AllMovie

Veteran producer Benjamin B. Hampton had an affinity for filming the works of pulp writer Zane Grey. Grey's The Desert of Wheat constituted the basis for this fine silent western starring Roy Stewart and Hampton's wife Claire Adams. Stewart plays Kurt Dawn, a returning war hero who finds the old neighborhood ablaze with radical fervor and forms a vigilante group. The story is far from politically correct, of course, but Riders of the Dawn was reviewed more as a rousing melodrama than a treatise against the burgeoning labor movement.