Silver - The precious metal used by the Lone Ranger (Clayton Moore/John Hart), a frontier vigilante on the western adventure THE LONE RANGER/ABC/1949-57. The Lone Ranger's trademark silver bullets were made from the silver ore taken from a mine once owned by his brother Captain Daniel Reid, who was killed by the Cavendish Gang. An old retired Ranger named Jim Blane worked the silver mine (located under an old cabin) and fashioned the silver ore into the Ranger's bullets, which he used sparingly. He chose silver as his medium to emphasize that silver, like life, was precious and should not be wasted. The silver bullets became a "symbol of justice to all honest men and a cause of fear to the lawbreakers." The Ranger’s silver mine would be the basis of the fortune that built the Reid publishing empire run by Britt Reid, the crusading editor and publisher of The Daily Sentinel in the GREEN HORNET radio and TV series. According to the book Who Was That Masked Man? by David Rothel the idea for using silver for bullets came from a script written by Fran Stryker about Robin Hood "where Robin's arrowheads were tipped with silver so that all would know the archer with the distinctive trademark." The theme of silver ran through the program with the Ranger's silver bullets, Silver the horse and the classic signoff "Hi-Yo, Silver Away!" As of 1958 (per statistics gathered for the twenty-fifth anniversary of the Lone Ranger program) the Masked Rider of the Plains had brought to justice some 21,734 villains while having shot a total of 12,684 silver bullets (and never killed anyone). That's about two bad guys per bullet. In the motion picture remake The Legend of the Lone Ranger (1981) Tonto (played by Michael Horse) advised the Lone Ranger (played by Klinton Spilsbury) to use silver bullets because Tribal chiefs used silver tips on their arrows to make them fly straighter and longer and because "Silver is pure...it has been a symbol of justice since the year of the sun."  See also - GREETINGS & SALUTATIONS "The Lone Ranger's Silver Bullet"