The celebrated land rush sequence took a week to film, using 5,000 extras, 28 cameramen, six still photographers, and 27 camera assistants. The scene is so iconic that, three decades later, when MGM remade the film, the camera angles for the land rush sequence remained almost identical to the original.
The first Western to win a Best Picture Oscar. It would be another 59 years before a Western would win the Academy Award for Best Picture again when Dances with Wolves (1990) took the main prize.
One of the extras was Nino Cochise, the actual grandson of the great Chiricahua chief Cochise. He and his good friend Apache Bill Russell were in this movie as well as several others.
Yancey Cravat, the character played by Richard Dix, was based on real-life lawyer and gunfighter Temple Houston - the son of Sam Houston, whom Dix played in Man of Conquest (1939) and upon whom the 1960s western TV series Temple Houston (1963) was based.
The first film to be nominated for every major Academy Award. There were only eight categories in 1930-31, and with seven nominations (the most any film had garnered up until that time), Cimarron (1931) just missed being nominated in every category. As such, it was also the first film that stood a chance of sweeping all five major categories: Best Picture, Best Actor, Best Actress, Best Director and Best Screenplay -- a feat that would be accomplished just three years later with It Happened One Night (1934).