One of the interesting things about the movie is that in some of the roles, real members of the Blackfoot tribe from a Montana Blackfeet reservation were used and one of them was Martin Good Rider, the boy who played Little Chief. Alas, most of the Native speaking roles were filled by white actors in red face, and like many movies of the period depicting Native Americans, the portrayals are often caricatures and certainly insensitive. Still, for its time, it's somewhat amazing that the movie portrays sincere friendship and trust between the two groups with regard to Shirley Temple's relationship with them.
Around the time working on the film ended, its co-stars Margaret Lockwood and Shirley Temple were going to star in their next project together, an adaptation of Henry De Vere Stacpoole's Die blaue Lagune (1949) that was to be co-produced by 20th Century-Fox and Gainsborough Pictures. Lockwood was to play Emmeline as an adult, while Temple was to play the character as a child. The project was suspended after the outbreak of World War II. After the project was restarted in 1944 under Sidney Gilliat and Frank Launder's newly founded company, Individual Pictures with backing from the J. Arthur Rank Organization, it was decided that Lockwood was too old to play Emmeline as a young adult and Temple should play instead that part. However, the cost overruns from Caesar und Cleopatra (1945) forced Rank to impose a ruling that the role of Emmeline should be played by an unknown. After Gilliat and Launder auditioned hundreds of females for the part in the British Empire, the United States, and Europe without success, they resorted to Jean Simmons once Rank suggested her to the duo after the world premiere of David Lean's adaptation of Charles Dickens's Die großen Erwartungen (1946).