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Cheyenne Autumn Trail

Name: Cheyenne Autumn Trail
Genre: Documentary
Released: 1964-01-01
Duration: 19 min

1964 · 0h 19m · Documentary

Watch it tonight if you're a John Ford completist or genuinely interested in Cheyenne history—this is a clever, purposeful companion piece that recontextualizes a flawed classic by centering actual Cheyenne voices. Skip it if you want straightforward entertainment; it's a specialized historical document, not a crowd-pleaser.

Plot

Structured as a complementary social and historical companion piece to John Ford's final western Cheyenne Autumn (1964), this documentary short intersperses clips from the big-screen epic with background information about the Northern Cheyenne Exodus of 1878–1879 and contrasts it with life on the Cheyenne reservation in 1964, as a tribal chief, a tribal beauty queen, and a tribal adolescent take a drive along the route of the 19th-century trek.

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