John Ford, the director of Stagecoach (1939), Fort Apache (1948) and The Searchers (1956), wanted to try a different approach to the Western, the genre for which he still stands today as poet laureate. Let's face it, we've treated them very badly-it's a blot on our shield we've cheated and robbed, killed, murdered, massacred and everything else, but they kill one white man and, God, out come the troops." There are two sides to every story, but I wanted to show their point of view for a change. "I've killed more Indians than Custer, Beecher and Chivington put together, and people in Europe always want to know about the Indians. As peace is restored, Archer and Deborah decide to remain with the Indians who have survived the historic ordeal. Red Shirt is killed, and Little Wolf, having broken his vow never to kill another Cheyenne, goes into self-imposed exile. Once there, Red Shirt and Chief Little Wolf face each other with pistols to settle their dispute over the latter's wife. As they are trapped by troops prepared to massacre them, Archer arrives with the Secretary, who negotiates a treaty which permits the Cheyennes to return to their homeland. Before he can do so, the Indians revolt, kill Wessels, and flee into the snow. Upon learning that Wessels intends to march the Indians back to Oklahoma, Captain Archer goes to Washington to seek the help of the Secretary of the Interior. With the coming of winter, the Cheyennes split into two groups: half continue their journey half surrender to the brutal Captain Wessels at Fort Robinson. Earp, however, deliberately leads his drunken posse in the wrong direction and remains on the trail until public panic subsides. When the newspapers play up the incidents by depicting the Cheyennes as "marauding savages," Wyatt Earp and Doc Holliday are pressured into organizing a war party. But a young hotheaded Cheyenne brave named Red Shirt precipitates several skirmishes in which U. And pursuing them is a cavalry troop headed by Captain Thomas Archer, Deborah's betrothed, who hopes to resolve the dilemma without bloodshed. Accompanying them is Deborah Wright, a Quaker schoolteacher sympathetic to their plight. Desperate, the survivors decide to make a 1,500-mile trek to their former Yellowstone hunting grounds. After a year of waiting for Federal aid that never arrives, the original band of 1,000 has been reduced by disease and starvation to a mere 286. In the 1870's, the Cheyenne Indians are taken from their Wyoming homelands and moved to a barren Oklahoma reservation.
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