I've always known from old movie review books that this film was longer when it was released at theatres back in the late 1940's. The VHS and dvd versions are about 15 minutes shorter.
However, I've noticed on IMDB that it states the UK version is 12 minutes longer.
It would be nice if there was someone out there who saw the original release of this movie, and had a photographic memory to know what's being left out!
My reply is about 7 years late; but I only just discovered this message. I have seen the uncut version. RKO cut the film apparently for a reissue in the early fifties. Some of the cuts are very small; cutting one or two lines of dialog from a scene. Others are more substantial, but usually cover plot points established by other scenes. For example, at the beginning right after Mitchum departs, there is a scene of nearly 3 minutes that includes a montage of Holden and Gray trying to make a go of it alone. Holden is shown shooting a deer in a winter scene, then the spring planting (with a stock shot borrowed from RKO's "Devil and Daniel Webster), and a comic scene where they try to cook dinner in the fireplace and their failing efforts to keep it from falling on the floor and to keep the hounds away from it. Back at the homestead after the marriage there is a scene where Holden and Gray are in the background walking toward the woods, Loretta Young is seated in the foreground doing some chore. The boy, who up until this point has been openly hostile to Rachel, turns in her direction and waves "Come on!" Rachel eagerly puts her chore aside and gets up to join them, when she suddenly realizes the boy was addressing the dog! Other cuts are a bit more perplexing. Does the climactic Indian attack seem a little short? That's because they even made some cuts there! Likewise in the comic brawl between Holden and Mitchum earlier in the film. None of the edited scenes could be considered absolutely essential, but nevertheless I think the film plays better with these scenes included. One especially poignant moment was cut. In the reissue version, when Rachel first arrives at the cabin, she enters the bedroom in which she will sleep alone, and the scene dissolves to the next morning. In the uncut version the scene continues, and Rachel, now struck by the solitude and the realization of a lonely future, begins quietly sobbing as the scene fades out. One more edit needs to be mentioned. When RKO reissued the film, they altered the opening titles and removed the credit for Howard Fast. I was always puzzled by this, until I chanced upon Mr. Fast's obituary, which revealed that he was a victim of the Hollywood anti communist witch hunt in the early fifties. Howard Hughes, who was head of the studio by this time, was, (among many other things), a rabid anti communist. So, to their everlasting disgrace, the studio threw him under the bus, as they did with so many others.
I just watched it, again, and Fast is now included in the credits.
Any antipathy toward Fast must have disappeared, or they would not have made a mini-series out of his 4 book series (which started with "The Immigrants") with Peter Strauss in 1975 (?).