Plot
Set during the early years of the California Gold Rush, the film tells of the adventures of Caroline Frost, the wilful and spoilt daughter of a US Senator. He does not approve of her beau, Lt Robert Latham, of the US cavalry, and persuades President James K Polk to post Latham to guard gold shipments from the California mines owned by Jake Carstair.
Caroline travels by train and steamship and manages to join a wagon-train about to trek overland to the West. She falls in with Johnny, a debonair but ruthless gambler and two comically inept opportunists, Prince Gregory Stroganovsky and his much put-upon servant Koppa.
Adapting slowly to the rigours of the journey, she first claims to be married to the Prince (as no unattached women are allowed to join the wagon-train) and then further claims to be actually married to Carstair.
She eventually reaches Sonora in California. Here, her problems are quickly sorted out. After some confusion between Carstair and his real wife, Caroline decides that she really loves Johnny. Her Father, who has followed her, is reconciled.
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Famous quotes containing the word plot:
“James’s great gift, of course, was his ability to tell a plot in shimmering detail with such delicacy of treatment and such fine aloofness—that is, reluctance to engage in any direct grappling with what, in the play or story, had actually “taken place”Mthat his listeners often did not, in the end, know what had, to put it in another way, “gone on.””
—James Thurber (1894–1961)
“Morality for the novelist is expressed not so much in the choice of subject matter as in the plot of the narrative, which is perhaps why in our morally bewildered time novelists have often been timid about plot.”
—Jane Rule (b. 1931)
“But, when to Sin our byast Nature leans,
The careful Devil is still at hand with means;
And providently Pimps for ill desires:
The Good Old Cause, reviv’d, a Plot requires,
Plots, true or false, are necessary things,
To raise up Common-wealths and ruine Kings.”
—John Dryden (1631–1700)