Thirty years have passed since Andre Pelletier's final parting from his brother at the Horse Creek rendezvous. He has achieved prominence in his adopted Apsaalooke village as White Grizzly, war chief, and a member of the Council.
War hangs over the Powder and Bighorn River country with the Cheyenne and Arapaho nations joining the Lakota to fight the onslaught of white migration, and the hated bluecoat soldiers over the treaty-breaking Bozeman Road. The Apsaalooke were content to let their enemy, the Lakota, struggle with the soldiers until an Army company out of Fort Phil Kearny attacks White Grizzly's village hurling them into the war.
Due to his knowledge of the white man's world the Council looks to White Grizzly for direction in fighting the soldiers. Between his concerns for his family, a son gone insane becoming renegade, and the realization that the world they knew is rapidly disappearing, Andre struggles to find answers for the present, and what their impact will be on the ominous future facing them.
With war looming over them, Andre makes the journey to the Poudre Canyon to leave the women and children of his family in the safe care of his brother, Jean. Then, accompanied by his sons, he returns to the Big Horn River as White Grizzly - war chief, to fight a war he knows they cannot win.