This has a slightly incongruous conservation slant to it as it follows the battle between the oil drillers and the local, largely indigenous, Oklahoman farmers. Now forgetting the terrible song at the start from "Pinky" (Chill Wills) - who provides us with the optimistic narration; we are introduced to the honorable "Cherokee" (Susan Hayward) who is after compensation when her father is killed by flying debris from an oil derrick owned by "Tanner" (Lloyd Gough). Nothing doing says he, but when she comes into some oil leases that she can ill afford to exploit, he has enough of a fair-mined (and venal) spirit about him to lend her the cash. The remainder of this drama is all quite predicable, and though Hayward does enough as the woman conflicted by both the ecology of what they are doing and also with would be husband "Brad" (Robert Preston) versus the admiring local lad with a conscience "Jim" (Pedro Armendáriz), the rest of the cast just go through the motions. There are some decent visual effects towards the end as things hot up and there is an underlying message of reconciling progress with nature that shows even in 1949 people were thinking about balance. It's watchable enough.
