Fury at Furnace Creek

In Arizona in 1880 a general sends an order telling the captain escorting a wagon train through Apache territory to abandon the escort and hurry to another town. The train is attacked, nobody survives at the poorly manned fort, and the general is court martialled for treason. The outcome the film relates is that the treaty is broken and the territory passes to white settlers with the help of the cavalry. The account gives its events from inside the western mould of its period; the view that makes the native people the enemy and settlement a natural advance is the film’s view, not today’s. The question of who the order came from forms the real knot of the story. Victor Mature and Coleen Gray appear in H. Bruce Humberstone’s eighty eight minute American film, completed in 1948.