Returning home from the War of 1812, John Breen, a Kentucky militiaman, falls in love with French exile Fleurette de Marchand.

Throughout the film, Breen's soldiers sing: When the song is first heard, there are eight hundred miles (1,287.5 km) to go (the tune is "She'll Be Coming 'Round the Mountain").

Congress authorized the sale of four townships in the Alabama Territory in March 1817 at two dollars per acre, and Marengo County was created on February 7, 1818 from lands that had been taken from the Choctaw Nation, under the Treaty of Fort St. Stephens.

[5] Re-broadcast by 'Arte 1' in February 2017, the film credits celebrated composer Georges Antheil (1900-1959) with the music (background score including, among things, stirring "variations" on the Marseillaise).

[7][8] The Fighting Kentuckian was one of only four films in which John Wayne wore a buckskin suit with a coonskin cap, the others being the 1930 widescreen epic The Big Trail (in the Grand Canyon sequence shot on location), Allegheny Uprising (1939) and as Davy Crockett in the concluding battle footage in The Alamo (1960).