The Homesteaders

Mace Corbin (Elliott) wants to get the dynamite to Oregon homesteaders who desperately need it to blast rocks out of their farmland and to open up a passage to good grazing territory.

Dynamite is hard to come by after the Civil War, and Kroger (James Seay) persuades Mace's broke farmer friend Clyde (Robert Lowery) to sell Mace out and double-cross him by giving Kroger the dynamite once it arrives.

Mace and Clyde make the journey with a bunch of ex-military prisoners; some are glad to be sprung from the fort and make a little money, with the prospect of filing homesteading claims, but others are a downright angry bunch. And then there's those Indians...

Not many westerns are centred around dynamite ( unstable like nitroglycerine) - well not carrying it over a long trek in the hope of blasting away rocks and trees so they can farm their land. Interesting idea, plus the crew consist of prisoners - the dirty dozen style and you have a mixed assortment of characters, some obedient to wild Bill Elliott's command and some plain disobedient. The film moves along briskly, the events flow naturally, and with some good action scenes.

As Wild Bill Elliott's career as a film cowboy hero was coming to a close his last studio was Allied Artists where clearly he was not getting the budgets he got at Republic or Columbia. And there was something incongruous about seeing him behind a plow as he was playing one of The Homesteaders.

Bill and partner Robert Lowery hear about how they can acquire some dynamite, four wagonloads of it in fact from the Army which Elliott wants to use to blow stumps and rocks from the hilly ground he's trying to farm on. Lowery however is in deep to gambler James Seay who wants the stuff to use for mining gold. He's reluctant to pull a doublecross on a friend though.

But the reason the army wants to get rid of the dynamite so cheap is its a really bad batch. Very unstable, but the commander of the post also gives Elliott and Lowery some of his best guardhouse specials as a crew to transport it.

Although the action is a plenty as in Wild Bill Elliott films, this cast good and bad guys alike should have all been blown to smithereens. Elliott has to deal with discipline among his crew, Lowery's treachery, an Indian attack, and finally a showdown with Seay and his band. The way the bullets and arrows were flying around they all should have been blown to smithereens.

Definitely Elliott's career was on the downside with stuff like The Homesteaders.