Broncho Billy loses his job and is forced to go west in search of employment. He lands in a small western town, where he takes up gold mining. Stockdale, a westerner, also meeting with bad luck, consults Broncho Billy, and the two determine to hold up the stagecoach that day.
Gilbert M. Anderson
Broncho Billy
Carl Stockdale
Billy's Western Chum
Broncho Billy loses his job and is forced to go west in search of employment. He lands in a small western town, where he takes up gold mining. Stockdale, a westerner, also meeting with bad luck, consults Broncho Billy, and the two determine to hold up the stagecoach that day.
A cattle-vs.-sheepman feud loses Connie Dickason her fiance, but gains her his ranch, which she determines to run alone in opposition to Frank Ivey, "boss" of the valley, whom her father Ben wanted her to marry. She hires recovering alcoholic Dave Nash as foreman and a crew of Ivey's enemies. Ivey fights back with violence and destruction, but Dave is determined to counter him legally... a feeling not shared by his associates. Connie's boast that, as a woman, she doesn't need guns proves justified, but plenty of gunplay results.
Questions arise when Senator Stoddard attends the funeral of a local man named Tom Doniphon in a small Western town. Flashing back, we learn Doniphon saved Stoddard, then a lawyer, when he was roughed up by a crew of outlaws terrorizing the town, led by Liberty Valance. As the territory's safety hung in the balance, Doniphon and Stoddard, two of the only people standing up to him, proved to be very important, but different, foes to Valance.
John Russell, disdained by his "respectable" fellow stagecoach passengers because he was raised by Indians, becomes their only hope for survival when they are set upon by outlaws.
A con man heading west to search for gold teams up with a pair of scheming brothers along the way. The trio soon find themselves in the middle of a feud between two rival families and two underhanded land developers.
At a desolate relay station in the west, a stagecoach attendant and a stranded woman traveller are held captive by a band of escaped convicts.
When a handful of settlers survive an Apache attack on their wagon train they must put their lives into the hands of Comanche Todd, a white man who has lived with the Comanches most of his life and is wanted for the murder of three men.
When Rocklin arrives in a western town he finds that the rancher who hired him as a foreman has been murdered. He is out to solve the murder and thwart the scheming to take the ranch from its rightful owner.
Texas Ranger Jake Cutter arrests gambler Paul Regret, but soon finds himself teamed with his prisoner in an undercover effort to defeat a band of renegade arms merchants and thieves known as Comancheros.
Drifter Cole Harden is accused of stealing a horse and faces hanging by self-appointed Judge Roy Bean, but Harden manages to talk his way out of it by claiming to be a friend of stage star Lillie Langtry, with whom the judge is obsessed, even though he has never met her. Tensions rise when Harden comes to the defense of a group of struggling homesteaders who Judge Bean is trying to drive away.
Hud Bannon is a ruthless young man who tarnishes everything and everyone he touches. Hud represents the perfect embodiment of alienated youth, out for kicks with no regard for the consequences. There is bitter conflict between the callous Hud and his stern and highly principled father, Homer. Hud's nephew Lon admires Hud's cheating ways, though he soon becomes too aware of Hud's reckless amorality to bear him anymore. In the world of the takers and the taken, Hud is a winner. He's a cheat, but, he explains, "I always say the law was meant to be interpreted in a lenient manner."