to marry Dillon -- a man she has never met.
Not long after Dillon guns down Sam Kertcher, the dead man's son comes to Dodge for revenge.
Two toughs beat an old man to make him reveal his hidden gold, and when that fails he suddenly finds himself married.
A wounded fugitive strangles a deputy and slips arrest, and Dillon takes up the hunt.
A hide skinner is told he shot his partner dead in a drunken blackout -- but he remembers nothing of it.
A killer leads Dillon and Chester out of town on a false trail so his partners can rob the bank.
Dillon saves a young man from a rustling lynch mob and gives him a second chance that may prove a mistake.
A killer on the run from Amarillo faces Dillon in a gunfight -- and guns the Marshal down.
A gunman comes to kill Dillon but falls ill first, and Doc's friend must nurse the assassin back to health.
The Karp brothers rob the Dodge bank and carry Kitty off as a hostage.
When her jailed son kills an unarmed man, tough old Ma Tennis arrives shotgun in hand.
A man is shot in the back, and the woman who names the killer and the accused tell very different stories.
A family refuses to leave the forty acres they claim to have bought but cannot prove is theirs.
A man claims a reward for an outlaw's body -- but it is the wrong man, and there is a bullet in his back.
A tough hombre Dillon suspects of a stage robbery lives by the creed that every man should kill his own snakes.
A killing passed off as self-defense doesn't convince Dillon, who digs past a hired gun and a simple-minded bodyguard.
A cholera outbreak deepens a deadly feud between two prairie neighbors fighting over water.
Two bone hunters have been trying to kill each other, and when one knifes the other Dillon senses more than a woman is behind it.
Chester's wild, uncivilized brother Magnus turns up in Dodge -- and means to stay.
Kitty misses three appointments and vanishes, alarming Doc, just as a stranger from the East also fails to return to his hotel.
1955
A normally placid old drunk turns violent against a no-good gambler who has come to Dodge with his wife, and means to kill him.
A courtly stage robber who takes only from the rich and spares the poor has Dodge wondering if it is the gentlemanly Teddy Blue Fisher.
A man is shot dead while Chester is escorting him to jail, and every scrap of evidence points to Chester as the killer.
A mountain man's Kiowa wife is despised in Dodge, and old blood between the town and her people threatens to boil over.
Two drifters gun down a rancher in cold blood, planning to help themselves to his cattle, his ranch, and his wife.
The Cheyenne take repeating rifles and leave the reservation for the warpath, and a green army captain only makes things worse.
A jailed outlaw's partner is so desperate to free him that he hires a professional gunman for the break.
A determined man comes to Dodge to claim his bride -- carrying a rifle and warning he will kill anyone who stands in the way.
An ice-nerved hired killer has been in Dodge a week, and Dillon must work out who the man came to gun down.
A naturally fast but decent gunfighter comes to Dodge to start over, only to find an old enemy has done the same.
A judge arrives to dispense a strange brand of justice with a killing and $10,000 in stolen money at stake.
A faro dealer is beaten and robbed, and the suspect's only alibi is Doc -- who happens to be out of town.
A rancher's horses are stolen and peddled openly around Dodge, and tempers rise toward a killing.
Sickened by all the killing, Dillon turns in his badge and quits.
A woman comes to Dodge searching for her brother, who has sunk into being the town's coward and drunk.
Dillon is nearly shot when he steps into a bitter feud between two families over a dead son.
Cut down before a lynching can kill him, a man swears to hunt down the two ranchers who tried to hang him.
A widow, enraged that Dillon killed her husband, offers $1,000 to anyone who will gun the Marshal down.
The bizarre Grelk family traps Dillon and Chester in a potato cellar and plots to kill them.
A rich Easterner's bride is kidnapped off the stage, and the robber returns to surrender for a strange reason of his own.
A newcomer has Dodge cowed by his gunman's reputation -- but Dillon wonders whether Hank Shinn is all talk.
A man who hates doctors summons Doc Adams to treat his sick cow, and tragedy follows.
A troublemaking faro dealer has his hand stabbed to the table mid-deal and vows to make trouble for the Marshal.
Dillon must hand his own prisoner a gun to run down a stage robber.
A scheming woman tricks a man into killing her Bible-quoting husband, then finds the body count higher than she bargained for.
An army deserter running off to marry his sweetheart is spotted by Dillon and Chester on the trail.
