José, halfbreed trapper, adores Lucy and necessarily dislikes Will, whom he correctly counts his successful rival.
Rarely are the courts resorted to in that portion of the North where these events transpired and the rough lumbermen quickly decide to lynch Will.
Already the noose is about Will's neck and a death prayer on his lips and then, in the nick of time, Lucy arrives with the precious confession, and Will gathers his faithful sweetheart to him in the tenderest scene that has ever closed a thrilling picture.
Lonergan was an experienced newspaperman still employed by The New York Evening World while writing scripts for the Thanhouser productions.
[3] Edwin Thanhouser would later recall that this production featured a minor part of a woodsman who ended up ruining the scene through excessive smoking.
He described the young actor trying to focus attention on himself by smoking "like the consolidation of seven chimneys", but ended up obscuring the action of the scene.
[4] The film was reviewed positively in The Moving Picture World for the real snow and weather and for being a high-class drama.
[1] A shorter modern synopsis from the incomplete surviving print from the Library of Congress indicates that the film is lost after the halfbreed falls from the precipice.
[14] The survival and rediscovery of this film was by happenstance in the Canadian gold rush town of Dawson City, in Yukon, Canada.
In 1929, Clifford Thomson, then-employed by the Canadian Bank of Commerce and also treasurer of the hockey association, solved the problem of the library's stock of film and the inadequate ice rink.
Dawson Amateur Athletic Association continued to receive new nitrate films which would later fuel the destruction of the entire complex in a fire in 1951.
The Dawson Film Find material was collected and preserved, with these prints becoming the last surviving records of these studios.