AllMovie

Burgeoning western star George O'Brien starred in this lavishly mounted but otherwise quite commonplace Northwest melodrama about a crime-fighting lumberjack. A very young John Wayne (still known as Marian Morrison) can be glimpsed in a saloon scene. Wayne's fortunes would escalate later that year with the release of Raoul Walsh's spectacular but ultimately disappointing The Big Trail. The son of San Francisco's police chief, O'Brien assured himself a place in film history starring in John Ford's The Iron Horse (1924) and opposite Janet Gaynor in Murnau's Sunrise (1927). He was a natural for "B" westerns, however, and later headlined what many considered one of the finest series ever made, at RKO in the late 1930s.