A blustering 'general' brands the town's new banker a thief, but it is the general himself who is the liar.
A pair of relatives decide the easiest way to get Chester's job is to shoot him -- and they do.
A poor-sighted gunman, an old friend of Dillon's, is bent on going through with a gunfight he cannot possibly win.
A man stands accused of taking a prize stud horse, and its owner threatens worse than killing.
A crazed old man proposes to Kitty and simply will not accept her refusal.
A young bride-to-be traveling to meet her intended finds danger waiting on the stagecoach.
A man returns to his aged mother seventeen years after running off -- but he is not really her son.
A half-Comanche scout hated by whites and his own people alike becomes the target of a vengeful man.
A new physician sets up in Dodge and gives Doc Adams such stiff competition that Doc quits.
A man means to wed a Long Branch dance-hall girl, and his brother will halt it with gunfire if need be.
A Kiowa war party strikes the Clayburn family, and a battered homesteader resolves to abandon the region.
A flashy stranger with two thoroughbreds and a full pocket buys friends around Dodge, and Dillon suspects the horses are stolen.
A young man raised white but born Cheyenne leaves to join his people during an uprising.
A baggage man is killed and $20,000 taken aboard the Dodge train; the wounded boy who recognizes the robber's voice is now a target.
With the army payroll stolen and martial law threatened, a good girl in bad company holds the key to the crime.
An unknown coward stalks Dodge determined to kill the Marshal from hiding.
Texas drovers attacked by Jayhawkers on the way to Dodge decide to take their revenge out on any Kansan they can find.
Dillon must travel to the rough town of Elkader to bring back a murderer -- no easy job.
A reformed outlaw signs on to guard the stagecoach.
A gunman who went straight in Dodge must go back to Oklahoma to face a murder charge.
A preacher who has lost his faith is beaten senseless by the biggest, meanest red-headed brute Dodge has seen.
The West's biggest horse thief returns to Dodge and appears to be back at his old tricks.
A woman named Amy Slater comes to Dodge set on forcing the Marshal to kill her.
In a hard winter, the town miser hoards the only hay and gouges his desperate neighbors for it.
A swindler sells railroad land that isn't his to immigrant settlers -- and helps himself to a wife on the side.
A decent young man kills a man after a quarrel in the Long Branch and flees town like a frightened boy.
A man walks all the way from the Ozarks to settle an old family feud with a killing in Dodge.
1956
Left to freeze on the prairie, a man loses his foot to Doc's saw and, feeling less than a man, sets out to rob a bank.
A man is shot in the back not long after Doc Adams was heard threatening his life.
An old friend of Dillon's opens a gambling game in Dodge, and the Marshal knows him for a crooked, deadly-fast dealer.
The children of two feuding cattle barons plan to elope, and one father wants Dillon to jail the boy to head off a killing.
A government inspector arrives to enforce a rigid set of rules on Dodge -- and on the Marshal himself.
The two lawmen call at a prairie cabin where a dying man and his odd wife share an unsettling secret.
A shady stranger comes to town, the bank is robbed two days later, and Kitty appears to be part of the job.
A rancher's plan to build a new hotel enrages the owner of the Dodge House.
Dillon beats down a professional gunfighter, and the humiliated man loses his nerve.
Dillon squares off against an insane buffalo hunter carrying an old grudge, in a story with a sting at the end.
When a trail boss is jailed for murder his young son takes over the herd, and Dillon doubts the obvious killer is guilty.
An ex-army man is so set on becoming Marshal of Dodge that he offers Dillon $50,000 for the job.
A storekeeper is found hanged in his shop, and Dillon suspects murder when a local turns up flush with cash.
Dillon wonders why a stranger will pay $15,000 for an old man's ranch that is barely worth ten.
A widow won't reveal where her outlaw husband hid his loot -- then suddenly remarries.
A fast gunman goads a man into a fatal fight, and the dead man's brother sets out for revenge.
Assured there are no Indians about, a couple settles a new ranch; when the wife is killed, her husband's revenge puts Dillon next on the list.
Doc kills a stranger who tried to keep him from a patient, and the dead man's brother comes to Dodge to watch him.
A photographer who came to capture the violence of the West finds Dodge too quiet -- so he stirs up trouble himself.
A rustler traffics in stolen beef even as his wife tries to take in an orphan child.
