Yakima Canutt explained how the stunt was accomplished where, as an Apache warrior attacking the stagecoach, he is "shot", falls off his horse, and then gets dragged underneath the stagecoach: "You have to run the horses fast, so they'll run straight. If they run slow, they move around a lot. When you turn loose to go under the coach, you've got to bring your arms over your chest and stomach. You've got to hold your elbows close to your body, or that front axle will knock them off." After the stunt was completed, Canutt ran to director John Ford to make sure they got the stunt on film. Ford replied that even if they hadn't, "I'll never shoot that again."
One scene, which required the stagecoach full of passengers to be floated across a river, technicians deemed impossible to pull off. John Ford considered removing the scene from the script altogether. Yakima Canutt, however, suggested tying to the coach hollowed-out logs, which would increased buoyancy and thus offset the weight of the fully loaded coach. In addition, an underwater cable was used to help pull the stagecoach. Canutt's plan worked, and the scene was retained for the film.
The hat that John Wayne wears was his own. He would wear it in many westerns during the next two decades before retiring it after Howard Hawks' Rio Bravo (1959) because it was simply "falling apart." After that, the hat was displayed under glass in his home.
Orson Welles has put forth this film as a textbook example of filmmaking and said he had watched it more than 40 times in preparation for the making of Citizen Kane (1941).
Asked why, in the climactic chase scene, the Indians didn't simply shoot the horses to stop the stagecoach, director John Ford replied, "Because that would have been the end of the movie." In addition, Apaches would have stolen the stagecoach horses rather than killed them because, in their culture, horses were valuable in calculating a warrior's worth.
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