It is the story of the conquest of the Matterhorn. The film depicts the attempts made by various competing mountain men to subdue this peak, in the middle of the last Century one of the last still untouched. They succeeded in 1865 by the British led by illustrator Edward Whimper, who beat the Italian roped party led by Jean Antoine Carrel by only 150 meters. Whimper's roped party ended up in a massacre on the way back, where four of the seven members perished. Carrel, on July 16, 1865, planted the Italian tricolor on the same summit: two days later the British also reached it. The film was shot on documents kept in the newly created "Matterhorn Picture Gallery."