Following in his dad's footsteps, Shefford devotes himself to freeing his community from the grip of a particularly despotic Mormon sect. In so doing, he rescues his foster sister Fay Larkin, who is coveted by lecherous Mormon elder Wagoner. As was the case in Riders of the Purple Sage, the Mormons are villains simply because they are Mormons.
Clay Burgess (Tom Mix), a drifter, returns to the small town of Palo to find the president of the bank -- his father -- murdered and the unscrupulous "Big" Dave Dawley (George Nichols) in charge.
A settler and his daughter are trying to homestead a plot of land. They are tricked out of the land by a crooked saloon owner, who then shoots the father and makes a play for the daughter. A local cowboy comes to her rescue.
Mary Thorne is the quarter-breed daughter of prospector Marshall Thorne. She has just returned from college and when a pair of hunters, Mark Hamilton and Chester Martin, come along, she decides it would be fun to dress in native garb and fool them. Both men find themselves attracted to her, even though Indians were taboo for whites in the racist days of the 1910s.
While out West, prospector Harry Webb makes enemies of a con artist, Mark Brenton and the con's crooked lawyer, Frank Beekman. Jack goes to the city and meets singer Janice Williams in a cabaret. They become engaged, but Brenton also has designs on her. He tricks her into going to a room to meet with him, and Webb, hearing of the scheme, follows. What he finds when he gets there is Brenton on the floor, dead, and Janice holding a gun.
Cowhand Steve Ransom discovers that German spies are operating along Mexican border, relaying their radio messages into Mexico and thus on to Germany. The spies learn that Steve is a fugitive from American justice.
Fellow convicts Cheyenne Harry and Buck Masters become even more bitter enemies when Buck agrees to tamper with the prison's books for the warden's greedy son.
In the Canadian Northwest, Jen Galbraith lives in a tavern with her brother Val and her father Peter, a bootlegger who sells whiskey to the Indians. Val's friend Pierre resolves to win Jen, even though she is in love with Sergeant Tom Gellatly of the Mounted Police. When Val tries to retrieve some liquor sold illegally by the elder Galbraith to an Indian named Grey Cloud, the Indian insults Jen and Val shoots him. Tom is assigned to track down the murderer, but after he arrives at the tavern, Galbraith and Pierre drug him. Jen delivers the papers he is carrying to police headquarters, but when she discovers that they contain orders to arrest her brother, she shoots Tom to prevent him from going after Val.
Lassiter quits the Texas Rangers and spends his life in pursuit of a group of Mormons who kidnapped his married sister. In a town on the Utah border, he meets the Withersteens and falls in love with their daughter, Jane. He also befriends Venters, and helps him track down some bandits who have been rustling the Withersteens' cattle.
Vaudeville artist LaBelle Geraldine and her dancing partner, Freddie Montgomery, are stranded in Arizona when their troupe breaks up. In order to raise money, Geraldine orders Freddie to impersonate masked bandit Black Jim so that she may turn him in and collect the $2,000 reward. When the real Black Jim holds up her coach, Geraldine, believing that he is Freddie, boldly pulls out her gun, whereupon the bandit shoots her in the wrist and takes her to his cabin. Later Freddie, too, is captured, but when members of the gang insult Geraldine, he refuses to protect her. Gradually Black Jim falls in love with her, and she comes to admire him so deeply that instead of seizing a chance to escape one night, she returns to warn him of the gang's plot to kill him.
The hero, a stranger in a Western town, falls in love with an Innocent girl he discovers in a wine room. He wins her after several clashes with the villain, who also loves her.
Cowboy Lin McLean's restlessness takes him to Denver, where he becomes enamored of a waitress named Katie. Intending to marry her, Lin accompanies Katie back to the ranch, but a traveling rainmaker arrives in the little town, and Katie departs with him after revealing that he is her husband. Visiting Denver for Christmas, Lin adopts Katie's abandoned son Billy, and soon afterwards, the cowboy meets and falls in love with the new station agent, Jessamine "Jessie" Buckner. Lin and Jessie marry, and the little family is happy until Katie, determined to be rid of her neglectful husband and marry Lin instead, appears and drives Jessie away. Realizing that Lin does not love her, Katie poisons herself, and Jessie returns to Lin and Billy.
Cowhand Jim Cleve is wrongly accused of murder and rescued by Jack Kells, leader of a band of Idaho outlaws known as the Border Legion. But when the Legion takes Joan Randall prisoner and leaves Cleve to guard her, he realizes that he cannot remain part of an outlaw band and decides to rescue Joan.
This comedy starts with the rescue by a cowboy's dog of a baby that is floating down a gorge toward a cataract in a tiny crib. The cowboy takes the foundling to his cabin. Then the cowboy finds himself not only beset with the troubles of feeding an infant, but also is the object of a spinster who, by claiming the baby, hopes to compromise the cowboy