An insane buffalo hunter takes Dillon and Chester prisoner, and the Pawnee turn out to be unlikely allies.
An Arizona deputy comes to Dodge certain that Hank Young is the murderer he is hunting -- and Dillon knows better.
A gentle loner who asks only to be left in peace is harried by two Missourians settling a war grudge.
Just after Kitty buys into the Long Branch, the father who abandoned her turns up to talk her into selling and moving to New Orleans.
A man who carries no gun and seems not to need one proposes to a woman whose brother swears to kill him.
Two New York writers looking for Wild West color are pinned as the thieves of a Fox Clan totem amid signs of an Indian uprising.
Chester is convinced a man newly arrived in Dodge has come to kill him over an old grudge he won't explain.
Two cattlemen slaughter a gentle sheepherder's flock, burn him out, and shoot him -- and he still won't name them.
Dillon is forced by a court order to evict a reformed gunfighter from land he never legally filed on.
A man is found lynched, and another sets out to punish the killers his own way.
A boy is found at a murder scene, and the man who hated the victim looks like the obvious killer.
A pretty newcomer sets Dodge men brawling over her almost as soon as she steps off the train.
Two toughs kill an old man's dog for spite, and one of them soon turns up with a knife in his back.
A husband and a neighbor seem to be quarreling over the wife -- but the truth is not what it looks like.
Two hard men pressure Kitty and Sam to sell the Long Branch, and it looks as if they will get their way.
A month after a Wells Fargo robbery and murder, the dead man's old sweetheart pays for her ticket with the stolen bills -- then vanishes.
Belle Ainsley comes back to Dodge after three years spent riding with a gunman.
Two crotchety old friends of many years suddenly fall into a bitter feud.
A man's coffin holds only rocks, and Dillon digs into a faked death and a doctor no one can place.
A young man comes to Dodge to gun down a supposedly fast draw -- who may not be so fast after all.
A riverboat gambler arrives hunting a peaceable, unarmed friend of Dillon's, and the Marshal must learn why the man hates him.
A man with little time left comes back to settle scores with the Mahler brothers, and an old bullet claims three lives.
Someone shoots at Dodge's notorious skinflint from the dark, and Dillon must work out who wants him dead and why.
A woman card dealer newly arrived at the Long Branch is quietly planning to kill a man.
A dying, penniless old-timer leaves a will handing everything he owns to Kitty.
A man with no known enemies is shot in the back, leaving a young and pretty widow.
Back after six years, a gunman finds his old sweetheart wed to his brother and vows revenge.
A bullying father and son terrorize a meek man who refuses to fight back, burning him out to force a sale.
A young Kiowa boy with his tongue cut out comes to Dillon for help as cattle vanish from a nearby ranch.
An Eastern dude comes to Dodge to meet his gunfighter father, who means to make a man of him.
A stage robber shot dead leaves a widow, and the man who gunned him down arrives courting her.
In a Christmas blizzard, a cast-out daughter and her husband must take refuge in her hard father's barn.
A near-blind old man's old blind hound is shot dead, and he sets out for revenge all the same.
1957
A woman leaves her abusive husband for work at the Long Branch and a handsome gambler, and her husband's vow of revenge ends in murder.
A rich, mean rancher moves to evict a farmer off land he doesn't even need, and his own son bitterly disagrees.
Dillon and Chester ride into a blizzard to recapture an escaped prisoner who will likely be set free anyway.
After a drifter beats and robs Buffalo Mary of her savings, Dillon metes out an unusual justice.
A bank teller accused of stealing gold is killed resisting arrest, and his mother cannot believe him guilty.
A man is judged to have been killed by his own horse, but his widow is certain a neighbor murdered him.
A young robber killed on a third job turns out to be a sixteen-year-old girl fleeing an abusive home.
February 17, 1957
Doubtful Zone
A string of 'accidents' on an old woman's ranch makes Dillon suspect her hired hand means to kill her.
A penniless, seemingly helpless beauty arrives in Dodge, and every man in town rushes to help her.
Forced to kill a no-good man, Dillon watches the dead man's brother start down the same bad road.
Two wanted men rob the Long Branch, take Kitty, and are cornered in a Dodge building.
A woman rides from the Texas panhandle gunning for the man who cheated her with a sick herd.
A mild chicken farmer is goaded into a brawl with a vicious man vowing revenge.
