Buster Keaton plays a melancholy midwesterner, name of Friendless, who hops a freight train for Arizona, intent on becoming a cowboy. His dream is realized, in a quiet sort of way, when he removes a pebble from the foot of a limping cow, Brown Eyes, and she becomes his constant companion. When Brown Eyes is to be shipped to Los Angeles, Friendless inadvertently accompanies her, caught mid-farewell in a car full of bovines on a train barreling west. Keaton makes the most of the comedy inherent in a herd of livestock wandering the streets of Los Angeles, exploring department stores and beauty parlors, but for the most part, Go West is memorable for more lyrical images, such as that of Keaton and Brown Eyes walking across a vast plain. As David Thompson writes in Richard Roud's Cinema: A Critical Dictionary, “This is the most atypical and at the same time one of the most endearing of his films. With acrobatics and gag comedy at a minimum, he experimented uncharacteristically with a quality of pathos in his depiction of Friendless and his comradeship with a gentle, sweet cow. Although this was his only essay in sentiment, his grace and taste carry it off with a style that is never mawkish.”