“The Trilogy begins with a highly ambiguous version of Custer's Last Stand, in which Ford invites us to join the men and women of the 7th Cavalry, to share their time and place in history, to dance with them and die with them. The ending of Fort Apache, in which Ford seemingly endorses a ‘cover-up' of Custer's stupidity and villainy, foreshadows the famous line in The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance: ‘When the legend becomes a fact, print the legend.' Ford seems to mean it. ‘We've had a lot of people who were supposed to be great heroes,' he told Peter Bogdanovich, ‘and you know damn well they weren't. But it's good for the country to have heroes to look up to.' And yet (as Bogdanovich first pointed out), in both Fort Apache and Liberty Valance Ford himself ‘prints' the truth, not the legend.” --Michael Goodwin