A retired gunman asks for his gun back when an old enemy comes to town to kill him.
Dillon brings in three men, one of whom murdered a half-Indian woman and her husband -- but which one?
A boastful stable hand fears a newly paroled man has come to Dodge to shoot him -- but the ex-convict has other plans.
A miser wants a traveling tonic peddler and his wife off his land, but the medicine man means to keep selling.
Two gamblers Dillon is running out of town hire an old friend of his to kill him.
A Bible-quoting sheep farmer refuses to hand his son over to Dillon after the young man shoots an unarmed man.
A man hauling a fortune in gold, shadowed by two pursuers, kills one of them -- and Dillon smells deceit.
Chester adopts a poisoned dog, not knowing it belongs to a henpecked man who kept it for protection from his brutal wife.
A man stands accused of taking another's prize stud, and the owner threatens worse than death.
A cattleman despises the book-loving sheepherder his son admires, and the rift between father and son turns dangerous.
A wagon train bound west passes through Dodge and leaves a baby girl behind.
Stranded on the prairie, Dillon must amputate a settler's leg while a suitor circles the man's daughter.
A buffalo hunter hauls a horribly disfigured skinner into Dodge, and soon a homesteader is found stabbed to death.
Having treated a wounded outlaw, Doc gives his word not to reveal his criminal patients -- and it costs him.
Sickened by all the killing, Dillon turns in his badge and quits.
The Karp brothers rob the Dodge bank and carry Kitty off as a hostage.
A man who hates doctors summons Doc Adams to treat his sick cow.
A woman brings her murdered husband's body to Dodge, shot by a big-shouldered stranger -- and a new man in town has just such shoulders.
A band of Jayhawkers preys on a Texas cattle drive, and the Marshal takes a hand.
Dillon ousts the crooked sheriff of Tascosa, who swears revenge, in a story with a surprise ending.
A lonely homesteader convinced Indians prowl his farm shoots a prowler who proves to be a cowboy trying to move him off his land.
A difficult son comes home to his ailing old father after four years away, worse than ever.
An old prospector is sure he has struck it rich, though everyone says it is only fool's gold -- or is it?
A no-good rancher hires two orphan boys to break his wild horses, and everyone knows he is up to something.
A stranger murders an old man and Dillon cannot prove a thing against him.
Dillon struggles to keep two men wed to the same woman from a fatal clash.
With the Marshal laid up sick, the Rook brothers terrorize Dodge until a cold-blooded killing.
Freed for want of evidence, a suspected rustler pushes his accuser toward private vengeance.
A traveling professor peddles a cure-all tonic that works suspiciously well -- because it is laced with opium.
A green special deputy from California arrives to arrest a man far tougher than the young lawman realizes.
A buffalo hunter flush with hide money gets into a fight with a man who is soon found dead.
An out-of-place Baltimore man comes to the prairie, hopeless at ranch work and adrift in Dodge.
An educated Chinese cook comes to Dodge, and when two bullies cut off his queue he swears to kill them.
An old man reports his wife of thirty-seven years has run off, and a stranger turns up wearing some of her clothes.
A frightened woman begs Dillon to hide her from her jealous, abusive husband.
Doc is shot from ambush, and Dillon -- the only man Doc trusts -- must cut the bullet out himself.
A hideously ugly man's mere presence so unnerves Dodge that the townsfolk form a mob to be rid of his 'menace.'
A man walks all the way from the Ozarks to settle an old family feud with a killing in Dodge.
A storekeeper is robbed and tied up in his own shop and names a man Dillon cannot believe would do it.
1958
Left to freeze on the prairie, a man loses his foot to Doc's saw and, feeling less than a man, sets out to rob a bank.
A down-on-his-luck Englishman loses his horse and money at poker, but a scheme is exactly what he came to Dodge with.
A man and his prize lead cow vanish, and a rival cattleman is suspected of foul play to win the river crossing.
A visiting senator is shot the moment he steps off the train in Dodge.
A religious fanatic comes to town to visit the Lord's vengeance on a man he judges a sinner.
Three men lynch a rancher for horse theft; when two are shot, the third lives in fear.
Fresh from prison, a man comes back to face the flirtatious wife who divorced him.
A husband dosing his dying wife with herbal remedies refuses to let Doc perform the operation that could save her.
A simple, penniless drifter arrives with only a mule and a guitar and is promptly set upon by bullies.
