Production
Ford formulated the story, and then Patrick Ford (John Ford's son) and Frank S. Nugent wrote the script. Ford and Merian C. Cooper (with Ford and Cooper's Argosy Pictures as production company) were co-executive producers, with Lowell J. Farrell as associate producer. Music was done by Richard Hageman, and the picture was distributed by RKO Pictures.
Ford had been shooting the film She Wore a Yellow Ribbon the year before (1948) in Monument Valley, near the town of Mexican Hat, Utah, close to the locations where he had also filmed Stagecoach (1939), My Darling Clementine (1946), and Fort Apache (1948). He wanted a different look for his next film and drove to Moab. Wagon Master was shot in less than a month, in 1949, for less than a million dollars. Filmed in black and white (there is a later computer-colorized version), on location, mainly north-east of the town of Moab, Utah in Professor Valley (with additional shooting at Spanish Valley south-west of Moab, and a few stage shots were done at Monument Valley). It was released on April 19, 1950.
The television series Wagon Train (1957–1965), starring first Ward Bond and then John McIntire, was inspired by the film (Ford directed one episode, but was otherwise not involved with it).
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“An art whose limits depend on a moving image, mass audience, and industrial production is bound to differ from an art whose limits depend on language, a limited audience, and individual creation. In short, the filmed novel, in spite of certain resemblances, will inevitably become a different artistic entity from the novel on which it is based.”
—George Bluestone, U.S. educator, critic. “The Limits of the Novel and the Limits of the Film,” Novels Into Film, Johns Hopkins Press (1957)