Whether or not one likes westerns, it is difficult not to respond to the sense of the monumental here, in people and landscape. But one can also feel Ford's tenderness towards his actors, especially Ward Bond (Ford's alter-ego?). Wagon Master has no central John Wayne-type hero on which to hitch a plot. As McBride and Wilmington write in John Ford, it is "less a drama than a lyric poem....(Ford's) personal favorite among all his westerns...Wagon Master details a series of episodes, alternately epic and picaresque, in the westward trek of a Mormon wagon train. 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 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."