This movie begins with two men by the names of "Thomas O'Rourke" (Alan Ladd) and his Cree half-brother "Cajou" (Jay Silverheels) trapping along the banks of the Saskatchewan River in Canada. As they begin to head back home they come across a couple of wagons that had recently been attacked by hostile Indians and discover one female survivor named "Grace Markey" (Shelley Winters) within the ruins. They then decide to take her to a nearby fort. However, she has other plans and tries to steal one of the horses when they aren't paying attention. Unfortunately, as she is making her escape she comes upon a small band of Sioux Indians and has to retreat back to where she started before being rescued again by Thomas and Cajou. Once they get to the fort it is soon disclosed that Thomas is a Royal Canadian Mountie and that the Sioux have just won a decisive engagement with the U.S. 7th Cavalry at the Battle of the Little Big Horn and have advanced north into Canada hoping to enlist the local Cree Indian tribe as allies. Also of interest is the fact that a U.S. Marshall by the name of "Carl Smith" (Hugh O'Brien) has arrived and has an arrest warrant on Grace for the murder of a man in Montana. If that wasn't bad enough, the new Mountie commanding officer named "Inspector Benton" (Robert Douglas) has recently made one bad decision after another which has seriously damaged the peaceful relations the Mounties had with the Cree and given them even more reason into considering an alliance with the Sioux. Now rather than reveal any more I will just say that this started out as a decent Western movie which subsequently developed a severe case of historical inaccuracy the further on it went. For starters, although Chief Crazy Horse was shown in the film trying to recruit the local Cree Indians, the fact is that after the Little Big Horn he never ventured that far north. Neither was Chief Sitting Bull an adversary of the Canadians. As a matter of fact, the Canadian government and Chief Sitting Bull had a healthy respect for one another and he was allowed to stay there in peace. It was only after the decline of the buffalo in the area that he and some fellow Sioux agreed to return to the United States and settle down in a reservation. But historical flaws aside, the film itself was pretty standard for a Western and I have rated it accordingly. Average.
Review of Saskatchewan
