The laughs are in watching cattleman Nick Barkley (Peter Breck) be outsmarted by Milton Berle, win a flock of sheep from him in a card game and hate the whole idea until his fellow cattlemen try to force him to get rid of the sheep. Then he digs in his heels and stubborn takes over. He will not let anyone tell him what to do with HIS sheep. Robert Fuller as the leader of the cattlemen trying to get rid of the sheep is in a nasty role here, uncommon for him, but believable. Berle is very sympathetic, very sweet, and very not funny in his role as the sheepherder, taking care of his orphaned niece Eileen Baral, a fine child actor of the 60s and 70s you'd see everywhere from I Spy to Big Valley to a recurring role on Nanny and the Professor.
It turns out Berle the sheepherder was deliberately trying to get rid of the flock he couldn't care for anymore but thought he was losing them to Jarrod Barkley (Richard Long) who he thought was better suited to take care of the flock. An interesting piece of trivia - Richard Long's uncle, Jack McCord was a real-life Tom Barkley of the frontier in Alaska in the early and mid 1900s, in BOTH the cattle and sheep industries in Alaska. It seems there was no problem with combining the two industries up there and apparently, it's not a problem these days either.