TV Western Trivia
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59 free TV Western trivia questions with answers — entertainment quiz, new questions added Sep 2026.
53 free TV western trivia questions with answers. TV western trivia for anyone who grew up with Marshal Dillon, the Cartwrights and a Winchester in the opening credits — or who found the genre later through Deadwood, Justified and the Dutton family. This quiz sticks to television only; the big-screen westerns have their own page. It starts in the 1950s boom, when thirty westerns filled prime time and Gunsmoke and Wagon Train ruled the ratings, then works through Bonanza, The Rifleman, Rawhide, Maverick, Have Gun – Will Travel, The Lone Ranger, The Big Valley, The Virginian and The Wild Wild West, before jumping to Dr. Quinn, Walker, Texas Ranger and the modern neo-westerns. There are easy questions about who played whom, and harder ones about ratings, cancellations, theme songs and behind-the-scenes decisions. Every answer was checked against encyclopaedic sources before it went in.
30 of 59 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01On the TV version of Gunsmoke, who played Marshal Matt Dillon?
James Arness
James Arness: at 6 ft 7 he was ordered off the landing craft first at Anzio in 1944 to test the water's depth, and the leg wound he took there troubled him on Gunsmoke, where riding scenes could set the pain off.
Q 02Gunsmoke is set in which Kansas cattle town?
Dodge City
Dodge City: the series was shot on Hollywood backlots and California ranch land, never in Kansas, yet the real town embraced it, and its Boot Hill Museum still carries a Gunsmoke tribute.
Q 03Which actress played Miss Kitty for 19 of Gunsmoke's 20 seasons?
Amanda Blake
Amanda Blake: she once brought her pet lion, Kemo, onto the set, and she and her husband ran one of the first successful cheetah-breeding programmes in captivity.
Q 04Which Gunsmoke deputy, played by Ken Curtis, replaced Chester in 1964?
Festus Haggen
Festus Haggen: the scruffy deputy's nasal twang was put on, because Ken Curtis was a smooth-voiced crooner who had sung with Tommy Dorsey's band and the Sons of the Pioneers.
Q 05Which first name did actor Milburn Stone choose for his Gunsmoke character, Doc Adams?
Galen
Galen: Doc went years without a first name until the producers let Stone pick one, and he borrowed that of the ancient physician who treated Rome's emperors.
Q 06CBS planned to cancel Gunsmoke in 1967 but instead axed which sitcom to free a Monday slot?
Gilligan's Island
Gilligan's Island: Gunsmoke took over its early Monday slot and the gamble paid off, as the ageing Western jumped back into the top ten and ran for eight more seasons.
Q 07The Cartwrights of Bonanza lived on a ranch called the Ponderosa near which Nevada town?
Virginia City
Virginia City: a real silver boomtown where, in the 1860s of the show's setting, a failed prospector turned newspaperman first signed his work 'Mark Twain'.
Q 08Who played patriarch Ben Cartwright on Bonanza?
Lorne Greene
Lorne Greene: Canadians knew the voice long before Bonanza, because his deep-toned reading of grim war news on CBC radio had earned him the nickname 'the Voice of Doom'.
Q 09Which Cartwright brother on Bonanza was played by Dan Blocker?
Hoss
Hoss: when Dan Blocker died suddenly in 1972, the writers let the character die too rather than recast him, and Bonanza lasted only one more season without its gentle giant.
Q 10In Bonanza's opening titles, what bursts into flames to reveal the Cartwrights on horseback?
A hand-drawn map
A hand-drawn map: the 1959 original survives, having hung for decades in creator David Dortort's home before it went on permanent display at the Autry museum in Los Angeles in 2011.
Q 11Why did NBC keep Bonanza after nearly dropping it early on?
It sold color TV sets
It sold color TV sets: Bonanza was one of the first shows broadcast in color, so parent company RCA used it to sell its sets, and after a move to Sunday nights it became America's top-rated show for three seasons.
Q 12What was the name of the Cartwright family's cook on Bonanza?
Hop Sing
Hop Sing: Victor Sen Yung, who played him, really could cook. He demonstrated Cantonese dishes on television and published his own Great Wok Cookbook in 1974.
Q 13Who starred as rancher Lucas McCain in The Rifleman?
Chuck Connors
Q 21In Have Gun – Will Travel, gunfighter-for-hire Paladin made his home at which San Francisco address?
The Hotel Carlton
The Hotel Carlton: there he lived as a dandy in ruffled shirts and tailored suits, then rode out to work dressed all in black, the colour TV Westerns usually kept for the villain.
