A rich Easterner who has always wanted to live in "the Wild West" plans to move to a Western town. Unknown to him, the town's "wild" days are long gone and it is an orderly and civilized place now. The townsmen, not wanting to lose a rich potential resident, contrive to make over the town to suit the young man's fantasy.
Stationed at the Mexican border, a young lieutenant whose job is to capture a ring of narcotics smugglers, spies his sweetheart, the daughter of a U. S. Customs official, in a cantina suspected of being the headquarters of the dope ring.
A tramp cares for a boy after he's abandoned as a newborn by his mother. Later the mother has a change of heart and aches to be reunited with her son.
Two families, abolitionist Northerners the Stonemans and Southern landowners the Camerons, intertwine. When Confederate colonel Ben Cameron is captured in battle, nurse Elsie Stoneman petitions for his pardon. In Reconstruction-era South Carolina, Cameron founds the Ku Klux Klan, battling Elsie's congressman father and his African-American protégé, Silas Lynch.