Part 1: Down on his luck drifter is offered a dangerous, but profitable job of mixing nitroglycerine for outlaws who are using it to rob banks. George also falls in love with a saloon girl and begins a business venture with his earnings.
Outlaw Ed Carstairs trades identities with a man dying of a snakebite wound, then is suprised when the man is brought into Dodge and seems to be recovering.
Kitty's conscience is torn between her sense of obligation to a man (James Daly) who saved her life and her concern for the law and Marshal Matt Dillon.
Deputy District Attorney Shephard will do anything to further his career, including having outlaw John Farron killed, instead of being able to give himself up.
After eight years as a down-on-his-luck farmer, husband & father, and reformed outlaw (Michael Ansara) tries to make ends meet by rejoinning his old gang to rob the Dodge City freight office.
Bull Bannock (Alan Hale), retired heavyweight champion of the world, attempts to make a home for himself in Dodge City, and tries to buy Miss Kitty's Longbranch Saloon.
Lars Karlgren, a Scandinavian immigrant and his teenage son Petter, find the West even wilder than they had imagined when they settle in Dodge City. Petter gets framed for a murder of a man who was picking a fight with him.
Doc Adams takes up arms to defend a gold shipment from bandits, first during a stagecoach ambush and then at a weigh station. He is aided by a blind man and a wounded man in the battle against the bandits.
All of Dodge City is suffering from a drought. A rainmaker (Guy Raymond) tries to put an end to it before the town's public well, their last source of water, runs dry.
Hootie Kyle is a poor but honest farmer whose credit has run out. Matt Dillon and Festus lend him some money, then he gets swindled out of it in a poker game. Later Hootie gets circumstantially framed for the murder of the card shark who swindled him.
Six years after her husband's hanging, Ma Stone plots her revenge against Matt Dillon by first kidnapping Kitty to use as a lure and then jailing Matt to be hanged on the morning of the second day with Kitty watching as her man died.