The triumph and tragedy of Native American Jim Thorpe, who, after winning both the pentathlon and decathlon in the same Olympics, is stripped of his medals on a technicality.

Joe heads for South America to fight the Latin champ. Shipboard, he helps federal agents fight counterfeiters. He also spars with love interest Anne Howe.

When Edward Creighton leads the construction of the Western Union to unite East with West, he hires a Western reformed outlaw and a tenderfoot Eastern surveyor.

Texas Ranger Dusty Rivers ("Isn't that a contradiction in terms?", another character asks him) travels to Canada in the 1880s in search of Jacques Corbeau, who is wanted for murder. He wanders into the midst of the Riel Rebellion, in which Métis (people of French and Native heritage) and Natives want a separate nation. Dusty falls for nurse April Logan, who is also loved by Mountie Jim Brett. April's brother is involved with Courbeau's daughter Louvette, which leads to trouble during the battles between the rebels and the Mounties. Through it all Dusty is determined to bring Corbeau back to Texas (and April, too, if he can manage it.)

Radio star Jack Benny, intending to stay in New York for the summer, is forced by the needling of rival Fred Allen to prove his boasts about roughing it on his (fictitious) Nevada ranch. Meanwhile, singer Joan Cameron, whom Jack's fallen for and offended, is maneuvered by her sisters to the same Nevada town. Jack's losing battle to prove his manhood to Joan means broad slapstick burlesque of Western cliches.

Gangsters use a woman to get to a boxer and convince him to throw a big fight.

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?

While searching the South Pacific for a missing aviator, Bob Mitchell and Jimmy Wallace are caught in a typhoon and crack up on an island, escaping unharmed with the aid of Tura, a beautiful jungle girl who is the only inhabitant of the island and is believed a goddess by the natives of the adjoining islands. The three are about to leave the island on a make-shift raft when a gang of savage tribesman land, headed by Kuasa, a half-mad potentate who informs them that all whites are his mortal enemies because an Englishwoman once spurned his love and he got his revenge by stealing her daughter, who is Tura.

In 1890, two British expatriates, Robert Herrick and Huish, and German Captain Jakob Thorbecke, are commissioned to sail a Yankee schooner called The Golden State , whose captain and crew have died of smallpox. From Tehua in the South Seas to Australia, they are to deliver a cargo of champagne. Thorbecke decides to head for Peru, however, so he can sell the merchandise and pocket the money. While sailing, Faith Wishart, daughter of the deceased captain, comes out of her hiding place on board and, by briefly holding Thorbecke at gunpoint, demands he make the delivery.