A laughing-gas show turns dangerous when one of the Marsh boys is made a fool of on stage.
A young gunman is dispatched to kill Dillon, who is determined to learn who is behind it.
A man is found tortured to death, and Dillon confronts someone whose loathing of Indians has curdled into madness.
A domineering New York tycoon comes to Dodge to drag his grown daughter back home.
A boy reports his father kidnapped and his horse stolen, while the man's stepmother proves to be trouble of another kind.
Fearing her son will follow his father into drink, a rancher's wife vows to torch every saloon in the state.
Two traveling gamblers stage a William Tell shooting act with deliberately bad aim.
A young man resents his father's Arapaho wife, and the family's grief comes from that unexpected source.
After Dillon shoots a drunken cowboy, the dead man's brother swears to gun the Marshal down from behind.
A brute shows off an Indian 'wife' who in truth belongs to an honorable man come to take her back.
A man of bad reputation seizes another man's fine stallion for a debt and mistreats it, to his cost.
Stranded with a shattered leg, Dillon lies helpless before a prisoner bent on murder.
A boastful Missouri man wagers his ranch on a grudge quarter-horse race against a local rancher.
Dillon foils a lynching and jails a man for horse theft, until the accuser's young son tries to break him out.
A beautiful woman from Dillon's past comes to Dodge, and Kitty quickly sees she is up to no good.
A rancher's son loves a gypsy girl, which pleases neither his father nor the other gypsies.
A whiskey drummer warns of a plot on Dillon's life; when the Marshal plays dead, two different men boast of the killing.
Chester catches wind of a daylight bank-robbery scheme and tries to lure Dillon away to shield Doc and Kitty.
A youth bent on proving himself kills a jailed man and forces Dillon at gunpoint to dance in the Long Branch.
Chester's father comes to Dodge and is startled to find his good-for-nothing son is now the Marshal's deputy.
When Doc fails to save a rancher's wife, the grieving husband swears revenge and nearly gets it.
When two men trouble a Mexican girl, her father vows to make them answer for it.
An old man is thrown out of his own house by a son now wanted for murder.
On the trail of two stage robbers, Dillon and Chester find an old Southern lady living in a vanished past.
A good-natured German blacksmith is hounded by a bully once too often.
A beaten wife won't file a complaint against her husband -- she even posts his bail.
A boy accused of shooting a neighbor's turkeys reveals the man has been visiting his stepmother, and his father swears revenge.
A convincing eyewitness whose testimony will hang a man turns out to be anything but reliable.
A saloon girl's old fiance follows her from Philadelphia to Dodge, bent on taking her back.
A young man arrives from Louisiana determined to defend Kitty's honor whether she wants it or not.
A hired killer rides into Dodge and won't say who he has come to gun down -- a man Dillon once called friend.
Doc makes himself the bait to trap the two men who murdered a young boy.
A proud old army scout vows to kill the two men who humiliated him with a cruel practical joke.
A jailbreak looms as a drunken, card-cheating Shakespearean actor complicates matters for Dillon.
A man with a sick wife begs Dillon to guard his locked suitcase.
A man whose brother Dillon accidentally wounded kidnaps the Marshal and tricks him into shooting Chester.
Dillon must travel to the rough town of Elkader to bring back a murderer -- no easy job.
A demanding St. Louis correspondent dogs Dillon for the true, unromanticized story of the West as the Marshal hunts badmen.
A blazing wagon and a corpse on the prairie greet the two lawmen, and the truth holds a surprise.
When a rancher's wife is shot down on Front Street, he is sure one of the newly arrived Texas cowboys did it.
Kitty is hurt in a fall from her horse, and Dillon must beg shelter from hostile Kansans.
A Christmas story: a man accused of armed robbery has a few chores to finish before Dillon and Chester can arrest him.
An outlaw going straight takes work guarding the stage line.
1959
An unknown coward stalks Dodge determined to kill the Marshal from hiding.
Accused of killing his employer's colts and inventing a great white wolf to keep his winter job, a wolfer sets out to trap the real beast.
A religious fanatic accuses Chester of interfering with the Lord's work and means to cut off his hand.
A drunken ex-gunfighter is forced into a store robbery to keep his young friend from learning of his disgrace.
The dim-witted Finney twins come to Dodge to hunt Indians -- and prove to be killers.
