Thomas Atherton was a young stable master from Massachusetts who had always dreamed of leaving Boston behind and heading west across the great frontier. When he met the legendary Buffalo Bill Cody at his famous Wild West Show, Thomas decided the time had finally come to make his dream a reality. He saw his chance when he heard about a $5,000 reward offered to the first man to find a surviving herd of the nearly extinct buffalo. And so he set out to test his mettle on a buffalo hunt. But he would soon find that taming horses was nothing compared with taming the prairie and the rugged mountains beyond---or surviving run-ins with vicious outlaws and rustlers.