Spare the Rod, Spoil the Bandit

Player notes

Screenshots from Spare the Rod, Spoil the Bandit, mirrored from Red Dead Wiki.

• ◆During the mission, the player will receive a Winchester Repeater if they have not purchased or obtained one already.
• ◆It is possible to skip having to even go inside the farm house. After the barn encounter, shoot all the bandits who come outside on the front porch. As soon as there's only a few bandits left, run around the left side of the house and round the back. Here the player can shoot the bandits that are upstairs through the windows.
• ◆There is another mission later on in the game called "Spare the Love, Spoil the Child".
• ◆This mission and "Spare the Love, Spoil the Child" are title parodies of the idiom "spare the rod, spoil the child", which indicates that discipline is necessary for good upbringing; the idiom itself is also derived from the Bible verse in the Book of Proverbs 13:24.
• ◆If "Jenny's Faith" has not already been completed, Jenny will be seen at the rock where she is laying.
• ◆Eli can be seen drinking Nigel West Dickens' Elixir before leaving Marshal Johnson's office.
• ◆A naked, castrated man can be seen hanging in the barn. Another nudity scene can be found in the mission "The Gates of El Presidio", where Reyes is having sex with a woman.
• ◆The place the bandits burned down is possibly Mercer Station. It's the closest burnt-down place to Ridgewood Farm. Coincidentally, it is also used for cover during the final shooting with Bill Williamson's men. However, the station is burnt down even before this mission, since the start of the game so this might be an error on the developers' part.
• ◆This is one of the few ways to obtain the Winchester Repeater for free; another being clearing out Tumbleweed (the sheriff there must survive in order for this to happen).
• ◆The woman who scolds Marshal Johnson after the shootout will come back in Undead Nightmare as the mother of Millicent Waterbury.
• ◆The screenshot shown for this mission is one of the earliest released by Rockstar. The screenshot shows Marston wearing the Legend of the West Outfit with a Bolt Action Rifle on his back. Neither the outfit, nor the weapon, are obtainable at this point in the game however. (Unless the player uses cheats).
• ◆If the player's horse doesn't have a saddle, (this may be due to being recently broken before the mission) it will not travel to you when whistled. It acknowledges the whistle with a standard throw-back of the head (as well as the 'Player's Mount' icon appearing on the mini-map) but won't travel towards you. The unsaddled horse will also move around during the events of the mission, not staying where automatically placed by the game for the player.
• ◆During the sequence in which the player gallops besides Marshall Johnson and his deputies towards Mercer Station, a glitch may occur where the Marshal's horse won't transition into a gallop. It increases in speed along with the other horses, but the Quarter Horse remains in the canter animation. The glitch has been confirmed to occur on both the PS3 version, and strangely the Xbox One version, despite being absent on the X360 version.
• ◆During the cutscene after the examination of the first ambushed campsite, if the player's horse is unsaddled, the player's horse during the cutscene will be equipped with a black and grey NPC saddle, rather than Marston's signature brown and tan leather one. The same will also occur during the cutscenes in which the player, Marshall Johnson, and the deputies confront Williamson on the hillside.
• ◆Parked alongside the first ambushed campsite is a unique carriage, only seen in this mission. It is shorter in length and width than other carriages or wagons in the game. It appears to be taller than any other too, as well as having a unique cover arrangement to sustain its odd appearance. The carriage/wagon also appears as if it can be driven by a maximum of two horses, despite only a carcass of a single horse being located in front of it. This may also suggest that it can be led by a single horse, which only carts can.
• ◆During the shootout at Mercer Station, Williamson's gang ambushes you. Despite Norman Deek being a semi-critical plot point, he isn't one of the attackers on horseback - like the mission suggests. This is probably due to the fact that the player is free to dispatch the attackers in any means available. So, if Norman Deek was an attacking NPC and the player killed him, it would be inconsistent with the following cutscene where he is interrogated and captured.
• ◆In the second to last cutscene of the mission in which Williamson commands his men to attack you, a member of his gang can been seen sitting atop a Kentucky Saddler. This is unusual, considering the only natural instances of an NPC- ridden Kentucky Saddlers are located around Manzanita Post. Despite appearing in the cutscene, the Kentucky Saddler isn't one of the ambushing horses either, since it is ridden by the outlaw in brown, who only appears as an enemy outside of cutscenes during "The Assault on Fort Mercer".
• ◆All members of the Williamson gang share the same character models as the Bollard Twins gang, rather than the Unaffiliated criminals as they usually do. Marshal Johnson will still be able to distinct them from being the Bollards, though.
• ◆When John sees Bill and his gang from a distance and threatens to kill the latter, Bill tells him how Dutch thought John was an "arrogant son of a bitch." This references a camp event in Red Dead Redemption 2, wherein Bill sees Dutch tell John not to be an "arrogant son of a bitch" as the latter was better than it.