The young Mormon's father is a beloved and faithful man. This young man becomes a look-out for his community, locating and assisting in the attack of wagon trains to secure new wives for polygamists. One day, he observes a lone wagon train crossing the prairie. He discovers it is a young woman that he falls in love with at first sight. This love leads him to give up his faith and warn the emigrants. He joins in the fight against his own people and they defend themselves with the flag of truth. After his father learns of his son's apostasy, he sadly returns home. The emigrants are killed, the young Mormon takes the place of the emigrant, and together with the girl, they turn to a new life.

Joy reigns in a colony of struggling artists because Old Felix, a composer, has at last sold one of his symphonies. The night of its initial hearing at the grand opera house the members of the colony turn out en masse. Too poor for orchestra seats, they gather in the gallery around the old composer. The old composer is happy almost to tears, and when the last note has died away there is a cry for the composer. Felix attempts to utter a few words of thanks, but is smothered with flowers. At his studio his friends have prepared for his welcome, and it is upon his arrival there that be feels the happiness which comes of success. However, at the other end of the hall another different drama is being enacted. A girl sits beside her stricken mother, and as the merriment in the studio reaches its height, the soul of the mother departs from the body.

For fifty years the Dawsons and the Putnams have been engaged in a deadly family feud. Old Hen Dawson is now the patriarch of the Dawsons, and Jed Putnam is the leader of the Putnams.

Helen MacDermott, daughter of the Factor at Bear Lake, has been carefully and religiously brought up by her widowed father. Bob Brandt, a dashing young gambler and adventurer, stops at Bear Lake in his wanderings, and having occasion to visit the post to buy supplies, he becomes acquainted with Helen. She quickly surrenders to his charms.

Richard Mead was a sheepherder who lived with his daughter in a hut in the mountains. He was hated by the cattlemen and was ordered to quit the range. Returning to his home he tells his daughter what has happened, and prepares to protect himself.

James Collins leaves his dear old mother and goes West, where he becomes connected with the Bar Diamond Outfit. He finds the life of a cowboy arduous and the pay meager. The possibilities of owning a herd of his own by blotting brands or branding calves, occurs to him, as it has to many others, who desire quick results from very little effort. Six months later, he is a full-fledged cattle thief, branding cattle, under his own registered brand, while ostensibly an honest cowboy in the employ of the Bar Diamond Ranch. He writes his mother of his success and she, never dreaming of the hazardous occupation her son is following, plans to join him in the West.

In the hills of Dixie live Jed and Sue, a country lad and lass, who are very much in love with each other. The keeper of the wayside tavern is an unscrupulous fellow who has coveted Sue for some time. He makes advances to Sue, but Jed, who suspects the man, warns him to keep away and not molest her.

Absorbed in his painting, Robert Gainsworthy neglects his beautiful wife - not intentionally - but rather in the pre-occupied way of a man who did not want the single train of thought broken. He worked for days in his studio without ever speaking to her and the strain told on their relations for the wife brooded bitterly. Jack Sanders, a globe-trotting cousin of Robert, visited at the Gainsworthy home. He took many strolls with the heart-sick wife and found himself madly infatuated.

Three pals, Reid, Neilan and Kirkland breast the breakers of their roving life with but one condition of creed, nothing was to come between them to sever or impair the sincerity of their ties of friendship. Regardless of what extremity of life they encountered, they religiously respect their one law of sharing alike; that is, until the fall of Sumter, when the call to arms invaded homes and divided brother against brother.

While a Union picket reminisces about his sweetheart and recalls leaving home to go to war, a Confederate ambushes soldier ambushes and kills him.