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A mountain man who wishes to live the life of a hermit becomes the unwilling object of a long vendetta by the Crow tribe and proves to be a match for their warriors in single combat on the early frontier.

In the 1850s, a boy and his family are stranded in the Rocky Mountains. With the help of a local mountaineer, a Sioux medicine man, and a legendary bear known as "Walking Thunder, " the boy learns to become a man.

A grim incident from American pioneer history is recreated as a determined group of settlers, facing almost insurmountable odds, struggles to reach California in 1846. Already divided by internal dissension over the choice of a leader and the selection of a route, the wagon train is soon decimated by Indian raids, a scarcity of food and water, and the unrelenting forces of nature. Finally after months of hardship, the party reaches the High Sierras, only to be stranded in the middle of the pass by an early snowstorm. And as fear of an agonizing death from starvation forces the abandonment of conventional rules of human behavior, the pioneers face a new enemy - each other.