Busy day at the office: Jim Arness goes on location and finds a lot of work.

Gunsmoke's James Arness is a private man, not much given to signing auto-graphs, at least in Hollywood. But things are different in Custer, SD. The tempo is slower, somehow, even for a television actor on a tight production schedule. There Arness obligingly scribbled his name on scraps of paper for young admirers (above). Arness was in Custer because of a snowstorm. Executive producer John Mantley got lucky when a freak blizzard blanketed the area last spring and permitted him to use a script he had been ready to discard. He rushed his crew to the Black Hills, where Arness rode to work on a train (right), had a knife fight with an Indian (right, above) and wore shades to discuss production problems (center). +

The train was an essential part of the plot and, in fact, the main reason why the cast went to South Dakota. Where else do you find a 19th-century locomotive, a snowy landscape and a band of Indians, all in one place? In the springtime, yet But the locomotive was more than a prop, as it turned out. The location site was two miles from the nearest road, so the train was used to transport the 70-man company-augmented by 25 genuine Sioux from a near-by reservation. Arness enjoyed chatting with the Indians but he didn't enjoy swim-ming, as the plot required, in a fast, I icy river . The horse's feelings went unrecorded. There were, of course, the usual foul-ups and close calls. The worst moments came when the 26-degree cold departed almost as quickly as it had arrived and the snow began to melt at a frightening rate. It disap-peared from the tracks first. For one scene, Mantley had to call on all hands to grab shovels and move snow from a shady spot to the rails. Then the train could grind to a halt with a suit-able snowy flurry. But in spite of the problems, Arness was more relaxed than usual, a mood exemplified by the picture actually taken later, as he chatted with actor Harry Morgan after going on location. Perhaps it was the clean Dakota air.