Sammy is a teenage cutter living with her meth addicted mother in a trailer on the Indian Ridge Reservation. Her mother's boyfriend is a drug dealer using the reservation as a cover for his drug trafficking. David, Sammy's best friend, is a foster youth and helps her to escape from this dysfunctional life she's had to endure since her father died.

Set in Kansas during the early 1900s, a teen-aged Native American boy is taken from his family and forced to attend a distant Indian "training" school to assimilate into White society. When he escapes to return to his family, Sam Franklin, a bounty hunter of Cherokee descent, is hired to find and return him to the institution. Franklin, a former Indian scout for the U.S. Army, has renounced his Native heritage and has adopted the White Man's way of life, believing it's the only way for Indians to survive. Along the way, a tragic incident spurs Franklin's longtime nemesis, the famous "Indian Fighter" Sheriff Henry McCoy, to pursue both Franklin and the boy.