[5][page needed] In St. Louis, Missouri, on Lutie Cameron's wedding day, she receives a telegram from her fiancé, cattle rancher Col. Brewton, telling her to board the train for New Mexico to marry him in the small town of Salt Fork.

The first person she meets in town is Brice Chamberlain, who warns her of likely unhappiness with Brewton, locally considered a tyrant.

He runs his cattle on government-owned land and opposes homesteaders because he believes the Great Plains do not get enough rain to sustain farming.

Fearful for his wheat crop, one man goes out of the house with his rifle, planning to scare off the cattle.

Chamberlain lobbies for a Federal District Court in Salt Fork, and he wins election as its judge.

Chamberlain tries to get her to fight for Brock's custody so they can run away together as a family, but Lutie does not love him enough to marry him.

Sara Beth breaks down and invites her mother back to the house, where she reconciles with Brewton.

He thought the producers had approved clothes for Katharine Hepburn that in design and quantity did not fit the frontier environment, but changes were restricted due to production deadlines.

There is no little irony that a story based in New Mexico exclaiming the Great Plains are cattle country was using a backdrop that later became part of the McKelvie National Forest.

[7][8] Although it received mostly tepid critical reviews, the movie was the most commercially successful of all the Hepburn-Tracy MGM films, making $3,150,000 in the US and Canada and $1,539,000 overseas.