Two title cards introduce the story: “The blood of America is the blood of pioneers—the blood of lion-hearted men and women who carved a splendid civilization out of an uncharted wilderness. With dauntless courage, facing unknown perils, the men and women of the ’forties flung the boundaries of the nation westward, and still westward, beyond the Mississippi, beyond the prairies, beyond the Rockies,--until they bounded the United States of America with two Oceans.” After a title card introduces “Westport Landing—1848—since called Kansas City,” another cards reads: “In May of that year a great covered wagon caravan gathered there from every section of the Ohio and Mississippi valleys, eager to brave the two thousand miles of hardship that lay between Westport and Oregon.”
       The Stephen Foster song “Oh, Susanna” runs through the story, and was played by whoever musically accompanied the film in theaters.
       According to an article in the 31 Mar 1923 Exhibitors Trade Review, Paramount Pictures President Jesse L. Lasky got the idea to make The Covered Wagon from Will H. Hays, head of the Motion Picture Producers and Distributors of America (MPPDA). During an early 1922 conference in Hollywood, CA, Hays suggested that “it would be a splendid thing for the [movie] industry,” which had been having public relations problems because of scandals, if a studio made “a picture with a tremendous theme of Americanism.”
       The 28 Oct 1922 Exhibitors Trade Review announced that the cast had been chosen for The Covered Wagon, and that filming would take place in Utah and Nevada. A studio chart in the supplement of the 14 Oct 1922 Camera noted that production was set to begin in Baker, NV, with Vernon Keays assisting director James Cruze. The 14 Oct 1922 Motion Picture News announced: “Five hundred covered wagons are now being built and one hundred and fifty yoke-untamed steers being trained.” Additionally, the 23 Dec 1922 Moving Picture World reported that Paramount combed the country for personal “prairie schooners still in existence,” and procured nearly 200, along with their drivers, who were collectors or preservers of family heirlooms. The production planned to shoot mostly at the 200,000-acre Baker Ranch in Snake Valley, NV. The town of Westport, MO, was being built there. Among the thousands of participants, one thousand were Indians from the Shoshone, Sioux, Kaws, and Pawnee reservations. Another item in the 11 Nov 1922 Motion Picture News mentioned that T. J. McCoy of Wyoming, better known as Tim McCoy, was in charge of recruiting Indian actors, and that “a half dozen train loads of Bannock, Crow, Shoshone and Arapahoe Indians” had passed through Salt Lake City, UT, on their way to Milford, NV. Mammoth Lakes in Mono County, CA, near the state border, provided water for many of the river scenes. Location manager Walter Reed and production supervisor Tom White were busy building two Indian ferry landings and a reproduction of Fort Bridger, the real-life Jim Bridger’s famous trading post. The production also secured permission from the U.S. government to use a herd of 5,000 (other sources said 500) wild buffalo on Antelope Island, Great Salt Lake, UT, where the first scenes would be filmed. According to the 21 Oct 1922 Motion Picture News, the company left Hollywood for Baker the previous day and planned to be gone “a month or six weeks.”
       An item in the 21 Oct 1922 Camera mentioned that filming was being done near Milford, NV. Another studio chart in the 2 Dec 1922 Camera, along with an item in the 2 Dec 1922 Motion Picture News, reported that the production would return to Hollywood “this week” and finish at the studio. In a monthly “Letters from Location” column in the Apr 1923 Picture-Play, actress Lois Wilson wrote from what she called “the heart of Snake Valley” in Utah, eighty-five miles from the nearest railroad in a lake-side tent city they called “Camp Cruze.” She related that the cast and crew had already endured a snowstorm and a flood that threatened their encampment. She numbered the Indians in the cast at 500, and said they were from the Bannock, Arapaho, and Navajo tribes. None spoke English, so an interpreter passed along James Cruze’s instructions in sign language. Dailies had to be rushed to Hollywood and returned in time for the cast and crew to watch them in the mess tent in order to “see our work and make necessary retakes.” Lois Wilson shared a tent with her eighteen-year-old sister, Constance Wilson, who made her screen debut as an uncredited extra. Jesse Lasky was apparently so impressed with the young actress that he starred her in Fair Week (1924, see entry), but it was her only film.
       Paramount Pictures ran a full-page advertisement in several trade magazines, including the 25 Nov 1922 Camera, proclaiming ”The Covered Wagon is on the way!” Calling the production “the most gigantic motion picture undertaking ever attempted,” the advertisement printed a letter from one Lou Marcus, who had spent two days on location: “I saw things which I scarcely believed possible to be set up in a desert: a wagon train two miles long; a thousand people, including two hundred and fifty Indians; a camp of over two hundred tents; a complete electric lighting system; a commissary department as efficient as a hotel…. There will never be another picture like this. No one else would go to the expense of $12,000 a day for two or three months to make it. The company is ninety miles from the railroad, and we had to travel over the worst roads I ever saw to get there. The temperature at night is about 3 above zero, but nobody complains.”
       A full-page Paramount Pictures advertisement that ran in several publications, including the 3 Feb 1923 Exhibitors Herald, listed the following “facts” about The Covered Wagon: “3,000 actors spent three months on location…; 1,000 Indians were brought from reservations hundreds of miles away, with their horses, tepees, and complete equipment; eight truckloads of supplies a day had to be taken over the rough desert roads; three hundred wagons were built [using] 40,000 square feet of canvas…to cover them; 100 oxen [were] broken to the yoke; 3,000 costumes of the period [were] made; water [was] backed up three miles for [a] river scene; dam broke and flooded camp, tearing down tents; 500 horses brought from Oregon for buffalo hunt scenes, which required particularly strong animals; 500 ordinary horses also used; 500 buffalos used in the hunt, the only large herd in existence; nine square miles of territory burned up for prairie fire scene; seventy trees felled and transported eighty miles for building of ferries; sixty wagons hauled material daily for six weeks to build replica of Fort Bridger; mile-wide river forded by 300 wagons.”
       One of the characters in the original novel was real-life scout “Kit Carson,” but in contemporary film reviews of The Covered Wagon he was alternately referred to as Kit Carson or “Joe Dunstan,” which suggests that film prints had different title cards indentifying him. He was Joe Dunstan in the copy viewed by AFI Catalog. Guy Oliver, the actor who played him, went on to portray Kit Carson (again) in the 1926 film The Vanishing American (see entry).
       In a photograph in the 6 Jan 1923 Exhibitors Herald, James Cruze posed with three Bannock Indian chiefs who appeared with their tribes in the film. They were named Strong Man, Big Ear Ring, and Big Elk.
       The 10 Mar 1922 Motion Picture News reported that a “world premiere” screening was scheduled for the following evening at a major charity event in the ballroom of the Hotel Plaza in New York City. The film opened five days later on 16 Mar 1923 at the Criterion Theatre, where huge electric signs displayed a covered wagon fording a stream on both the Broadway and 44th Street sides of the building. The film opened in Hollywood, CA, at Sid Grauman’s Egyptian Theatre on 10 Apr 1923. Two weeks later, The Covered Wagon was screened for President and Mrs. Warren G. Harding in the East Room of the White House in Washington, D.C. Also in attendance were members of the U.S. Supreme Court, ranking military leaders, and various U.S. Senators and Congressmen. The twenty-five-member orchestra from the Criterion Theatre provided accompaniment. President Harding dedicated the film to former President Theodore Roosevelt, who had died four years earlier.
       The Covered Wagon was a critical success and the number-one box office hit of 1923. The 1929 Film Daily Year Book voted it one of the “Top Best Features” of 1923, as reported in the 7 Feb 1930 FD.