They were reluctant partners, both very fast and deadly with a gun, who were thrown together by circumstance when Corey walked into town carrying his saddle and needing a job, and David badly needing another gun to watch his back.

And David had to learn to trust a man who, a few years before, had held the whip hand - literally - and who once considered slaves to be "inventory".

Earl Corey had lived on a Virginia plantation, a rich man, who returned after the war to find his plantation untouched, everything just as he left it - but now in the hands of his pro-Union brother whom Corey, and other Southerners, considered a traitor.

In 1973, several episodes of the series were compiled together as an overseas theatrical release entitled Call Me By My Rightful Name.

Harlan Ellison deplored the show in his review for the Los Angeles Free Press.

Citing an episode where Corey seduces an innkeeper's wife while David watches, he conceded that it was realistic to show black/white romance as unthinkable for the time, but that showing David as having normal desires wouldn't have been too much to ask: instead, "the black man is allowed to vent his frustration and loneliness and hostility only through the use of the gun.