It was Ford's first major film, in part because the hastily planned production went over budget, as Fox was making a hurried response to the success of another studio's western.
Davy escapes but witnesses his father's capture and subsequent murder by a two-fingered white man dressed as a Cheyenne.
By wintertime, a train passing through the Union Pacific railway is attacked by the Cheyenne natives, led by the same two-fingered renegade.
Bauman, the richest landowner in the town of Cheyenne, learns that Marsh wants a shorter pass along the Smoky River.
Cold and exhausted, the railroad workers hear about Marsh's new plan, and Miriam encourages them to finish the project.
The same night, while Jesson is charting the railway map, Marsh brings Ruby to his cabin lodge, and the two kiss.
Continuing his father's dream, Davy has charted a shorter railroad pass through the Black Hills, and brings Jesson along.
He boards several men and women, including Miriam, onto a train to fight the Cheyenne, while he has the Pawnee serve as the cavalry.
[4] There is a note in the title before this scene that the two original locomotives from the 1869 event are used in the film, although this is false - both engines (Union Pacific No.
[5] In choosing the film, the Registry said that The Iron Horse "introduced to American and world audiences a reverential, elegiac mythology that has influenced many subsequent Westerns.
A 2011 release of The Iron Horse on DVD in the UK included both the US and International/UK versions of the picture, and a half-hour video-essay about the film by author and critic Tag Gallagher.
The international version includes some variant shots and uses different names for some supporting characters; it also carries a dedication to the British railway engineer George Stephenson.
Starting in the early 1920s the publishing house Grosset and Dunlap crafted a deal with the prominent Hollywood studios to issue novelizations of their major, original releases and among those was The Iron Horse (1924, 329pp).
The author was Edwin C. Hill, then a journalist, who would become a prominent radio broadcaster, best remembered for a show called The Human Side of the News.