In the wake of his father's murder, Riley seeks vengeance on an underbelly thug known as the Confidence Man, a gambler who never loses. Riley challenges his father's killer to a round of Russian Roulette.
Mildred Manning wants to experience the Wild West firsthand with her beau, Sir Charles Beverly. While Charles is gambling, Mildred is saved from two drunken cowboys by Del Burton. Del falls in love with Mildred and follows her back east.
A notorious gambler and card cheat, George Forrester, rules a little western town with an iron hand. The men of the town plot to catch him cheating and do, but his men save him from danger. In the same town lives Gerald Austen, or Aitkens, who had left his tyrannical father in the east and made good in the west.
Tom Evans, the fearless range boss of the Double X Ranch, falls in love with a romantic schoolteacher from the East named Clara. They marry and for a time are happy, but in Tom's absence, his partner Blackie persuades the restless young wife to run away with him. Blackie soon deserts Clara, and she is forced to earn her keep at a disreputable dance hall. After robbing a stage, Blackie returns, and Tom, who has been waiting for his former friend, goes after him. In a gun battle with Tom and his posse, Blackie kills Clara and escapes, but Tom follows him into the desert and takes his horse, leaving him to die of thirst.
The legendary frontiersman and hero of boyhood paperbacks joins forces with Captain John Fremont as chief scout on a secret expedition to Mexico. The disobedient Randy tries to rejoin his friends but only succeeds in putting them all in jeopardy.
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.
Lucy Raven's Demolition of a Wall (Album 1) is the second film in her trilogy of "Westerns." In American cinema, the Western has traditionally celebrated the expansionist myth that the region is somehow primal or untouched. Raven, by contrast, engages with a West that–while still dramatic in its natural beauty–has been industrialized, militarized, and colonized. She filmed this work at an explosives range in New Mexico that is typically employed as a test site by the US Departments of Defense and Energy and private munitions companies. Notably, it is close to Los Alamos, a national laboratory known for its role in the development of the nuclear bomb. Using a variety of cameras and imaging techniques, Raven captures the trajectory of the pressure-blast shockwaves that move through the atmosphere in the wake of an explosion. [Overview courtesy of the Whitney Museum of American Art]
Jimmy Wakely and Dusty, traveling with the medicine show owned by "Lasses" White, stop at the Ferguson ranch and find the rancher and his wife killed. They take the Ferguson baby to their camp, where outlaws Joe, Slick and Pete attempt to kidnap the baby, while Dusty is reporting the murders to Sheriff Beasley and town mayor Melinda Pringle. Wakely and his singers hide the baby from its legal guardian, Doc Judd Thomas, as they suspect him of being connected with the Ferguson murders.