When three women living on the edge of the American frontier are driven mad by harsh pioneer life, the task of saving them falls to the pious, independent-minded Mary Bee Cuddy. Transporting the women by covered wagon to Iowa, she soon realizes just how daunting the journey will be, and employs a low-life drifter, George Briggs, to join her. The unlikely pair and the three women head east, where a waiting minister and his wife have offered to take the women in. But the group first must traverse the harsh Nebraska Territories marked by stark beauty, psychological peril and constant threat.

An aging cowboy must choose between his desire to remain free and the responsibilities of maintaining a family.

This film tells the true-life story of Yuri Nosenko, a top Soviet KGB agent who defected to the West at the height of the Cold War in 1962.