A man comes to Dodge to kill the former Union soldier who murdered his wife during the war.
A modern-methods doctor draws patients from Doc Adams -- and bodies from Indian graves.
A woman arrives searching for her fiance, who turns out to have an agenda all his own.
A man with a bad heart accepts a fight that could kill him.
A hard old woman forces her sixteen-year-old son to rob the stage carrying $20,000 -- with Chester aboard.
Dillon and Chester meet a cavalry escort bringing home a woman just ransomed from the Arapaho -- and the warrior who loves her.
A judge arrives to dispense a strange brand of justice with a killing and $10,000 in stolen money at stake.
An Easterner courting a Dodge girl finds himself in a shootout and then kidnapped.
Wounded by a bear and left to die by his partner, a trapper survives and comes to Dodge planning to kill the man who abandoned him.
After botching an errand, Chester convinces himself the Marshal no longer needs him.
A young man rebelling against his domineering father falls in with two men and a stagecoach robbery.
A dim bank robber shoots Dillon just to take his badge, while his sharper partner keeps the Marshal alive for his own ends.
A man appoints himself Dillon's deputy while secretly plotting to kill him.
A wealthy grandmother comes to Dodge to bring home her Yale-bound grandson -- who is wanted for a bank holdup.
After a mother and her boy witness a murder, Dillon dangles the child as bait to snare the killer.
The circus comes to Dodge, elephant and all, bringing a strongwoman and her Confederate flag.
A soldier who stole an army payroll and was shot doing it hides with his parents near Dodge and shoots Chester.
Doc and Kitty are seized by Indians whose chief wants his sick child treated -- and Doc agrees, if Kitty goes free.
A jailed robber's men kidnap Kitty and offer to trade her for his release.
With the army payroll stolen and martial law threatened, a good girl in bad company holds the key to the crime.
A father and his son and daughter rob a train and kill a man; Dillon and Chester run them down.
A miser who thinks only of work is found shot, and his wife begins spending freely soon after.
Dillon's old friend is shot in the back, and the gunman comes to Dodge to finish the job -- testing how far loyalty should bind.
Dillon must free a horse thief when the key witness fails to appear -- and there is a grim reason for the man's absence.
A rancher plots to steal the finest lead steer in Kansas, and Doc is drawn into the strange affair.
An Eastern all-star baseball club plays a Dodge team, with Doc Adams umpiring and trouble brewing.
A beautiful young woman arrives announcing she has come to marry a man she has never met, and her troubles -- and Dillon's -- begin.
A boy is sure the silent, tormented old man Pokey Pete has buried treasure, though Pete never says a word.
A scheming woman dupes a young cowboy into shooting her Bible-quoting husband, then reaps more death than she planned.
Bringing a prisoner toward Wichita, Dillon and his fellow travelers are pinned down at a way station by gold-hunting bandits.
Weary of the badge, Dillon nearly quits until an Indian problem and gunrunners show him where he is truly needed.
A man returns to his aged mother seventeen years after running off -- but he is not really her son.
Ed Beaudry comes to town gunning for the blacksmith who married the woman he wanted, but Beaudry is found dead first.
A man threatens to kill Dillon if his jailed brother hangs, then turns that threat on the brother when he admits his guilt.
A tough-talking woman takes over the Lady Gay, and the fate of its former owner is a mystery.
A smooth talker exploits the Marshal's liquor-numbed tooth extraction to loot the bank and gun down a teller while Dillon cannot respond.
A banker forecloses on a family with the law squarely on his side, leaving Dillon little room to act.
A boastful old-timer, humiliated by a local tough, straps on his old pistols once more.
Dillon and Chester arrest a killer in Abilene to bring him home for trial, but the man's brothers mean to stop them.
Dillon uncovers the hidden past of Doc Adams -- a man once called Calvin Moore, wanted for murder.
A woman like no other in Dodge leaves three dead men in her wake before Dillon can stop her.
A rancher puts up gold for a hired gun to cut Dillon down.
A wounded bank robber comes home for his mother's help, only to learn from his little brother that she has died.
A buffalo hunter fresh off the prairie sets his sights on a Long Branch saloon girl and will not take no for an answer.
Dillon's old Mexican friend Esteban rides into Dodge to kill a drifter, and the Marshal must keep him from murder.
A pregnant woman and her husband take refuge in the barn of the father who cast her out.
