This modern western was one of John Wayne's first pictures at his home studio, Republic, after he'd become a hot box-office draw on loan-out for Stagecoach. It attempts to cash in on John Ford's The Grapes of Wrath by featuring the plight of Dust Bowl farmers as well as being a story about refugees from Nazi Germany settling in America. Wayne arranges for Charles Coburn's eminent Viennese surgeon and his daughter, played by Norwegian actress Sigrid Gurie, to move away from the doomed farming area and settle in Oregon. Preaching self-help and optimism, the film shows no sign of a left-wing viewpoint, though the director, Bernard Vorhaus, and one of the writers, Samuel Ornitz, were later blacklisted.

Viennese surgeon Dr. Braun and his daughter Leni come to a small town in North Dakota as refugees from Hitler. When the winds of the Dust Bowl threaten the town, John Phillips leads the townsfolk in moving to greener pastures in Oregon. He falls for Leni, but she is betrothed to the man who helped her and her father escape from the Third Reich. She must decide between the two men.