Part 1 – The people who have been with Tom the longest and who are the most loyal to him are Groot and Matt, but after Tom kills the three cowboys, both of them have made it clear they think Tom was in the wrong even though they helped him at the time. I don’t think Groot tossed Tom the rifle so he would start shooting, I think he did so because he saw that Tom was unarmed and wanted him to have a chance to defend himself if any of the three cowboys tried to draw on him. But Tom started the shooting as soon as he caught the rifle. The only justification for what Tom did might have been if he were defending himself if one of the men had in fact tried to draw on him. As I have already said when I talked about Bob Canale, a man in the West had the legal right to defend himself if another man drew on him first. If one man reached for his gun and the man he was drawing on was quicker and killed him, it was considered to be a case of self-defense and no criminal charges would be pressed. It was always better if there were witnesses to this, but if only two men were involved the law usually gave the benefit of the doubt to the survivor. In this case, we have the best witness of all, a movie camera! We can actually replay the gunfight in slow motion in order to determine who started it.

Part 2 – Dunson killed the three men rather than let them quit, but that very night three more men have quit and run away. This is a serious matter. This cattle drive is already undermanned. There are only thirty cowboys trying to control 10,000 head of cattle. The usual rule was that it took three to four cowboys to drive every 1000 head of cattle. Dunson had already lost Dan Lattimore and Bob Canale because of the stampede and now he has killed three men. Now he has lost three more. In addition to that he sends Cherry and another man after the three cowboys who ran away. That leaves him with about twenty cowboys for 10,000 head of cattle. The whole cattle drive is in danger of failing now, but Dunson’s answer is to drive the men who have stayed even harder as you will see in the next excerpt

Part 4 – This excerpt is where the entire film has been going since …well, since Tom and Matt first met. From the very beginning of their relationship Tom has completely dominated Matt, slapping him, taking is gun away, taking his cow away. But at the same time, Tom has also protected Matt and taught Matt…especially how to use a gun. So that when Matt finally tells Tom, “No, you aren’t going to hang them” and Tom asks who will stop him, Matt’s answer “I will” isn’t an empty threat. After Matt came home, Groot laughed when he called “draw!” because he saw that Matt had at last become faster with a gun than Tom. We saw that he shot Bob Canale before Dunson could even draw his gun. But we should also recall that Dunson has killed many men. All we have seen Matt do is shoot tin cans and shoot Bob in the shoulder in order to save Bob’s life. Matt did not actually shoot any of the three cowboys who were killed in the shoot-out. Tom killed two of them and Cherry killed the other. Matt only drew his gun, but he never fired it.

Tom, who is both drunk and exhausted from lack of sleep, is still the same man he has always been. Tom never backs down from a fight and as he stands up it really looks like he is going to draw on Matt when…out of nowhere…Cherry, the third gunslinger, hoots Tom’s hand and wounds him just badly enough so that he can’t draw his gun. It is a perfect shot only a true master gunslinger could have made. Cherry is clearly such a master gunslinger. But, why would Cherry suddenly do this? Cherry, after all, is the one who captured the escaping men and brought them back (and even killed one of the men who resisted). Why would Cherry suddenly turn on Tom? Think about this before going on to the next part of the lecture.

Part 5
I believe that Cherry is not betraying Tom; he is protecting Matt. Cherry understands the relationship between Matt and Tom and he knows that Matt could never shoot Tom, but Cherry also knows that Tom is drunk and exhausted and half-crazy and he might just possibly shoot Matt. So, Cherry intervenes. That was enough for the rest of the men because they are all fed up with Tom’s bullying and senseless violence.

Even before Matt and Cherry stood up to Dunson the two men who ran away have had their say. Dunson has called them both thieves, but Laredo answered that “the law might see it differently”. He means that in a court of law a judge might decide that they had a right to quit and leave because Dunson violated the terms of the contract. But Dunson interrupts him and says, ‘I’m the law!” Of course, he isn’t. America is a country founded on the notion that “we are a nation of laws, not of men” and that “no man is above the law”. The idea is that we have no king or dictator who can decide what “the law” is. We decide what the law is by electing representatives to government who make our laws. If we don’t like those laws, we vote for different representatives. When Dunson says, “I am the law”, it goes against the most basic idea of what it is to be an American, in other words to live in a society free of kings or dictators. But, why should these words surprise us? This man has killed men for simply trying to quit their jobs.

Part 6 – Even though they have left Dunson far behind and all alone with no weapons, he still pursues the cattle drive like some evil spirit. The men have nightmares about him. Groot and Matt both believe Dunson will really pursue them as soon as he can. But soon they have a more immediate problem to deal with.

They are on what would eventually be known as the “Chisholm Trail” headed towards Kansas instead of Missouri because they are trying to avoid the Missouri border gangs. But the Chisholm trail takes them directly through the very same Oklahoma Indian territory that we saw in Cimarron. In that film the year was 1889 and the United States was taking the last of this territory from the remaining Indians who lived there. But in 1866 when Red River is set, this territory was still largely controlled by the powerful Comanche Indians. The Comanche were so powerful and ferocious that they had actually chased the Apache away from this territory.

Other tribes, such as the Apache, feared them so much they simply fled their traditional hunting grounds rather than fight them. This is why when Quo identifies the arrow as Comanche. Buster gives a low whistle and says, “That’s bad”. Later, the Comanche would allow cattle drives through their territory by charging a fee per head, but that is far in the future.

But it isn’t the herd the Comanche are attacking in this scene; it is the wagon train Buster found. This is the same tribe that attacked Tom and Groot’s wagon train fifteen years earlier.

That was the attack that killed Tom’s fiancée. It was also the attack that killed Matt’s real parents. Matt isn’t going to allow another massacre like that to occur.

In our next lesson we will find out what happens to the Wagon train and the cowboys who ride to their rescue.