Left to freeze on the prairie, a man loses his foot to Doc's saw and, feeling less than a man, sets out to rob the bank.
1960
The Pueblo gang hits Dodge, robs the stage, and kidnaps and shoots a woman passenger.
After a man beats him and kills his son, Luke Burris refuses Dillon's help and means to settle the score himself.
Dillon and Chester are held prisoner by two men who beat the woman living with them; the Marshal escapes with her, but one man means to get her back.
A traveling minister clashes with a local man who accuses him of being an escaped convict -- and is right.
Sheltering from a storm while taking in a prisoner, Dillon meets a woman who learns he caused her father's death.
A gentle Civil War drummer boy is set up for murder by the local bully.
A desperate, near-starving man caught stealing seeds finds his wife accused of rustling a rich rancher's calf.
A woman is convinced her husband, drawn to a nearby widow, means to kill her.
A likeable drifter with a bounty on his head saves an ungrateful man's life -- and gets no thanks at all.
A man comes to kill Dillon, who is so weak with fever he can barely stand.
Pressured to ease off, Dillon swears to make no more arrests, so the town hires a most unusual constable to keep the peace.
A white woman found starving on the road with an Indian baby could spark an uprising.
A stage holdup leaves one robber dying and Doc kidnapped by the rest of the gang.
The orphaned son of Dillon's late friends spends the summer in Dodge and, trying to help, believes he has shot an old drunk dead.
A newly widowed woman insists on staying alone on her remote land, and a neighbor takes cruel advantage.
An Indian named Big Foot seizes a killer Dillon is bringing to trial, meaning to deliver his own justice.
Shot in the leg and menaced by renegade Utes, Dillon and Chester take shelter with a mean old woman who charges for everything.
A knife-carrying dude arrested on suspicion of murder may be the long-estranged son of old man Wydell.
A woman is found beaten to death and a silent trapper stands accused of the crime.
Chester's letters, signed as Matt Dillon, draw a mail-order bride who may be a serial husband-killer.
Dillon takes a runaway girl from her cruel father back to Dodge, only to find his troubles with her just starting.
A self-styled professor arrives peddling a machine that supposedly turns dimes into silver dollars, with a price on his head.
A jealous woman accuses Kitty of stealing her diamond pin -- and her husband happens to be sweet on Kitty.
Dillon works to persuade an Indian that the cut telegraph line is not evil magic.
After her stepfather burns to death, Dillon brings a young girl back to Dodge and must decide what to do with her.
An old man crusading against guns and violence comes to Dodge carrying a sack full of gold.
A drunken Indian agent, gone off the deep end, withholds guns and food from the Sioux he is meant to serve.
A friendly sheriff comes to Dodge hunting a bank robber and finds trouble with the wrong couple instead.
After Dillon jails a man, the prisoner's brother smashes the stagecoach and seizes Kitty as a bargaining chip.
A devoted old husband of forty-five years falls for a scheming widow, and his sharp wife sets out to open his eyes.
Dillon meets a man rigging a noose, sworn to hang the killer of his lost love the moment the man admits his guilt.
The Bane brothers steal Dillon and Chester's horses while they bathe, and the bullied younger brother is drawn into a bank robbery.
A traveling hangman arrives with his own portable gallows, and a simple-minded man who befriends him shoots Doc.
Dillon ousts the crooked sheriff of Tascosa, who swears revenge, in a story with a surprise ending.
With Doc missing four days, Dillon and Chester search the ranches, and Chester finds trouble of his own along the way.
A grieving mother swears to kill Dillon if the man who murdered her son is hanged.
A released convict mistakes Doc for the judge who sentenced him and will not be talked out of his revenge.
Chester's itch leads Dillon to the answer behind a rancher's disappearance on his way to town with bank money.
Cut down before a lynching can kill him, a man swears to hunt down the two ranchers who tried to hang him.
An ice-nerved hired killer has been in Dodge a week, and Dillon must work out who the man came to gun down.
A woman reporter in men's clothing joins a cattle drive to chronicle the real West, and the trail boss demands she be jailed.
After two drunken Texans drag Chester behind a horse for sport, Dillon walks in to arrest them -- without his guns.
Dillon and Chester take in a badly beaten, half-starved woman, and the husband who admits abusing her comes to claim her.
A clever con artist works out an ingenious new way to rob a bank.
