In 1885 young Rose Edwards is widowed by Montana vigilantes who hang her husband for an alleged theft, then burn her Yellowstone Valley cabin to the ground as a warning for her and others of her kind to quit the territory. Penniless and illiterate, yet fiercely independent, Rose begins a two-year odyssey to revisit the land of her childhood, a land she once traveled with her father, an itinerant robe trader among the Assiniboines and Blackfeet. But the old ways of the hunter and trapper are disappearing as Europeans flood the ranges with vast herds of cattle. With an aging roan gelding as her closest friend, Rose becomes a reluctant hero of an indigenous population as she stubbornly pushes back against the invading aristocracy.