Working as an assistant on a long cattle drive, the young Ben Mockridge contends between his dream of being a cowboy and the harsh truth of the Old West.

Shadrach Jones, ex-Texas State Policeman, has the ruthless determination to find and kill the man who shot his brother in the back and stole the money with which he was to buy a ranch for the two of them. At the saloon-hotel run by Adelaide, Shadrach is convinced that one of the cowhands on the Captain McKellar cattle drive to Montana is his man. He takes the job of trail-herd boss to find the killer. McKellar preaches to Jones that he should forget revenge and let the law of retribution take care of the killer. Shadrach's hard driving of the men and his hunt for the killer makes him bitterly hated, and his retribution quest ends in a manner he did not anticipated.

In 1864, during the American Civil War, Mexican cattleman Alvarez Kelly supplies the Union with cattle until unexpected circumstances force him to change his customers.

Mortimer builds a fence for the cattle brought by Ken Morley. To retaliate, Slater who wants access to the land, builds a dam cutting off Mortimer's water supply. When Ken confronts Slater, he is captured. Then lightning destroys the dam and Ken, imprisoned in a shack, is in the path of the oncoming water.

Hopalong Cassidy, boss of the Bar 20 ranch in Texas, rides down the Camino Real in the New Mexico cattle country near Alamogordo, in response to an urgent message from his lifelong sweetheart, Nora Blake, who is in serious trouble. Before he and his saddlemates, "Lucky" Jenkins and "Pappy", can reach her ranch, they are stopped by Clay Allison, a cattle-rustler who is in almost complete control of the district, and wants to extend his holdings by seizing Nora's cattle and driving her out. Seeing Cassidy as a menace to his plans, he has him arrested on a trumped-up charge. Cassidy and his pals shoot their way out of the trouble and reach Nora;s ranch where they learn that Allison's henchmen have murdered her foreman, Tom Dillon, and Allison has sent for a crew of outlaws on the Texas border.

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.

A drought is about to end the cattle business. The owner of a canning factory wants to buy all the remaining cattle cheap. He plans to ruin the cattlemen's plans to ship water by train and to seed the clouds for rain. Roy is sent by a packing house to investigate.

Broke and in debt, an otherwise honest cowboy and his buddy get mixed up in some shady dealings with a crooked cattle dealer.

Lambert, a young man out to make his fortune, is out west trying to sell a gadget that can peel potatoes, open cans, pull out nails and perform other handy tasks. He comes to a cattle ranch and runs into a group of cowboys eating supper. He impresses the cowboys so much that they make him their leader, and it's not long before he's hired by pretty young ranch manager Vesta Philbrook as her aide and bodyguard. "The Duke", as he's now called, falls in love with her and sets out to help her get rid of a gang of vicious cattle rustlers that are constantly raiding her ranch.

Cattle baron John Chisum joins forces with Billy the Kid and Pat Garrett to fight the Lincoln County Land War in the New Mexico Territory of 1878.

When her husband dies en route to America, Martha Price and her daughter Hilary are left to carry out his dream: the introduction of Hereford cattle into the American West. They enlist Sam "Bulldog" Burnett in their efforts to transport their lone bull, a Hereford named Vindicator, to a breeder in Texas, but the trail is fraught with danger and even Burnett doubts the survival potential of this "rare breed" of cattle.

A New Mexico cattle man and his strong-willed daughter clash over land and love.