"Daughter of the West" is an unusual film. It is mostly about Native Americans. It takes place mostly on an Indian reservation. And, it is a generally positive look at the efforts of an Indian nation to adapt to farming and land management using skills and knowledge of the white man. Many Western movies either have denigrated the Native Americans, or have focused on their plight in being forced onto reservations. So, this movie is a look at one reservation's efforts to become self-sufficient.
It takes place in the late 19th century. The hero, Navo White Eagle is played by Phillip Reed. He has just returned from Carlisle Indian School in Pennsylvania, where he studied basic agriculture, geology and other courses that could help his people. The heroine is Lolita Moreno, played by Martha Vickers. She grew up as an orphan in the Mission San Capistrano in California, and leaves there to become a school teacher at the Navajo reservation.
The plot involves some bad guys who try to swindle the Indians out of their valuable mineral rights. The opening credits are quite crude, but then the production value improves. This is a poverty row production, with little known actors. But they do well enough to keep one's interest. James Griffith is recognizable from a lot of Westerns where he played mostly bad guys. Vickers was a somewhat better actress who had some nice minor roles. She might have done more but she died of cancer at age 46. She is also known as the second wife of Mickey Rooney.
This movie most likely was filmed somewhere in California – the film credits don't say where. Had it been shot on the actual Navajo Reservation, it might have had some scenes that would be familiar to many movie buffs. The Navajo lands are the largest Indian Reservation in the U.S. Their 27,425 square miles spread across NE Arizona, SE Utah and NW New Mexico. Since 1939, movie buffs have become familiar with some of the landmarks of the Navajo territory. That's when John Ford filmed his classic Western, "Stagecoach" in Monument Valley. The valley is completely located within the Navajo lands in Arizona and Utah. Ford made many more Westerns there, and many other films have since been made with scenes of the famed buttes and spires that rise above the desert floor.
