Opening with a dedication to Abraham "The Builder" Lincoln and climaxing with the symbolic 1869 marriage of the Central and Union Pacific railroads, The Iron Horse was John Ford's first official epic, as well as his breakthrough hit. Like D.W. Griffith, Ford uses the august figure of Lincoln (played by Charles Edward Bull) as a link between the film's fictitious narrative and its historical background, though the director's own account of the birth of a nation is divided less between North and South than between East and West, a national struggle that is reconciled by the progressive locomotive of the title. It's a large canvas, and one that the filmmaker, then 29, often has trouble filling: The integration of the insipid couple at the film's center (colorless George O'Brien, maidenly Madge Bellamy) with the epochal events swirling around them is clumsy, while Indians are portrayed not as a people but as just one of the defiant forces of nature that have to be braved by the railroad.