"My name's John Ford. I make Westerns." As his 1950 comment indicates - with excessive modesty - the filmmaker directed some fifty Westerns during a career that lasted more than half a century. Ford's films are in fact exceptionally varied, but he seems to have been most at ease when shooting in the great outdoors. From his first feature, Straight Shooting (1917), to Cheyenne Autumn (1964), it is especially in his Westerns - including such cinematic gems as Stagecoach, My Darling Clementine, Fort Apache, She Wore a Yellow Ribbon, Wagon Master, and The Searchers - that Ford created a unique personal vision of his country's past, both rooted in and reacting to the aspirations of Manifest Destiny, the supremely self-confident belief that continually propelled American society westward across the continent.
Ford's vision also flowed from a vibrant tradition in the visual arts, and this book is the first to examine his Westerns, as well as several historical films (including Drums Along the Mohawk, Young Mr. Lincoln, and The Horse Soldiers), in terms of the inspiration he drew from the paintings and other works of such artists as Frederic Remington, Charles M. Russell, and Charles C. Schreyvogel.

In addition, Ford was inspired by the primal beauty of the American landscape; so many of his films are set against the untamed wilderness of Arizona's Monument Valley and southeastern Utah that the area came to be known as "Ford country."