In San Francisco in the 1850s, a city where gold fever has left shipowners short-handed, Bat Morgan, a sailor come ashore is robbed and nearly shanghaied aboard another ship. Managing to escape, he sticks around town to pay back those responsible and then to take a cut in the action in the vice district. Organizing the various gambling houses (and other forms of vice implied but, for Code reasons, not explicitly stated) into a consolidated enterprise in alliance with a corrupt city boss, Jim Dailey, he comes into conflict with a crusading newspaper, run by Jean Barrat, the daughter of the late murdered publisher, and Charles Ford, the idealistic editor.