The Drifter is a 1917 Western short.
Social & External
The people behind it
Harry Carey
Cheyenne Harry
Claire Du Brey
Dora Mason
A series of 25 2-reel Western thrillers in which a cowgirl aids the cause of justice and humanity in the Old West, often aided by her fiancé and her rancher father. Each episode tells a complete story in itself.
Broncho Billy is a typical bad man. The story opens with him shooting up a small town in the west, and scaring the inhabitants nearly to death. The sheriff with his deputies order him out of the country. Sunday morning, the congregation is in church singing. Boardman, another bad man, and his protégés, break up the meeting. The preacher is ousted.
Broncho Billy, an express rider, is married to Stasia Wynn, daughter of Grant Wynn. John Mackey, a gambler, comes to town and Wynn loses all his money to him. Broncho Billy buys his wife a scarf pin, which her father steals and loses to the gambler. Mackey is caught cheating and is driven from town.
With a price upon his head. Texas Pete takes to the open country.
The hero's mother is desperately ill and the young fellow, while going afoot for a doctor, stops a mail carrier and forces him- at the point of the pistol- to give up his horse.
When his wife is killed by the evil Marques de Bazan, Spanish army officer Dorando becomes a notorious outlaw known as El Bandolero. He kidnaps Bazan's son Ramon and has him raised by one of his own men. When Ramon grows up to be a man he meets and falls in love with El Bandolero's beautiful daughter Petra. Bandolero forbids his daughter from seeing Ramon, so Ramon leaves to become a bullfighter. A vengeful young woman he has spurned sets up Ramon to be gored by a vicious young bull. Complications ensue.
The tenderfoot came into camp with his ill-gotten money intending to purchase a claim. The faker salted a claim, hoping thereby to secure the money. But the gambler got ahead of him through cheating at cards. Later the tenderfoot sought to regain his money and in the struggle it fell into worthier hands.
For five years Dorothy had put up with her husband although all his refinement, delicacy and love had long since been drowned in drink. Dorothy had reached the turning point. She answered an advertisement calling for a leading woman to accompany a repertoire show west. She was given the position and that night left.
Before dying, a man's friend asks him to do his best to keep the truth that he was a robber from his son.
The son of the sheriff of Arizona Territory is an outlaw. When he's captured and sentenced to hang his mother and two sisters plead with the Governor for mercy.
Johnson, a pharmacist, makes an illicit traffic in cocaine and morphine, which he cleverly sells through his drug counter to a select clientele. In his richly furnished office, the head of the Kurson Chemical Company counts the receipts of Kurson Consumption Cure, a patented drug that contains a large amount of morphine.
After years of scientific research Thomas Kellner, an eccentric chemist, succeeds in manufacturing an imitation diamond, with the help of his son Jack.
Morton, encouraged by Watson, who wants to expel him from the bank, is the president who uses the bank's money for his private speculations. He gets very involved and when the matter is brought to the attention of the directors, he is asked to oblige to the default or go to prison. Morton would commit suicide except for his stenographer, Mary Lane, a beautiful and intelligent girl. She takes him in and discusses the matter with Morton's son, whom she loves.
Jeanne La Roche lives alone with her brother in the great northwestern country. Jacques is a ne'er-do-well and has fallen under the suspicion of the mounted police, two of whom are dispatched to arrest him for robbery. The stolen goods are found in his home. Jeanne is too young to be left in their lonely cabin, so she is taken to the post, where the wife of the proprietor welcomes her and gives her a home. Several years later, Donald McLean wins her for his wife. Meantime Jacques escapes from prison, eludes his pursuers and takes refuge in McLean's home.
In this Western, Frank Keenan has a dual role -- kind-hearted gambler John Lynch and evil bandit Big Rivers. The only person who realizes there is a resemblance between the two is dance hall girl Nita (Maude George), who was abused by the outlaw and cared for by Lynch.
Rustler Pete Sontag kidnaps Merlin Warner after he kills her father. Pete, a drug smuggler who uses his saloon as a front, coerces Merlin though beatings to become the dancer Mexicali Mae. She meets and falls in love with morphine addict Joe Blanchard but Pete frames Joe for a murder that he committed, forcing Mae to hide Joe in a homestead in the hills. After many struggles, Joe is cured of his addiction and proposes to Mae. She accepts, but when his mother and fiancée Eleanor arrive, they offer her money to leave, Mae refuses the money but becomes convinced that she is not good enough for Joe and writes to him that she is returning to the saloon. Joe learning of his mother’s plot arrives at the saloon and in the resultant fight Pete is killed. Mae and Joe are reconciled.
On the American frontier in the last decades of the 19th century, Billie is a female cowboy who fights a series of bad men in this film serial.
