In this rare surviving Western melodrama from the last full year of the Triangle company, Louise Glaum plays a distaff version of the character so often portrayed by the company's leading cowboy star William S. Hart. Like the films of Hart, the mise-en-scéne looks extremely authentic: dusty streets and equally dusty men fighting for pure women, and even those not so pure. Glaum seemingly belongs to the latter category but she is of course redeemed by the love of a good man. There is a great scene where an impossibly young John Gilbert, playing a rowdy cowboy, forcibly drags Holy Roller William Conklin from the pulpit and straight into Glaum's saloon where the good reverend is forced at gunpoint to sample the evil brew. Mildred Harris, the first Mrs. Charles Chaplin, is fine as Glaum's crippled and God-fearing sister, and the acting in lesser roles is fairly convincing and all but free from the most egregious of early silent-era histrionics.
by Hans J. Wollstein
review
