It is Christmas Eve, and a humble prospector has spent his last cent for food. He is heartbroken to think that he cannot even buy anything for his two small children. When his wife finds a letter to Santa Claus asking for a doll and rocking horse, the prospector is desperate.
Broncho Billy, a prospector, makes a rich strike, but while he is examining the rock he is being watched by three claim jumpers. The minute he leaves the spot the jumpers gather up some samples of the ore, and after replacing Broncho's sign with one of their own, start for the claim agent's office.
The successful operations of a lone bandit known as "The Night Hawk" terrorize a frontier town, and when a stranger arrives riding a fine horse, suspicions are aroused and he is mistaken for the criminal.
The year is 1862. The settings. The Canadian northwest. The lure is gold. Nine men, two women (one of them pregnant), and a young boy begin the odyssey which is to change all their lives. Through jungle-like forests, they look for a trail abandoned 10 years before by explorers and fur-traders. It runs out in a beautiful mountain trap, a box canyon with a waterfall. Left leaderless when death strikes, the vulnerable band must find another route. They decide to descend the mighty Fraser river by raft. Those who survive the great Grand Canyon rapids must continue on foot.
Somewhere between the stars is a place that has gone missing. Hazel is a time traveler. Hat is a zealot. Lily is ghost. And something is always watching. Through the lens of five interconnecting stories, the secrets of the Rift are revealed.
Denny O'Hara marries Eileen O'Connor. He learns his elderly mother has been evicted. He finds her dead and sets out to kill the landlord and finds him already dead. A local priest urges him to flee to America fearing he will be accused of landlord's death.
Raúl is an unemployed cattleman that lives in an isolated house on the fields. The landscape of pastures is being superimposed by huge soy plantations. Devastated by poverty, he joins a gang of other peasants that steals cattle during the darkness of the nights on the pastures.
Chad Rainey, a young boy from Ohio looses his mother to Cholera. On his way west on a wagon train he elopes into the wilderness where he meets and fall in love with an Indian girl.
Dick, an easterner, comes west to try his luck at mining. No sooner does he arrive than Hartley, the local gambler and all-around villain, commences to make sport at his expense. Dick endeavors to bear it patiently, but a clash is inevitable, until the arrival at the village store of Mary Brown, one whom all held in respect, excepting Hartley.
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.
A drifter falls for the daughter of a rancher, an alcoholic old coot whose ranch is on some very valuable land. When the old man is found murdered, the drifter is accused of the crime. He didn't do it, but he has to find who the real killer is and clear his name.
Millionaire Larry Prentiss inherits a ranch. He decides to visit his new property incognito and gets a job as a ranch-hand. He falls in love with the ranch foreman's daughter and complications ensue.
The Brockton clan considers the mountain Little Smoky their own, but then the government comes in and declares it a forest and game preserve. This doesn't stop the family, who swears they will do what they want with the land.
A band of Klan-like night riders have been running rampant, and ranch owner Julian Marbolt (Andre Beaulieu) -- who is afflicted with day blindness and can only see in the evening -- offers a reward for the leader's capture.
There is trouble between the Dunbar brothers when Wally proposes to Bonnie on his brother's behalf only to have her accept him. Their feud is interrupted when they have to go after a con man who has cheated the bank out of $5000 by using a gold brick. With the outlaw captured, Wally now tries to get his brother and Bonnie together.