On deserting from a Royal Navy ship, sailor Barnaby Skye becomes a fur trapper in America. He marries an Indian woman, but she leaves him to become the second wife of an Indian chief. When another tribe abducts her, Skye goes to her rescue.

Barnaby Skye, seaman-deserter from the Royal Navy, Rocky Mountain trapper, and frontiersman extraordinaire, brings his Crow Indian wife, Many Quill Woman (whom Skye calls "Victoria"), to the trappers' rendezvous on the Popo Agie River of Wyoming in the summer of 1838. There, he learns that the beaver-trapping business is dying out. When he is offered a chance to become a post trader in Victoria's homeland, he makes the journey to St. Louis to present...

In the midst of a brutal winter, Skye's beloved Crow indian wife, Victoria, is critically wounded when a Blackfoot raiding party attacks a Crow hunting camp. Skye"s attempts a doctoring, Victoria's life hangs in the balance. Skye and Victoria struggle to survive cold and starvation.

Barnaby Skye and his two wives, Victoria of the Crow and Mary of the Shoshone, lead a party of tubercular children and their families through the desert Southwest in search of a cure at Virgin River, but their expedition is threatened by rival guides and superstitious fears.

When a dour fifteen-year-old Shoshone is prompted by a total eclipse to rename himself after a dreaded totemic bird and stirring discontent on the Wind River Reservation, schoolteacher Dirk, the son of Barnaby Skye, struggles to mediate a dangerous uprising.