"(Ford's) personal favorite among all his Westerns...shot on a minimal budget far from civilization and producers...Wagon Master details a series of episodes, alternately epic and picaresque, in the Westward trek of a Mormon wagon train (led by Ward Bond and Ben Johnson). Lindsay Anderson, who described it as an 'avant-garde Western', remarked of the film: 'Ford often abandons his narrative completely, to dwell on the wide and airy vistas, on riders and wagons overcoming the most formidable natural obstacles, on bowed and weary figures stumbling persistently through the dust'....Symbolically, the Mormons represent all the American pioneers, and it is a typical Ford irony to express American ideals through a group of pariahs" (McBride and Wilmington, John Ford). "This deceptively unpretentious film is in many ways the high point of Ford's Westerns. Ford's optimism and pessimism are in perfect balance. The darker side of his vision gives an emotional depth lacking in earlier films...but the optimism prevails and renders this film...only gentle in its nostalgia, not bitter like the later films" (J. A. Place, The Western Films of John Ford).