A college graduate returns West after ten years in the East to her home in Sulfur Springs. Virginia's mother, the owner of a rooming house has turned hard and uncaring in her absence and the girl finds comfort in her friendship with Ross Cavanagh, a forest ranger. The latter runs afoul of cattle baron Sam Gregg, who resents a new tax on cattle grazing on government land.
Returning to his father's cattle ranch after the excitement of serving in combat overseas, Bud McGraw becomes restless, and his father decides to send him to an old friend who commands the Border Police in Texas. On the way he meets Peggy Hughes, accompanying her Uncle Graham, a customs inspector, and he retrieves her hat from the rails of a train. At the headquarters, numerous scrapes and fights win him the admiration of, and friendship with, the men. Lazaro, a Secret Service agent, invites Mrs. Graham and Peggy, who are staying at the border station, for an automobile ride, and they are captured by bandits and held for ransom. Bud and his pals deliver the ransom and discover that Lazaro is the bandit chief. Lazaro refuses to release Peggy, but a jealous rival, Nita de Garma, causes his downfall and shoots him as the Border Police arrive to rescue the party.
Jim Blake, the playboy son of a New York millionaire, heads west to prove himself a man. He goes to work on his father's ranch in Wyoming, and eventually wins over the locals by turning the tables on a town bully and trying to collect damages from a railroad magnate, whose trains have killed many of the Blake ranch's cattle. When the railroad refuses to pay, Jim comes up with a plan that will make them pay far more than they originally had to. Problems arise when he falls in love with Alice, the railroad magnate's daughter.
A wandering cowboy gets caught up in a range war.
An ex-convict drifter and his flawed young partner are made sheriff and deputy of a Western town.
The murder of her father sends a teenage tomboy on a mission of 'justice', which involves avenging her father's death. She recruits a tough old marshal, 'Rooster' Cogburn because he has 'true grit', and a reputation of getting the job done.
At a Mexican ranch, fugitive O'Malley and pursuing Sheriff Stribling agree to help rancher Breckenridge drive his herd into Texas where Stribling could legally arrest O'Malley, but Breckenridge's wife complicates things.
A scorned woman enlists the help of five strangers to execute a bank robbery. Tensions rise as the men anxiously await her arrival with the money, leaving the crew to wonder if they have been betrayed.
Jim Douglass arrives in the small town of Rio Arriba in order to witness the hanging of the four men he believes murdered his wife. When the convicts escape, Jim tracks them into Mexico, determined to see that justice is done. But the farther Jim goes in his quest for vengeance, the more merciless he becomes, losing himself in an unrelenting spiral of hatred and violence.
In the 1820s, a taciturn loner and skilled cook travels west to Oregon Territory, where he meets a Chinese immigrant also seeking his fortune. Soon the two team up on a dangerous scheme to steal milk from the wealthy landowner’s prized Jersey cow—the first, and only, in the territory.
One of the last bills signed by President Lincoln authorizes pushing the Union Pacific Railroad across the wilderness to California. But financial opportunist Asa Barrows hopes to profit from obstructing it. Chief troubleshooter Jeff Butler has his hands full fighting Barrows' agent, gambler Sid Campeau; Campeau's partner Dick Allen is Jeff's war buddy and rival suitor for engineer's daughter Molly Monahan. Who will survive the effort to push the railroad through at any cost?
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.
Pacer Burton, a young man of mixed Kiowa and white heritage, is caught between two worlds as conflict erupts between Native Americans and white settlers in Texas.
A peace-loving, part-time sheriff in the small town of Firecreek must take a stand when a gang of vicious outlaws takes over his town.
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.
There's a box social coming up, and Curly asks Laurey if she'll be his date. Trouble is, Laurey thinks he's waited too long, and in a fit of pique accepts an offer from the boorish ranch hand Jud instead. Meanwhile, Laurey's friend Ado Annie is also torn between two men: cowboy Will and foreign peddler Ali Hakim. Both women struggle to know their own hearts before it's too late.
A white man trades with the Comanche for the release of a female stranger and the pair cross paths with three outlaws who have their eyes on the handsome reward for bringing her home and Comanche on the warpath.
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.
A rancher, his shady bride and his one-armed brother fight amid carpetbaggers in Texas.
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.
An oppressed Mexican peasant village hires seven gunfighters to help defend their homes.
While moving a group of Apaches to a Native American reservation in Arizona, an American scout named Sam Varner is surprised to find a white woman, Sarah Carver, living with the tribe. When Sam learns that she was taken captive by an Indian named Salvaje ten years ago, he attempts to escort Sarah and her half-Native American son to his home in New Mexico. However, it soon becomes clear that Salvaje is hot on their trail.
Two brothers discharged from the Confederate Army join a businessman for a cattle drive from Texas to Montana where they run into raiding Jayhawkers, angry Sioux, rough terrain and bad weather.
