It's interesting to watch this "sissy" get challenged by his prospective father-in-law to prove himself in "becoming a man" by going out west for a year before he can marry the man's daughter, and then to try to interpret it. The guy kisses a couple of cowboys when he meets them at the train station, dresses like a fop, and carries a teeny weeny gun that the "real men" have a big laugh over. As he develops a friendship with one of them, it's hard not to see gay overtones in all this and wonder what producer (and possibly director) Alice Guy-Blaché's intention was.
Is he gay or bisexual and out of conformity to the times going to marry a woman? Or is he just a wimpy guy from the east who has to prove himself to his would-be father-in-law and a bunch of masculine cowboys? Regardless, the characterization is ultimately positive - this effeminate misfit of a man saves another's life in more ways than one and "makes good," rather than not being able to cut it. Is it saying we shouldn't judge a book by its cover, and be tolerant to different ways of being a man? Or is it saying that effeminate weaklings can and should be toughened up?
It may be a Rorschach test or another example of the old saying, "we see things not as they are but as we are," especially 108 years later. Anyway, the story is linear and simple which is a little unfortunate, but in the vignette of the male characters (even exaggerated as they are), and in their relationship to one another, it's fascinating.