In the mid-19th century, Senator William J. Tadlock leads a group of settlers overland in a quest to start a new settlement in the Western US. Tadlock is a highly principled and demanding taskmaster who is as hard on himself as he is on those who have joined his wagon train. He clashes with one of the new settlers, Lije Evans, who doesn't quite appreciate Tadlock's ways. Along the way, the families must face death and heartbreak and a sampling of frontier justice when one of them accidentally kills a young Indian boy.
The Way West is a 1967 American Western film directed by Andrew V. McLaglen and starring Kirk Douglas, Robert Mitchum, and Richard Widmark. The supporting cast features Lola Albright, Jack Elam, Sally Field, Katherine Justice, and Stubby Kaye. Ostensibly based on the 1949 Pulitzer Prize-winning novel of the same name by A. B. Guthrie Jr. (1901-1991), the film is a drama about a band of settlers traveling by covered wagon train across the American frontier of the West to the Oregon Country on the Oregon Trail in 1843. It includes on-location cinematography by William H. Clothier. Sam Elliott made his feature film debut as an uncredited Missouri townsman.
