Featuring love triangles and an Indian natives uprising, the film was adapted from the 1945 novelette in the Saturday Evening Post magazine of Canyon Passage by Ernest Haycox, Hoagy Carmichael, (music) and Jack Brooks (lyrics) were nominated for Academy Award for Best Original Song ("Oscar") for the popular tune of "Ole Buttermilk Sky" sung by country-western music singer Carmichael of the late 1940s and 1950s.

In 1856, ambitious freight company / pack mule line and store owner Logan Stuart (Dana Andrews) agrees to escort Lucy Overmire (Susan Hayward) from the bustling seaport town of Portland home to the (real life) rough-hewn mining settlement of rustic log buildings of Jacksonville, (Jackson County), in the old Oregon Territory, along with his latest shipment of goods.

The night before they depart, however, Logan has to defend himself from a sneak attack while he was sleeping in his hotel room; though it was too dark to be sure, later throwing the burglar out the broken window, but he believes his assailant is Honey Bragg (Ward Bond).

What Logan unfortunately does not know is that friend George has been stealing gold dust from pouches left in his safekeeping by the miners to pay off some of his cards game gambling losses.

However, when one of the settlers rides in with a warning that the local Indian tribes are on the warpath after Bragg had attacked and killed one of their young attractive women that he saw swimming nude in a nearby stream, Logan then helps George escape in the confusion.

The arrival of Walter Wanger and the film's stars and other actors, featured a Native American ceremony and a parade through Portland's downtown streets led by the then 25th Governor of Oregon, Earl W.

[6] Richard Brody, of The New Yorker magazine, would champion the film as well, describing it as "a complex array of subplots and side characters that offers a quasi-sociological view of frontier life.

The relentless drinking, gambling, gunplay, and battles with Native Americans blend with struggles for love and money to evoke a raw and violent culture that plays, in the year after the Second World War, had ended, as utterly contemporary; avoiding history and politics, Tourneur serves up, in a dreamlike Technicolor glow, a pastoral film noir.

"[7] Elliott Stein of The Village Voice would also call it in 2009, a "great, dazzling, underrated and unconventional Western...memorable largely for the director’s concentration on the massive beauty of the American landscape.