Red River (1948 film)

Red River is a 1948 Western film directed and produced by Howard Hawks and starring John Wayne and Montgomery Clift, giving a fictional account of the first cattle drive from Texas to Kansas along the Chisholm Trail. The dramatic tension stems from a growing feud over the management of the drive, between the Texas rancher who initiated it Wayne and his adopted adult son Clift.

Thomas Dunson John Wayne is a stubborn man who wants nothing more than to start up a successful cattle ranch in Texas. Shortly after he begins his journey to Texas with his trail hand Nadine Groot Walter Brennan, Dunson learns that his love interest Coleen Gray, whom he had told to stay behind with the wagon train with the understanding that he would send for her later, was killed in an Indian attack. Despite this tragedy, Dunson and Groot press on. That night, Dunson and Groot, keeping watch, hear a group of Indians planning to attack them. They kill the Indians, and on the wrist of one, Dunson finds a bracelet he had been left by his late mother. One day before, he had presented it to his young love as he left the wagon train. The bracelet reappears significantly later in the film.The next day, an orphaned boy named Matthew Garth played as a boy by Mickey Kuhn and as an adult by Montgomery Clift wanders into Dunson and Groots camp, traumatized and babbling incoherently He had been part of the wagon train Dunson had left, and had came back from finding a strayed cow to see the ruins of the train. He is the sole survivor of the wagon train. Dunson adopts him and ties the boys cow to his wagon, alongside a bull Dunson already owned. ........

Source: Wikipedia