A young Blain Coulter is raised by his Indian mother, White Feather, in a small Wyoming town where prejudice abounds. Bullied through his school years by the privileged Todd brothers, Blain see's the white man's world as an ugly place. When his mother dies from overwork he returns to the Cheyenne to live with his grandfather. Blain finds love and takes a wife, Summer Moon, while living with the Cheyenne, but fate takes her out of his life when she stops an arrow met for him.