Hall is after Dennison's land and hires the Shooting Kid to finish him off. The Marshal sends Tex to help Dennison, but the Kid has been helped by Tex in the past and changes sides.
In the midst of the Civil War, Lassiter has a plan to get control of California. Working out of St. Joseph, he plans to send forged messages to the troops on the west coast via Pony Express. First he attempts to bribe Pony Express ride Roy Rogers. When Roy refuses he turns to the outlaw Johnson and his gang and this leads to trouble.
Lightning Bill Carson and sidekick Magpie are after Burrows, the man that killed a friend of theirs. Burrows is after the Arden ranch and his gang are rustling their cattle. Bill is robbing Burrows while posing as the mysterious Phantom and it's not long before the two collide.
Roy and Gabby return to Gabby's Texas ranch, after fighting with the Confederate military during the American Civil War, to find that a blustery Union Colonel whom they have previously hassled is now their district commander. Unbeknownst to the Colonel, however, is that the soldiers he believes have been sent to assist him are actually Union Army rejects who have come to loot the civilian populace under the guise of reinstituting normalcy to the former Confederate district.
McCord's gang robs the stage carrying money to pay Indians for their land, and the notorious outlaw "The Oklahoma Kid" Jim Kincaid takes the money from McCord. McCord stakes a "sooner" claim on land which is to be used for a new town; in exchange for giving it up, he gets control of gambling and saloons. When Kincaid's father runs for mayor, McCord incites a mob to lynch the old man whom McCord has already framed for murder.
Twenty-two years earlier Kirk Dean murdered his brother Fred Dean Sr. Now Fred Dean Jr. is looking for his father's killer. Unknown to Fred, Bill Barton who now works for Kirk, witnessed the murder.
A group of people traveling on a stagecoach find their journey complicated by the threat of Geronimo, and learn something about each other in the process.
When Blackton outbids Bill Carson. Bill suspects he will have to rustle cattle to fulfill the contract. So Bill arrives posing as an Mexican. When he rustles the cattle from the rustlers, it gets him into the gang. Hoping to bring them all to justice, he is in trouble when his true identity is revealed.
Disguising himself as a milquetoast Easterner who writes Western novels, Hoppy enrolls in a dude ranch in order to unmask the murderer of the owner's husband.
The Colonel sends Fred Dawson and Doc Flanders to investigate a cattleman sheepman war. Posing as a two man medicine show, they quickly become involved. When Fred tries to bring the two sides together, Joe Allison is shot and Fred blamed. With Fred in jail and a lynch mob on the way, Doc tries to break his friend out.
When shifty cattlemen Belknap (Walter Miller) and H.R. Shelby (Gordon Hart) are caught shipping infected animals to Mexico, they frame inspector Gene Autry. Now Autry and his sidekick, Frog Millhouse (Smiley Burnette), must catch the bad guys in the act and set things straight. June Storey co-stars as rancher Martha Wheeler. Autry sings "I'm Gonna Round Up My Blues," "Moonlight on the Ranch House" and "Big Bull Frog."
Bob Blake and his sidekick and four singing cowboys arrive at the Jackson ranch where Bob learns from Betty Jackson that her brother, Joe, is missing. Bob investigates and learns that there is gold on the Jackson ranch, and the neighboring rancher has kidnapped Joe in order to get his land.
The Cattlemen's Association has called in the Mesquiteers to find cattle rustlers. They get Tex Riley to pose as Stony so Stony can arrive posing as a wanted outlaw. This gets Stony into the gang of rustlers and he alerts Tucson and Lullaby as to the next raid. But Hartley is on hand and unknown to anyone is the rustler's boss and he joins the posse with a plan that will do away with the Mesquiteers.
The local school is causing Hoppy problems. First Bar 20 cattle are stolen when Hoppy investigates a problem there. Then the new teacher arrives and disrupts the routine of the Bar 20 hands. Later with the Bar 20 hands at graduation, the rustlers are poised to strike again. But there is dissension among them and this will lead to the break that Hoppy needs.
Knowing that is contains valuable helium gas, a gang of bad guys first tries to purchase the ranch which Gene straw-bosses. When that fails, they lay a hidden pipeline to snag the gas.