John Ford dealt with one of the long-lasting Indian tragedies in his "Cheyenne Autumn," the wasting away of a tribe in an uncongenial pen called a reservation and its efforts to take matters into its own hands…

Indians, to use a modern term, had become redundant; that was their true tragedy… They were unwanted in what the whites wanted to make of the West and so they were 'placed' and disposed of, thereby suffering the usual 'superfluous' maladies of physical and moral debilitation… Here they are portrayed as the victims of insensitive herding…

The Cheyennes—1,500 miles away in Oklahoma from their Yellowstone home—had seen their numbers depleted from one thousand to less than three hundred in the course of a disease-ridden year… With these sorts of statistics it was as much a matter of simple logic as an act of desperation when they upped and left one night, bound on foot for their old hunting grounds, probably knowing full well that the cavalry would make them hurry, as they did, all the way… An epic in real life. Would the master epic-maker match it? In purely visual terms the answer was 'yes'. Ford vivid1y depicted the starvation and disease plaguing the Cheyenne trek… But somehow Ford never wholly got to the heart of the matter although the intent was there and at times this is a most impressive and moving film…

Carroll Baker appears as a Quaker teacher who tries in vain to he1p the unfortunate migrants… Richard Widmark is the army captain who is as sympathetic as uniform allows, and Arthur Kennedy is razor-sharp in his impersonation of Doc Holliday, who, with Stewart's Earp, is drafted into leading a posse against the Indians… Stewart deliberately re-routes them and the Indians get away… Edward G. Robinson plays a humane and kindly Secretary of the Interior who helps bail out the unlucky Cheyenne.