Wagon Master

Two horse traders, Travis Blue and Sandy, agree to guide a Mormon wagon train across difficult country toward the San Juan Valley, where the settlers intend to start a new community. The journey brings hard terrain and hard choices, along with encounters with Navajo people and with the Clegg family, a band of outlaws. A group of travelling performers heading for California joins the train along the way, among them a young woman named Denver.

John Ford directed the film, the fifteenth of the thirty-one features he made, following Rio Grande and preceding The Quiet Man. Patrick Ford and Frank S. Nugent wrote the screenplay. Ben Johnson plays Travis and Joanne Dru plays Denver, with Harry Carey, Jr. as Sandy, Ward Bond as Elder Wiggs, Charles Kemper as Uncle Shiloh Clegg and Alan Mowbray as Dr. A. Locksley Hall. Thirty-two performers are credited.

Made by RKO Radio Pictures with Argosy Pictures, the film runs eighty-six minutes and was released in April 1950. On IMDb it holds a rating of 7.1 from roughly 6,200 votes, while on TMDB it stands at 6.7 from about 165 votes. A critics' rating of 8.9 from eight reviews places it noticeably above both audience scores.