I have a distinct but isolated childhood memory of a scene on TV in which an older, Grizzly Adams-type mountain man is all by himself out in the wintry mountains when he is attacked by unseen Indians. He gets shot by arrows several times, all while he spins around and tries to draw a bead on his assailants. He drags himself toward cover but eventually drops behind a log in the deep snow, face down, and dies. ISTM a shot with one eye peeping out of the snow over the log, with a big fur hat on his head. I remember being absolutely wrecked by this scene, especially since he doesn’t seem to see who’s attacking him.
I get the feeling that this was from a miniseries as opposed to a movie or regular TV series. I also have the impression that this showed the ending of a character that we had known as a younger man, making his way in the mountains, or that this was the mentor of a younger main character. It’s kind of fuzzy. This would have been in the late 70s or early 80s, with a Jeremiah Johnson feel to it. The dying mountain man wasn’t as old as Will Geer’s character in JJ; more like a guy whose dark beard had a bunch of grey in it.
Does this scene or fragmentary description ring any bells with anyone?
Man, the Wikipedia description of Centennial does sound familiar, especially the stone-arrowhead-in-the-spine bits. I’m going to have to get the DVDs from the library to look for that scene, since it doesn’t seem to be up on Youtube. Still, in my memory the fight takes place with the guy struggling in deep snow in the dead of winter. Maybe I’m conflating dying mountain men.
So having watched the death of Pasquinel, I can say that it’s not the scene that I think I’m thinking of. It’s got the pincushioning with arrows, but no snow, no fur hat, and he clearly sees the Indians coming for him. However, I obviously did see this on TV as a child because I remember a bunch of these scenes, glacial pace/bad beard wigs/terrible accents/guys in redface and all. Pasquinel demonstrating how to cut the arrow out of his back on the river’s edge in particular brought me right back to 1978.
I’ll push on through for a while to see if my scene comes up somewhere later, but by God I’m watching it on fast forward.
Maybe it was the death of either Robert Duvall or Tommy Lee Jones in Lonesome Dove? I remember him getting hit multiple times with arrows, but he lived long enough to make it back to town.
First thing I thought of was Jack Elam in an episode of the TV series Father Murphy, because he looked like this. But I doubt he had a violent death scene in that episode.
Lonesome Dove is too late, I think.
Not Jeremiah Johnson; I have that on DVR. Seems like a similar mood, though.
How the West Was Won? I’ll have to look into that, thanks.