Narrator: My dad wasn't just one man named Flint Mitchell. He was a breed of men... mountain men who lived and died in America. He used to tell me about these men he knew. Men who walked the Indian trails and blazed new ones where no man had ever been before. Men who found lakes and rivers and meadows. Men who found paths to the west and the western sea; who roamed prairies and mountains and plateaus that are now states. Men who searched for beaver and found glory. Men who died unnamed and found immortality. My father always began his story by telling me about the summer rendezvous of the mountain men. This is where they met every July after a year of trapping in the Rockies. Here they cashed in their furs, caught up on their drinking and the fighting and the gambling and the fun... and the girls. They lived hard and they played hard.


--Howard Keel (as Narrator) in Across the Wide Missouri

Narrator: My father told me that for the first time, he saw these Indians as he had never seen them before - as people with homes and traditions and ways of their own. Suddenly they were no longer savages. They were people who laughed and loved and dreamed.


--Howard Keel (as Narrator) in Across the Wide Missouri

Narrator: Trees lie where they fall, and men were buried where they died.


--Howard Keel (as Narrator) in Across the Wide Missouri

[Bill is dressed as an Indian woman with a baby]
Calamity Jane: Gosh almighty, it's Bill Hickok!
[proceeds to laugh along with everyone else]
Wild Bill Hickok: [hands baby over] Here take him.
[stands up]
Wild Bill Hickok: The next man that laughs is gonna get his head ventilated.
[silence and Bill sits down. Calamity laughs again after a few moments]


--Howard Keel (as Wild Bill Hickok) in Calamity Jane

[during the fight with Wild Horse's braves, the wagon with the stolen gold hidden in the flour barrels flips over spilling it's contents among the grateful Indian women]
Lomax: They're picking it clean! Why didn't you stop 'em?
Taw Jackson: Well, just how do I go about that?
Levi Walking Bear: I'm afraid Taw's right, Lomax. They'll fight you.
Lomax: Shut up, you Indian!
Levi Walking Bear: I know my people. To them it's flour.
Lomax: Flour? What about the gold?
Levi Walking Bear: As far as they know, it's just food.


--Howard Keel (as Levi Walking Bear) in The War Wagon