Walk the Proud Land is a 1956 American CinemaScope Technicolor Western film directed by Jesse Hibbs and starring Audie Murphy and future Academy Award winner Anne Bancroft.

Filmed at Old Tucson Studios,[2] it recounts the first successful introduction of limited self-government by John Clum (1851–1932), Indian agent for the San Carlos Apache Indian Reservation in the Arizona Territory and is based on the 1936 biography Apache Agent by his son Woodworth Clum (1878-1946).

Clum gives Eskiminzin authority to dispense justice among his people as he sees fit, and orders Larsen and his troops, who have even less regard for the Apache than Safford and Wade do, to leave.

An Indian widow given to him as a housekeeper, Tianay, falls in love with Clum; he tells her that he is engaged, and his culture does not permit a man to have two "wives" at the same time.

Angered that no merchant will sell him beef or provisions, Clum goes to Safford and demands that Wade return the guns confiscated from the Apache.

Mary had envisioned a fancy wedding, but Clum's insistence of treating the Apache as fellow human beings has rubbed nearly everyone in town the wrong way; he tells her they are lucky they are able to get married at all.

Clum tells Geronimo that he and his people are welcome to live at San Carlos if they agree to certain rules, including being unarmed while on the premises.

The epilogue states Clum never stopped fighting for the welfare of "his Indians", and the government turned administration of San Carlos over to the Apache in 1955.

[3][4] The role of Mary Dennison, Clum's fiancée, was originally offered to Piper Laurie, but she turned it down so she could study at the Actors Studio in New York.

The film was not a success at the box office, something attributed to the fact that Murphy played a pacifist rather than an action hero.

This ended Murphy's plans to make his dream project, a biopic of painter Charles Marion Russell.