Dan Evans, a small time farmer, is hired to escort Ben Wade, a dangerous outlaw, to Yuma. As Evans and Wade wait for the 3:10 train to Yuma, Wade's gang is racing to free him.
When his cattlemen abandon him for the gold fields, rancher Wil Andersen is forced to take on a collection of young boys as his cowboys in order to get his herd to market in time to avoid financial disaster.
Young Travis Coates is left to take care of the family ranch with his mother and younger brother while his father goes off on a cattle drive in the 1860s.
Ross Bodine and Frank Post are cowhands on Walt Buckman's R-Bar-R ranch. Bodine is older and broods a bit about how he will get along when he's too old to cowboy.
Rosario, the niece of the rancher, returns to the ranch after ten years of absence. She takes in Margarito, a worker at the ranch, who is immediately smitten by her.
A sheep rancher entrusts his goofy sheepdog Dizzy to guard his herd one night. The dog is told to blow a whistle when he sees a wolf, but he spends his time fooling his master by "crying wolf," and he proceeds to blow the whistle for no reason other than to excite the farmer.
Swindler in jail devises a scheme to blackmail the family of recently deceased people, threatening to tell supposedly incriminating facts about their dead relatives' lives.