Plot
A young woman, Cresta Lee (Bergen), and young U.S. private Honus Gent (Strauss) are joined together by fate when they are the only two survivors after a cavalry group is massacred by the Cheyenne. Gent is much devoted to his country and duty; Lee, who has lived with the Cheyenne for two years, declares that in this conflict she sympathizes more with them. The two must now try to make it to Fort Reunion, the army base camp, where Cresta's fiance, an army officer, waits for her. As they travel through the desert with very low supplies, hiding from the Indians, they are spotted by a different tribe of Indians than the Cheyenne. Under pressure from Cresta, Honus fights with the tribe's chief and, by fluke, ends up stabbing him in the stomach. He finds himself unable to kill the chief, even as the latter's own men stab him for his defeat, and leave the couple alone.
Eventually, after being shot at by a white man who supplied guns to the Indians, Honus finds himself alone in a cave where Cresta leaves him to get help. She arrives at Fort Reunion, only to discover the that her fiance's cavalry plans to attack the peaceful Indian village of the Cheyenne the day after. She runs away on a horse and reaches the village in time to warn Spotted Wolf, the Cheyenne chief. The latter refuses to indulge in warfare and prepares to extend a hand of friendship to the American soldiers using the US Flag. The army men however, do not refuse the orders of their Commanding Officer to open fire at the village. What follows is a massacre of Indians, so violent and brutal that it came to be known as the most shameful day in the Indian Wars of the American West. The movie gets extremely graphic here and shows with abandon the ruthlessness of the 700 army men as they wipe out 500 Indians, most of them women and children.
Read more about this topic: Soldier Blue
Famous quotes containing the word plot:
“The plot! The plot! What kind of plot could a poet possibly provide that is not surpassed by the thinking, feeling reader? Form alone is divine.”
—Franz Grillparzer (1791–1872)
“There comes a time in every man’s education when he arrives at the conviction that envy is ignorance; that imitation is suicide; that he must take himself for better for worse as his portion; that though the wide universe is full of good, no kernel of nourishing corn can come to him but through his toil bestowed on that plot of ground which is given him to till.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“After I discovered the real life of mothers bore little resemblance to the plot outlined in most of the books and articles I’d read, I started relying on the expert advice of other mothers—especially those with sons a few years older than mine. This great body of knowledge is essentially an oral history, because anyone engaged in motherhood on a daily basis has no time to write an advice book about it.”
—Mary Kay Blakely (20th century)