Solid acting (Noah Beery Jr, John Anderson, Glenn Ford, Barbara Hershey, and David Carradine) is compromised by formulaic direction and a script that zig-zags, forgets, remembers, and improvises, but the action occasionally rises, and the preacher-gunman conflict keeps things on track just enough to keep one watching till the end.
From the distance of 2010, 60s cultural interest is raised by the film's brief, gratuitous, and confusing nudity, as well as Barbara Hershey's hippie depiction of a half-Hopi girl, but the biggest surprise may be that this otherwise predictable western was produced as late as 1969. Except for those 60s flashes, I could imagine my parents and their siblings enjoying something similar in 1955, while I would have wished for a hero less earnest and boring than Ford.
Among the film's skewed lines, the oddest may be that the sheep-herder side of the range war is first identified with American Indians but is then shifted to a polygamous Mormon. I'd like to go back to 1969 and be 18 again, but no wonder I felt confused.