Just before this season starts, the Macahan mother, Kate, dies. Luke (Bruce Boxleitner) is sent to fetch Uncle Zeb (James Arness) while Josh (William Kirby Cullen), Laura (Kathryn Holcomb) and Jessie (Vicki Schreck) head to town to pick up their estranged aunt Molly (Fionnula Flanagan, recently seen in Lost and Defiance), who has decided to stay with the Macahans while they mourn for her sister's death.
Zeb, ever the mountain man, has been roaming the wilderness for a while, and has just turned down a job to help "guide" a group of Russian royals in a hunt for buffalo. With Zeb out of the picture, the local fort hires the second-best mountain man in the area, and the new guide has fewer qualms about trespassing on Sioux Nation land.
In the midst of Zeb and his family grieving over their recent loss, he is called away when the hunting expedition he wanted no part of angers the Sioux people. Now the Indians have one of the Russian nobleman and Zeb finds himself acting as a negotiator trying to keep the two sides from attacking each other. An interesting aspect of this particular story arc is Ricardo Montalban's role as Satangkai, the Sioux Nation Chief. Montalban doesn't do anything to disguise his distinct accent, so hearing his voice come from the halting Indian speech common in these shows is an unusual dichotomy.
While Zeb is trying to prevent a war, Luke leaves the homestead to make sure he doesn't draw too much attention to the Macahan farm. Last season, Luke was forced to join the Union army, and upon escaping, found himself in a few tough spots. One such situation (not actually shown before this season) led to him shooting a small town sheriff who was trying to hang him without due process. Unfortunately, this led to Luke having a price on his head and having to stay on the move a lot.
Luke's adventures this season starts with him stumbling into a small town with a sheriff who learns of the misunderstanding, but doesn't seem too worried about this potential gunslinger. When Luke starts to fall for the sheriff's daughter, everyone has to consider what kind of life Hilary could have if she ended up marrying an outlaw.
Meanwhile, the rest of the Macahans get a guest in a Mormon traveling West to avoid religious persecution. When Laura becomes smitten with the man, she learns that his religion allows him to have more than one wife. As the wedding approaches, Molly has to decide if she should intervene or let Laura do what she believes is right.
These early story arcs roll into others fairly smoothly. When one Macahan crisis ends, another follows. Before the season is over, Luke will have to leave Hillary and his possible future sheriff-in-law only to get captured by a gang of outlaws that try to convince him to join their troup. While he feels a certain kinship towards the group, he soon finds himself in a bit of a conflict with them. Meanwhile, Jessie gets attacked by a swarm of bees and could die from the stings. When western medicine starts to fail, Zeb decides to take the girl to the Arapaho healers.
Even these events are only steps towards the season's second half where each group is faced with even more devious dangers. Zeb's time with the Arapaho has him realize that the tribe is starving and the beef promised by the U.S. government doesn't seem to be getting to its rightful place. When he learns that the quality of the meat that is getting delivered means it can't be consumed, he decides to get a group of Arapaho together to cross the wastelands and blaze a new cattle trail from Texas to Colorado across the roughest part of the country.
Luke ends up helping a stranger that turns out to be a circuit judge who decides to return the favor by listening to Luke's legal problems and trying to make it so that he cannot be extradited to Missouri where his supposed crimes took place. Unfortunately for Luke, the sheriff of the town where he turned himself in seems to have a grudge for anyone who's injured a member of the law.
With neither Zeb nor Luke around, the rest of the Macahans once again find themselves working the land alone, and this time they find themselves in deeper trouble. When a wagon carrying both Molly and Jessie tips, Molly wakes to find the wagon driver dead and Jessie missing. Molly, Josh and Laura hire a guide to help them look for the youngest Macahan as she wanders through the desert. Their guide, Deek Peasley (Harris Yulin) starts to take a liking to Molly, even though she does everything she can think of to turn him away. Mr. Peasley turns out to be more determined than anyone would expect when he decides to claim a homestead next to the Macahan property. It becomes apparent that Mr. Peasley knows the Macahan name, and has had run-ins with Zeb in the past. The question is, is Molly all that the tracker wants, or is he looking for a bit of revenge as well?
The season starts off with a pair of feature-length episodes and also ends in one as well, but even the 45 minute shows that fill in the middle are packed with events as each one progresses all three running stories. Interestingly, where most shows might end a story arc at the end of an episode, How the West Was Won: The Complete Second Season tends to switch gears mid-show, which helps a lot with keeping the various storylines flowing into each other. Instead of the events around Laura's wedding happening in the final scenes of one episode and Jessie being attacked by bees at the start of the next, the story transitions about halfway through "Interlude" and similarly, Jessie's sickness gets healed halfway through "Cattle Drive" and before the episode is up, Zeb's getting his company together to start their long trek. It is an unusual formula that I don't believe I've seen much before.
Like the first season, How the West Was Won: The Complete Second Season will appeal mostly to those that saw the show when it aired in the late 1970's. That being said, it is still a good show. While its best to know the characters from the first season, you really don't need to in order to know what's happening in this collection.
