Thomas Dunson: The Rancher at the Heart of Red River

Who Is Thomas Dunson?

Thomas Dunson is the Texas rancher at the center of the 1948 film Red River, played by John Wayne. A plot summary on Filmsite calls him a hard, ruthless, determined man and the film's commanding father figure. The character comes from a story by Borden Chase, titled Blazing Guns on the Chisholm Trail and serialized in the Saturday Evening Post in 1946 and 1947.

Dunson is fiction, though the cattle-drive setting is real history. The film became a standard reference for how audiences picture the trail drives that moved Texas cattle to market.

How Dunson Starts His Herd

In 1851 Dunson leaves a wagon train to start his own herd in Texas. He heads south with his friend Groot Nadine, a bull and a few cows. He leaves his fiancee, Fen, behind, and she is later killed in a Comanche attack. The sole survivor of that massacre is an orphan, Matt, who becomes Dunson's foster son.

They settle on land near the Rio Grande, where Dunson confronts a Mexican landowner, Don Diego, and claims the ground. The film treats the claim as a plain fact of the frontier, a land seizure told from the winner's side.

The Drive on the Chisholm Trail

Years after the settlement the herd has grown, and Dunson takes it north to market. The seed notes for this entry describe the herd as roughly 10,000 head, and the film's drive is among the best-known in the movies. The cattle reach market on the new Chisholm Trail, the route that gives Chase's original story its title.

Real Texas drives after the Civil War did go north to railheads in Kansas and Missouri, and the film dramatizes that practice, with Dunson's own plan pointed toward Missouri. The drive is also where the film places most of its human drama, since a herd that size needs a crew that follows orders for weeks on end, and the story asks what happens when the crew stops.

Dunson and Matt Garth

The central conflict is between Dunson and Matt, now played by Montgomery Clift, in his first film. Dunson's rigid command on the trail provokes rebellion, and the rivalry builds to a final brawl that is stopped when Tess, played by Joanne Dru, breaks up the fight with a gun.

The film's reference entry notes that the ending is more upbeat than Chase's novel.

Production and Reception

Red River was Howard Hawks's first western and the first of five films Wayne made for him. Gary Cooper was reportedly considered for Dunson but declined. The picture cost more than $3 million, went over budget and became one of the year's top-grossing films.

It earned two Academy Award nominations, for Chase's story and for Christian Nyby's film editing, and many critics rank it among the ten best westerns ever made. The Turner Classic Movies feature, an article on the film, is a good further read.

Learn More About Trail Drives

To see the real work behind the movie, visit the ranching section of farm.FM. A farm.FM story that pairs well is a story about the Chisholm Trail.