Red River is a 1948 Western film directed and produced by Howard Hawks and starring John Wayne and Montgomery Clift, giving a fictional account of the first cattle drive from Texas to Kansas along the Chisholm Trail. The dramatic tension stems from a growing feud over the management of the drive, between the Texas rancher who initiated it (Wayne) and his adopted adult son (Clift). The film's supporting cast features Walter Brennan, Joanne Dru, Coleen Gray, Harry Carey, John Ireland, Hank Worden, Noah Beery, Jr., Harry Carey, Jr. and Paul Fix. Borden Chase and Charles Schnee wrote the screenplay, based on Chase's original story (which was first serialized in The Saturday Evening Post in 1946 as "Blazing Guns on the Chisholm Trail").
Thomas Dunson (John Wayne) is a stubborn man who wants nothing more than to start up a successful cattle ranch in Texas. Shortly after he begins his journey to Texas with his trail hand, Nadine Groot (Walter Brennan), Dunson learns that his love interest (Coleen Gray), whom he had told to stay behind with the wagon train with the understanding that he would send for her later, was killed in an Indian attack. Despite this tragedy, Dunson and Groot press on. That night, Dunson and Groot, keeping watch, hear a group of Indians planning to attack them. They kill the Indians, and on the wrist of one, Dunson finds a bracelet he had been left by his late mother. One day before, he had presented it to his young love as he left the wagon train. The bracelet reappears significantly later in the film.
The next day, an orphaned boy named Matthew Garth (played as a boy by Mickey Kuhn and as an adult by Montgomery Clift) who had been part of the wagon train Dunson had left, and who came back from finding a strayed cow to see the ruins of the train wanders into Dunson and Groot's camp, traumatized and babbling incoherently. He was the sole survivor of the wagon train. Dunson adopts him and ties the boy's cow to his wagon, alongside a bull Dunson already owned.