The Covered Wagon

The Covered Wagon is a 1923 American silent Western film released by Paramount Pictures. The film was directed by James Cruze based on a novel by Emerson Hough about a group of pioneers traveling through the old West from Kansas to Oregon. J. Warren Kerrigan starred as Will Banion and Lois Wilson as Molly Wingate. On their quest they experience desert heat, mountain snow, hunger, and Indian attack.

In his 1983 book Classics of the Silent Cinema, radio and TV host Joe Franklin claimed this film was the first American epic not directed by Griffith.In the 1980 documentary Hollywood A Celebration of American Silent Cinema, Jesse L. Laskey Jr. maintained that the goal of director James Cruze was ... to elevate the Western, which had always been sort of a potboiler kind of film, to the status of an epic. ........

Source: Wikipedia