To fully appreciate the western comedy The Marshal's Daughter, one must be aware that its star, a zaftig, wide-eyed lass named Laurie Anders, was in 1953 a popular TV personality. A regular on The Ken Murray Show, Anders had risen to fame with the Southern-fried catchphrase "Ah love the wi-i-i-ide open spaces!" Striking while the iron was hot, the entrepreneurial Murray produced this inexpensive oater, which cast Anders as Laurie Dawson, the singing daughter of a U.S. marshal (Hoot Gibson). Teaming with her dad to capture outlaw Trigger Gans (Bob Duncan), Laurie briefly disguises herself as a masked bandit. Amidst much stock footage from earlier westerns and a plethora of lame jokes and dreadful puns, The Marshal's Daughter is a treat for trivia buffs, featuring such virile actors as Preston S. Foster, Johnny Mack Brown, Jimmy Wakely and Buddy Baer as "themselves."

Lem's traveling-band bus stops in a small town, where he immediately takes up with the boys in the town and decides to stay, even getting a job at a general store that has a large candy counter that is popular with the boys. Then at the town meeting, he suggests the town needs a scout troup, and volunteers his service as scout master, and the town gleefully accepts. He takes a special interest in Whitey, a troubled boy (Kurt Russell) with an alcoholic father, who wants nothing to do with the scouts, and whom he later catches breaking into the general store. Lem eventually turns the boy around, and marries the pretty bank clerk, and they take in Whitey when his father dies. He considers resigning from the Scout Leader position, and Whitey considers running away, after an incident on a cliff when the boy is put in charge of the troup. Years pass and the original troop members become adults, and a new set of boys are accidently caught up in some military war games. And Lem subsequently ages, and is honored for his service.