Riders of the Sand Storm is a 1925 silent Western.
Social & External
The Cowboy
The Girl
Secondary Role
Ranger Job "Blue Streak" McCoy helps a miner and his pretty young daughter who are trying to protect their valuable mine from a gang leader who wants to take it.
A dying prospector tells "Peters the Pacific" about a mine he has discovered for "the mate's girl" and the ambush he has been set upon by mine jumpers, and gives Peters the location of the mine. In town, Peters uncovers the corrupt dealings of a dance hall owner, Jim Blalock, and Peter Hunter.
Esteban, a white boy, is raised by an Indian squaw, who believes she is his mother and from whom Beaugard steals the papers documenting Esteban's birth and his right to inherit a ranch. When he grows up, Esteban falls in love with Patricia Benton, Beaugard "exposes" Esteban to Patricia, and the villain taunts the boy, telling him that he has no right to a white woman.
A little girl and her father are among the settlers in a small western town. The father is very friendly with the neighboring Indian tribe and is presented with a quaint piece of metal representing a dragon's claw, the tribe's good luck omen. Some time later, while traveling with his daughter, he is held up by a band of bandits and shot dead. A bandit takes from him this dragon's claw. Years pass. The little girl has grown into a beautiful young lady. She marries. Their love is very real and their life most happy. He decides to go out west to see a mine that yields the richest gold and his wife expresses a desire to go along with him. The mine is christened "The Dragon's Claw," because of an Indian charm the man owns. While out on a western desert, he shows the dragon's claw to his wife. She then recognizes it as the kind her father possessed when he was killed. She has understood it to be the only one of its kind. She now believes it is her husband who killed her father.
While in Europe, Chaddie Green, a society girl, discovers that she has been left penniless. She returns to the United States and meets Duncan MacKail, who is equally broke though he owns grainland in the West. Duncan and Chaddie are married and go west to homestead. Duncan hires Ollie, a Swedish caretaker, who frightens Chaddie. When business takes Duncan away, Chaddie goes to take care of Percy Woodhouse, an Englishman who has become ill at his place fifteen miles away. Her horse runs away, and she is forced to spend the night there. She sleeps under a wagon, but Duncan is nevertheless angry and jealous.
As a baby, John Ermine is stolen from a wagon train by the Crow Indians and is adopted by Chief Fire Bear. John grows to manhood, ignorant that he is a white man until his parentage is disclosed to him by Crooked Bear, a white hermit who is on friendly terms with the Crows. Crooked Bear teaches John the language and customs of the white man's civilization, impressing upon him that it is his sacred responsibility to keep peace between the white men and the Indians.
Drifters Tom Williams and Joe Morgan have a chance meeting with the sheriff's daughter and learn that her brother Jim is being held prisoner in Line Hollow by Wolf, who aspires to be the next sheriff. They aid the sheriff in finding the outlaw gang and rescuing Jim. Tom decides to stop drifting and stay near the sheriff's daughter.
Evelyn Nelson portrays the character Frances Powell in this story that centers on themes of justice and personal vendettas in the old West.
Bill Drake is a cowpoke who must prove himself innocent of robbing the general store. The real culprit, as our hero detects, is Tom Evans, the weakling son of a local rancher.
After inheriting his uncle's ranch, a cowpoke manages to capture a ghost of the range, break up some cattle rustlers, and win the girl.
Harley Hennage, a gambler, loves Marie but remains silent when he realizes that she is in love with Oliver Corblay, a prospector. After Corblay and Marie marry, Harley moves to the distant town of San Pasqual and does not see his old sweetheart until her husband is killed while staking a claim in the desert.
An outlaw decides to hang up his guns and lead the "straight" life. His foster son falls for the daughter of a wealthy estate owner. The crooked manager of the estate wants the girl for himself--so he can control the estate when the father dies--and tells the father that the boy is an outlaw's son.
Our hero is mistaken for a bandit. Al's girl Nancy at first believes him to be guilty, but he manage to convince her that the real bandit is McDonald.
A notorious gambler and card cheat, George Forrester, rules a little western town with an iron hand. The men of the town plot to catch him cheating and do, but his men save him from danger. In the same town lives Gerald Austen, or Aitkens, who had left his tyrannical father in the east and made good in the west.
Bart Carson is in love with Lou and even goes to jail to save Walter A. Walker, a man she says is her brother but who is really a husband who has deserted his wife and two children.
Hired ranch hand Tex Smith is smitten with Lucy Blake, who lives in the cattle settlement of Marco. Meanwhile, Indian chief Brave Bear despises the encroachment of white people and conspires with Sam Hardman to steal the town's cattle during a rodeo.
