Nevada Smith is the young son of an Indian American mother and European-American father. When his father is killed by three men over gold, Nevada sets out to find them and kill them. The boy is taken in by a gun merchant. The gun merchant shows him how to shoot, on time and correctly.

Henry Thomas tries to overcome the horrors of his childhood and start a new life with his wife and kid. However, his abusive step-mother and his dependence on alcohol threaten to ruin his future.

A renowned former army scout is hired by ranchers to hunt down rustlers but finds himself on trial for the murder of a boy when he carries out his job too well. Tom Horn finds that the simple skills he knows are of no help in dealing with the ambitions of ranchers and corrupt officials as progress marches over him and the old west.

A disenchanted young Professor of Semantics at a California college learns of a distant relative's death in Missouri. He journeys cross-country to the funeral, then decides to spend the summer there and work as a laborer for a power-line company. In time, he meets a girl and falls in love but then faces an important decision as to which direction he wants his life to go.

Engineer Jake Holman arrives aboard the gunboat USS San Pablo, assigned to patrol a tributary of the Yangtze in the middle of exploited and revolution-torn 1926 China. His iconoclasm and cynical nature soon clash with the 'rice-bowl' system which runs the ship and the uneasy symbiosis between Chinese and foreigner on the river. Hostility towards the gunboat's presence reaches a climax when the boat must crash through a river-boom and rescue missionaries upriver at China Light Mission.

A small forest town is trying to promote itself as a place for tourists to come enjoy the therapeutic hot springs and unspoiled nature. Dr. Stockmann, however, makes the inconvenient discovery that the nature around the village is not so unspoiled. In fact, the runoff from the local tanning mill has contaminated the water to a dangerous degree. The town fathers argue that cleaning up the mess would be far too expensive and the publicity would destroy the town's reputation, so therefore news of the pollution should be suppressed. Dr. Stockmann decides to fight to get the word out to the people, but receives as very mixed reaction.