The Switchtower

The tenderfoot came into camp with his ill-gotten money intending to purchase a claim. The faker salted a claim, hoping thereby to secure the money. But the gambler got ahead of him through cheating at cards. Later the tenderfoot sought to regain his money and in the struggle it fell into worthier hands.

On a whim, a greedy tycoon decides to corner the world market in wheat. This doubles the price of bread, forcing grain producers into charity lines and others further into poverty. The film contrasts the differences between the lives of those who work to grow the wheat and the life of the man who dabbles in its sale for profit.

Mrs. Thurston, a socially ambitious widow, is holding one of her famous Bohemian parties. To these functions are invited the leading lights of the several professions, actors, artists, musicians, etc. Surrounded by these men and women of art and letters, she was at first entertained, but they soon palled and bored. On this evening in particular, she is especially possessed of ennui, until the appearance of Raymond Hartley, a wealthy young bachelor, who is introduced into the circle by a newspaper man. An attachment immediately springs up between the widow and Raymond.

Broken by grief after his mother's death, Olaf becomes a wanderer. He is treated cruelly until he is given a meal by a woman at the homestead where she lives with her husband and baby. Olaf is able to return her kindness when he overhears a plot to rob the settlers of their home. He alerts the couple and delays the would-be thieves long enough for the husband to file a claim on his land. Olaf is injured by the claim jumpers but he recovers, alone and forgotten by those he has helped. He then moves aimlessly along.

A son leaves to seek his fortune in the city. Many years later he returns and checks into his parents' inn. They don't recognize him, but noticing his fat wallet, plan to rob him.

An experiment goes wrong and blinds a newly married chemist. The chemist's wife does not want to take on the burden of caring for the blind chemist, and her younger sister take her place.

Ramona, residing on her wealthy Spanish adoptive mother's rancho in California, falls in love with the Indian Alessandro. When Ramona is denied permission to marry Alessandro, the lovers elope, only to find a life of great hardship and unhappiness amidst the greed and injustice of the white landowners.

Nekhludoff, a Russian nobleman serving on a jury, discovers that the young girl on trial, Katusha, is someone he once seduced and abandoned and that he himself bears responsibility for reducing her to crime. He sets out to redeem her and himself in the process.

The widowed elderly mother of three adult children, two sons and a daughter, wishing to relieve herself of the burden of care of her property, decides to divide it up among her children. To her son Charles, a wild but kind young fellow, she leaves a small amount, feeling that he will soon run through it. The good-hearted boy is perfectly satisfied, believing in the wisdom of his mother's actions. He assumes she will find a home with one of his siblings, who are married and settled. The old woman moves in with her married son, but is driven out by his wife over an argument about her young granddaughter. She is forced to move into a squalid apartment in a cheap tenement house, but is evicted for failing to pay her rent. Mack Sennett appears as a bartender in this film.

A mountain girl is seduced by a traveler from the valley. Her brother tracks the seducer down and kills him. In retaliation, the sheriff captures the brother and prepares to lynch him. Mother intervenes and, to save her son the disgrace of hanging, shoots him.

Two sisters want to know whether there is romance in their future. One sister pulls the petals off of a flower, while the other has her fortune told by a gypsy. When the gypsy tells the fortune so as to serve his own purposes, complications soon develop.

A contest is being held in Cremona for the best violin, with Giannina's hand in marriage as the prize. Filippo is secretly in love with her, but is also ashamed of being a cripple, so he switches his superior violin with that of another apprentice, Sandro, whom Giannina loves.

A rich nobleman steals a perfume merchant's wife just prior to the French Revolution, in which the perfumer is a leader of the peasants. His priest made him swear an oath to leave vengeance to God, however.

Two miners are fighting over a woman, and one is about to murder the other in his sleep. At the critical moment, the woman introduces her fiancé from the city.

At a political club, the members debate whose bust will replace that of Theodore Roosevelt. Unable to agree, each goes to a sculptor's studio and bribes him to sculpt a bust of the individual favorite. Instead, the sculptor spends their fees on a dinner with his model during which he becomes so inebriated that he is taken to jail. There he has a nightmare, wherein three busts are created and animated from clay (through stop-motion photography) in the likenesses of Democrat William Jennings Bryan and Republicans Charles W. Fairbanks and William Howard Taft. Finally an animated bust of Roosevelt appears.

Soon after their engagement, Bill goes to sea, and Emily vows to stay true until his return. Unknown to her, Bill marries another woman from a different port. Emily waits faithfully for six years, finally becoming dangerously ill. When Bill suddenly appears in town with his family, Joe, who has loved Emily all along, forces Bill to make Emily's final moments happy by pretending he has returned to marry her.