Miner Dan Stuyvesant finally strikes it rich, but on his way to report his claim, he is shot. When Jack Dedlow, the head of a gang of outlaws, hears this news, he rides to Stuyvesant's cabin intending to secure the claim for himself. There the outlaws find Stuyvesant's daughter Hilda, the sweetheart of Tom Flynn, and are about to draw cards for her when Dago Sam pulls out his guns and spirits her out the door. Because Tom is his only friend, Sam determines to protect Hilda from the gang, but when Tom suspiciously questions his intentions toward Hilda, Sam decides to live up to the town's poor opinion of him.
Jack Darling of the North West Mounted Police is ordered to track down and arrest murderer Alec Young, whose girl, Dancing Pete, performs in the Nugget dance hall. En route to Nugget, Jack meets Hope Ross, who is caring for her sister's baby. Although the two fall in love, the outlook for a happy romance appears hopeless, because he believes that she is a married mother, and she thinks that he is an outlaw.
Returning to House of a Thousand Candles a mystery unfolds involving two lookalike girls...or is there only one very crafty one?
Campbell is disgraced and removed from the service. He saves the girl who was being carried off and rounds up the crooks.
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.
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.
A wandering cowboy gets caught up in a range war.
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 rancher, his shady bride and his one-armed brother fight amid carpetbaggers in Texas.
Sam Burton's second wife is a Kiowa, and their son is therefore born mixed-race. When a struggle starts between the whites and the native Kiowas, the Burton family is split between loyalties.
During the war for Texas independence, one man leaves the Alamo before the end (chosen by lot to help others' families) but is too late to accomplish his mission, and is branded a coward. Since he cannot now expose a gang of turncoats, he infiltrates them instead. Can he save a wagon train of refugees from Wade's Guerillas?
In 1850s Oregon, a businessman is torn between his love of two very different women and his loyalty to a compulsive gambler friend who goes over the line.
A man and his partner arrive at a small Western town to kill its most powerful man because the former blames him for his wife's death.
A huge meteorite has plunged into the Great Valley, cutting off the water supply and causing tension among the once-peaceful dinosaurs. While the adults argue and turn against one another, Littlefoot and his friends venture out to find a new source of water, only to be constantly bullied by a trio of older dinosaurs. The journey becomes a fight for survival when the group is cornered by a pack of Velociraptors and trapped by a sudden wildfire.
A plague of locusts strikes the Great Valley, decimating the plants and forcing the dinosaurs to migrate in search of food. When the adults in the herd begin fighting over the scarce resources, young Littlefoot and his friends Petrie, Cera, Ducky and Spike split off from the main group, becoming stranded on an island after their path was destroyed by a tsunami. As they search for a way off the island, they encounter an old acquaintance who may become friend or foe.
A gunfighter and a cowboy help a Mexican girl avenge the land-related murder of her parents.
A man wanders out of the desert not knowing who he is. His brother finds him, and helps to pull his memory back of the life he led before he walked out on his family and disappeared four years earlier.
After striking gold in Alaska, the romantic George sends his womanizing partner Sam to bring his fiancée up from Seattle. When Sam finds that she has already married, he returns instead with Angel, a dancer originally from France.
At the end of the Civil War, a Confederate team is ordered to rob a Union payroll train but the war ends leaving these men with their Union loot, until the Feds come looking for it.
Embezzler, shill, all around confidence man S. Quentin Quale is heading west to find his fortune; he meets the crafty but simple brothers Joseph and Rusty Panello in a train station, where they steal all his money. They're heading west, too, because they've heard you can just pick the gold off the ground. Once there, they befriend an old miner named Dan Wilson whose property, Dead Man's Gulch, has no gold. They loan him their last ten dollars so he can go start life anew, and for collateral, he gives them the deed to the Gulch. Unbeknownst to Wilson, the son of his longtime rival, Terry Turner (who's also in love with his daughter, Eva), has contacted the railroad to arrange for them to build through the land, making the old man rich and hopefully resolving the feud. But the evil Red Baxter, owner of a saloon, tricks the boys out of the deed, and it's up to them - as well as Quale, who naturally finds his way out west anyway - to save the day.
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?
A naive traveler in Laredo gets involved in a poker game between the richest men in the area, jeopardizing all the money he has saved for the purpose of settling with his wife and child in San Antonio.
Davy Crockett and his sidekick Georgie compete against boastful Mike Fink ("King of the River") in a boat race to New Orleans. Later, Davy and Georgie, allied with Fink, battle a group of river pirates trying to pass themselves off as Native Americans.
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.