Q 22In Have Gun – Will Travel, the hero Paladin took his name from what?
The knights of Charlemagne's court
The knights of Charlemagne's court: hence the chess knight on his calling card and holster, and a theme song that hails him as 'a knight without armor in a savage land'.
Q 23Have Gun – Will Travel reversed the usual route for a 1950s Western when its TV success spawned what?
Chuck Connors: Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev was such a fan of The Rifleman that on a 1973 visit to America he greeted the actor with a bear hug.
Q 14The Rifleman was set in which fictional town in New Mexico Territory?
North Fork
North Fork: the series is set there in the 1880s, yet McCain's spinning, rapid-fire rifle is a Winchester Model 1892, a gun that would not exist for another decade.
Q 15The Rifleman's pilot, "The Sharpshooter", was first shown as an episode of which anthology series?
Zane Grey Theatre
Zane Grey Theatre: Sam Peckinpah had written the script for Gunsmoke, which turned it down, so he reworked it for the anthology and it grew into a series of its own.
Q 16Which future movie star played drover Rowdy Yates on Rawhide?
Clint Eastwood
Clint Eastwood: he tired of clean-cut Rowdy, 'the hero who kisses old ladies and dogs', so in 1964 he went to Spain to play a poncho-wearing antihero in A Fistful of Dollars.
Q 17Which singer performed Rawhide's theme song on the CBS series?
Frankie Laine
Frankie Laine: fifteen years later Mel Brooks hired him to belt out the Blazing Saddles title song, and he sang it in deadly earnest, unaware the film was a spoof.
Q 18James Garner's breakout role was as a wandering poker player in which 1957 Western?
Maverick
Maverick: its hero would sooner bluff or bolt than shoot, a send-up of the stern TV lawman that soon pulled Sunday-night viewers away from The Ed Sullivan Show.
Q 19Which future James Bond joined the Garner poker-player series as cousin Beau after its star left?
Roger Moore
Roger Moore: the studio first flew in Sean Connery, who turned the part down, so one future 007 made way for another years before Moore inherited Bond from him as well.
Q 20Who played Bart, brother of Garner's poker-playing hero Bret, alternating leads from week to week?
Jack Kelly
Jack Kelly: he was added because each episode took more than a week to film, so a second crew shot his Bart stories in parallel and the brothers could alternate in a weekly slot.
A radio version
A radio version: Westerns such as Gunsmoke had gone from radio to TV, but Paladin went the other way, and the radio series even wrote him an ending, in which he leaves San Francisco to claim an inheritance back East.
Q 24Who starred as the masked hero in the 1949–1957 TV series The Lone Ranger?
Clayton Moore
Clayton Moore: he went on appearing in costume for decades, and when the character's owner won a 1979 court order against the mask he switched to wraparound sunglasses until he got it back.
Q 25Jay Silverheels, who played Tonto, was a member of which Indigenous nation?
Mohawk
Mohawk: a chief's grandson whose mother's line was Mohawk, he reached Hollywood with a touring lacrosse team, where comedian Joe E. Brown talked him into a screen test.
Q 26Wagon Train's original wagon master, Major Seth Adams, was played by which John Ford regular?
Ward Bond
Ward Bond: the series was inspired by John Ford's 1950 film Wagon Master, and when Bond died suddenly in 1960 it rolled on under a new wagon master without ever explaining where Major Adams had gone.
Q 27Billed as 'Michael Morris', which film star made a shadowy cameo as General Sherman in a 1960 episode of Wagon Train?
John Wayne
John Wayne: the credit was a play on his birth name, Marion Morrison, and viewers had to know him by voice and outline, since director John Ford kept him half hidden in shadow for his one line.
Q 28Which Hollywood legend played matriarch Victoria Barkley in The Big Valley?
Barbara Stanwyck
Barbara Stanwyck: she did her own stunts on the show wherever she could, as she had in the film Forty Guns, where she let a horse drag her after the stuntmen refused.
Q 29The Barkley ranch in The Big Valley was near which California city?
Stockton
Stockton: the Barkleys held the valley for four seasons, and the show's renewal cost co-star Lee Majors the lead in Midnight Cowboy, which went to Jon Voight instead.
Q 30Which NBC Western filled a 90-minute slot every week from 1962, with James Drury in the title role?
The Virginian
The Virginian: the title is the only name its hero ever gets, because the series kept a secret from Owen Wister's novel, which left the foreman nameless to make him a man of mystery.