Cheyenne Autumn is a 1964 American epic Western film starring Richard Widmark, Carroll Baker, James Stewart, and Edward G. Robinson.

With a budget of more than $4 million, the film was relatively unsuccessful at the box office and failed to earn a profit for Warner Bros.[2] In 1878, the surviving Cheyenne natives have migrated 1,500 miles (2,414 km) from their Yellowstone homeland.

At her Oklahoma homestead, their plight is witnessed by Deborah Wright, a Quaker school teacher, who takes the Cheyenne children as her students.

Their trek has been accompanied by a United States Army cavalry troop headed by Captain Thomas Archer, who is engaged to Deborah.

Nearby, the Cheyenne natives and Archer's troops are waiting for a congressional committee sent by the Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA), but are informed by letter that their trip has delayed and are staying at Fort Reno.

At a nearby parlor, lawmen Wyatt Earp and Doc Holliday are unconcerned while the local townspeople organize a war campaign to combat the Cheyenne.

Elements of Fast's novel remain in the finished film, namely the character of Captain Archer (called Murray in the book), the depiction of Secretary Carl Schurz and the Dodge City, Kansas scenes.

[3] Reluctantly abandoning the docudrama idea, Ford wanted Anthony Quinn and Richard Boone to play Dull Knife and Little Wolf as well-known actors with some Indian ancestry.

[7] Although the principal tribal leaders were played by Ricardo Montalbán and Gilbert Roland (as well as Dolores del Río and Sal Mineo in major roles), Ford again used numerous members of the Navajo tribe in this production.

[8] According to the TCM podcast The Plot Thickens, Ford twice delayed production of the film: the first came when Ricardo Montalbán received a long-distance phone call that his eldest son had injured his neck while filling in for his youngest on his paper route.

Bosley Crowther for The New York Times praised the film highly, calling it "a beautiful and powerful motion picture that stunningly combines a profound and passionate story of mistreatment of American Indians with some of the most magnificent and energetic cavalry-and-Indian lore ever put upon the screen.

"[5] He was disappointed, however, that after the humorous (if "superfluous") Dodge City sequence, "the picture does not rise again to its early integrity and authenticity", and the climax is "neither effective and convincing drama nor is it faithful to the novel".

[5] Variety disagreed, however, calling it "a rambling, episodic account" in which "the original premise of the Mari Sandoz novel is lost sight of in a wholesale insertion of extraneous incidents which bear little or no relation to the subject.

"[9] The New Republic's Stanley Kauffmann wrote "the acting is bad, the dialogue trite and predictable, the pace funereal, the structure fragmented, the climaxes puny".