The film was directed by James Cruze based on a 1922 novel of the same name by Emerson Hough about a group of pioneers traveling through the old West from Kansas to Oregon.

He gets involved with Will Banion in a power struggle for the leadership of the wagon train, and also for the favors of the young Molly Wingate.

[7] In his 1983 book Classics of the Silent Cinema, radio and TV host Joe Franklin claimed this film was "the first American epic not directed by Griffith".

[5] In the 1980 documentary Hollywood: A Celebration of American Silent Cinema, Jesse L. Lasky Jr. maintained that the goal of director James Cruze was " ... to elevate the Western, which had always been sort of a potboiler kind of film, to the status of an epic".

The producers offered the owners $2 a day (equal to $35.77 today) and feed for their stock if they would bring the wagons for the movie.

Most of the extras seen on film are the families who owned the covered wagons and were perfectly at home driving them and living out of them during the production.

This was also President Warren G. Harding's favorite film as he showed it at a special screening at the White House during the summer of 1923.