Two robbers bury their loot to deflect suspicion as an Indian-grave-digging professor stumbles into the case.
A wild young man wants to settle down and marry, but his bride's brother swears he will die whether he goes through with the wedding or not.
While Dillon hunts a back-shooting robber, Kitty nurses a sick friend whose husband turns strangely hostile.
A cafe's new cook makes business boom until a drunken diner demands his eggs be turned and pushes the chef too far.
All Dodge buzzes about a war hero of Hogback planning to settle in town.
A wife shot by her brutish husband grows fond of Doc and taunts the man with talk of a new lover, nearly getting Doc killed.
1961
After a stranger is shot dead on Front Street, Dillon realizes the bullet was meant for him, paid for by an earless enemy.
A man challenges another to a gunfight for insulting his wife -- who has kept the truth about her past hidden out of love.
A man arrives in Dodge with his dead friend's body, throws a lavish wake, and keeps spending freely afterward.
A young couple passing through to sell their wagon are drawn in when a reckless man buys it and hires the husband, who does not trust him.
A young woman whose father is murdered by roadmen walks forty miles to Dodge and takes work at the Long Branch to find the killers.
A former Oklahoma marshal who quit for fear of a bullet in the back passes through Dodge, and Dillon worries someone means to collect on him.
Just after Kitty buys into the Long Branch, the father who abandoned her turns up to talk her into selling and moving to New Orleans.
Torn between duty and a social he promised Kitty, Dillon rides off for a prisoner while Kitty helps an injured man and falls in love.
A brutal gunman is remade into a gentler man after his shooting hand is crippled.
A man who lost at poker to a player later found shot suddenly has money for a wedding ring, and Dillon grows suspicious.
A pretty newcomer sets Dodge men brawling over her almost as soon as she steps off the train.
A brutal 'marshal' rules the town of Elkader with an iron fist until Dillon rides in.
Dillon quietly kills off the members of a gang who have been scalping settlers and blaming the Pawnee.
Chester dreads a lawyer's letter he assumes is over an old debt, but it brings news of a cousin's death and a small inheritance.
Dillon must release a suspect when Abilene claims another man for the murder -- the freed man's own brother, who could not have done it.
While Dillon is away, a crooked gambler sets up in Dodge and uses a hired gun behind a killing passed off as self-defense.
A father and son beat and rape an Indian woman and shoot her husband, and soon the son is found scalped.
When Doc is shot in the back on the prairie, Chester is forced to operate on him to save his life.
After an old man kills her son for trying to stop a horse theft, a mother shoots the man's son dead and sends her boy for Dillon.
A friend of Dillon's is murdered before he can testify, and the woman who killed him claims self-defense -- which the Marshal doubts.
Chester falls for a new woman in town whose brother is a wanted army deserter.
With Dillon away, a sod-buster's daughter mistakes Chester for the Marshal and sets her heart on him as a freed prisoner and a bank robbery collide.
A rustler sells the meat of stolen cattle while his wife tries to adopt an orphan.
When an old medical-college friend dies, Doc is visited by a Philadelphia doctor offering him the dead man's lucrative practice.
Dillon is forced by a court order to evict a reformed gunfighter from land he never legally filed on.
The Story
Often called the finest "adult Western" ever broadcast, Gunsmoke ran on CBS Radio from April 26, 1952, to June 18, 1961, following U.S. Marshal Matt Dillon as he kept a grim, uneasy order in 1870s Dodge City. Deliberately somber and morally complex, it let villains get away and endings turn bleak, with then-shocking content -- violent crime, scalpings, opium addicts -- and a marshal as scarred as the men who drifted into his town. It began when CBS chairman William S. Paley asked for "a Philip Marlowe of the Old West." The casting became the character. William Conrad won the role on a last-resort audition and so defined it that producer Norman Macdonnell said "you can't tell where Matt Dillon begins and Bill Conrad ends." Alongside Howard McNear's Doc, Georgia Ellis's Kitty, and Parley Baer's Chester, the show was famous for layered sound design that gave a palpable sense of the prairie -- John Dunning recalled hearing "the inevitable dog barking" a block away. Routinely placed among the best radio dramas of any era -- many enthusiasts prefer it to the celebrated 20-season TV series it spawned -- Gunsmoke proved radio drama could be literate, realistic, and unflinchingly adult.
Full story — coming soon while it's being curated.
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