The High Chaparral was filmed primarily in Hollywood, California 
and in Old Tucson, Arizona.
Executive Producer/Creator.......................................David Dortort
Producers..............Buck Houghton, William F. Claxton, James Schmerer
Production Manager.................................................Kent McCray
Story Consultant......................................................Don Balluck
Music By.............................................David Rose, Harry Sukman
Photography...........Harkness Smith, Kenneth T. Williams, Haskell Boggs

The High Chaparral traces the adventures of the Cannon family in their struggle to maintain a cattle ranch in the rugged Arizona desert.  The time is the 1870's, when survival means a fight against the elements, as well as renegade Indians and outlaws.  

Story Background:  In the early 1870s, a man named John Cannon comes to the Arizona Territory with his wife, Annalee, his twenty-year-old son, Billy Blue, his brother, Buck, and a dream of establishing a cattle empire in this rugged, untamed land. But unlike other settlers of his time, John dreams of building a life of peace and prosperity in cooperation with the native Apache. He has his work cut out for him, for his brother has a weakness for carousing in the nearest saloon, his relationship with his son is fraught with all of the difficulties common between fathers and sons, and his wife, though loving and supportive, is terrified by the savagery she sees around her. Within days of arriving in their new home, the army warns them off, Apaches attack, and John finds he has a hostile neighbor to the south, in Mexico, by the name of Don Sebastian Montoya - who claims the High Chaparral land as his own. As John, together with his brother and his newly hired ranch hands, struggles to get a foothold on the land, Annalee is killed in a raid, and John is forced into an arranged marriage with Don Sebastian's daughter, Victoria Montoya, as the price of peace with that adversary. He acquires a new brother-in-law, as well, Manolito Montoya, who comes initially as Victoria's protector but stays on to help establish the High Chaparral.  His son, Billy Blue, still grief-stricken over the death of his mother, is shocked by his father's hasty re-marriage and rebels, deserting the ranch for a time, until his Uncle Buck brings him back.

Faced with such obstacles, any other man would pack his bags and return in defeat from whence he came. But John Cannon is not any other man, and in fact, the Cannons, with their new allies and family, the Montoyas, are not ordinary people. They are determined to carve a home from the land they have claimed, and nothing short of death will stop them. They are the people who settled the West. This is their story.

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