James Parker and Harry Holt are on an expedition in Africa in search of the elephant burial grounds that will provide enough ivory to make them rich. Parker’s beautiful daughter Jane arrives unexpectedly to join them. Jane is terrified when Tarzan and his ape friends abduct her, but when she returns to her father’s expedition she has second thoughts about leaving Tarzan.

Two families, abolitionist Northerners the Stonemans and Southern landowners the Camerons, intertwine in director D.W. Griffith’s controversial Civil War epic. When Confederate colonel Ben Cameron is captured in battle, nurse Elsie Stoneman petitions for his pardon. In Reconstruction-era South Carolina, Cameron founds the Ku Klux Klan, battling Elsie’s congressman father and his African-American protégé, Silas Lynch.

A husband-and-wife detective team takes on the search for a missing inventor and almost get killed for their efforts.

The friendship between two orphans endures even though they grow up on opposite sides of the law and fall in love with the same woman.