With the country distracted by the Spanish-American war, someone is stealing cattle on the border between Mexico and the United States.  Federal marshal Rocky Lane (Allan Lane) is sent to investigate.  He gets a job with Nugget Clark (Eddy Waller), a local feed merchant, and gets to know Nugget’s daughter, Alice (Phyllis Coates).  As was usually the case with these B-westerns, it turns out that the band of onery outlaws is secretly being led by a villain who is an otherwise respectable member of society.  When it comes to the Old West in these films, the biggest threat was not from the outlaws but instead from the greedy and corrupt settlers who wanted to get their own piece of the action and who were willing to sell out their own neighbors and sometimes their own country to get it.  It falls to Rocky and Nugget to save the day, rescue Alice from the bad guys, and recover the cattle.

This was the last of the B-westerns to star Allan Lane as Rocky Lane and Eddy Waller as his sidekick.  Unfortunately, the arrival of television made short programmers like this one obsolete.  Kids could now just watch westerns on television instead of spending the day down at the theater.  This was not a bad western for the Rocky Lane character to go out on, though.  The plot is predictable but that’s to be expected for a 53-minute programmer like this one.  However, Rocky is an appropriately square-jawed hero.  He rides his horse, Black Jack, with authority and he looks convincing handling a gun and throwing a punch.  There are actually some good shots involving the outlaws’s hideout, which just happens to be hidden behind a waterfall.  For western fans, El Paso Stampede is a watchable and undemanding genre entry.

As I mentioned earlier, this was the last film to star Allan Lane.  He appeared in a few more westerns after El Paso Stampede but it was always in supporting roles.  Allan Lane appeared in 88 films, the majority of which were B-westerns like this one.  Today, though, Lane is best-remembered for a role for which he wasn’t even given onscreen credit, providing the voice of the talking horse, Mr. Ed.