In June 1880, stage driver Buck prepares a stagecoach from Tonto, Arizona Territory, to Lordsburg, New Mexico.

Among the passengers are Dallas, a prostitute driven out of town by the "Law and Order League"; the alcoholic doctor Josiah Boone; snobbish belle Lucy Mallory, who is travelling to join her cavalry officer husband; and diminutive whiskey salesman Samuel Peacock.

Hatfield, a chivalrous gambler and former Confederate Army officer, offers Mallory his protection and climbs aboard.

Ringo escorts Dallas to her destination in a seedy part of town and finally learns who she is, but he reiterates his desire to marry her.

Luke Plummer, who is playing poker in one of the saloons, hears of Ringo's arrival and summons his brothers to join him in the showdown.

Uncredited: The screenplay is an adaptation by Dudley Nichols of "The Stage to Lordsburg," a short story by Ernest Haycox.

[5] John Ford admitted that he took inspiration from a 1907 painting by Frederic Remington named Downing the Nigh Leader for the chase scene.

Ford withdrew the film from Selznick's company and approached independent producer Walter Wanger about the project.

[9] Wanger said he would not risk his money unless Ford replaced John Wayne with Gary Cooper and brought in Marlene Dietrich to play Dallas.

Nonetheless, director John Ford was satisfied with the crew's location work, which took place near Goulding's Trading Post on the Utah border, about 25 miles from Kayenta.

Anatopic incongruencies of landscape and vegetation are thus evident throughout the film, up to the closing scene of Ringo and Dallas departing Lordsburg, in the Chihuahuan Desert of southwestern New Mexico, by way of the unmistakable topography of Monument Valley's Colorado Plateau location.

[17][18] Orson Welles argued that it was a perfect textbook of filmmaking and claimed to have watched it more than 40 times in preparation for the making of Citizen Kane.

Robert B. Pippin has observed that both the collection of characters and their journey "are archetypal rather than merely individual" and that the film is a "mythic representation of the American aspiration toward a form of politically meaningful equality.

"[22] The film was originally released through United Artists, but under the terms of its seven-year-rights rule, the company surrendered distribution rights to producer Walter Wanger in 1946.

The film's copyright (originally by Walter Wanger Productions) was renewed by 20th Century Fox, which produced a later 1966 remake of Stagecoach.

The copyright has since been reassigned to Wanger Productions through the late producer's family under the Caidin Trust/Caidin Film Company, the ancillary rights holder.

[31] UCLA fully restored the film in 1996 from surviving elements and premiered it on cable's American Movie Classics network.

The theme of the movie has been reproduced as a Lone Ranger radio episode "The Last Coach West", which played August 22, 1945.

The plot of the radio play closely paralleled that of the movie in spite of the character changes, with exception of the Lone Ranger and Tonto heroically saving the stagecoach occupants from Geronimo's warriors.