On the day after Thanksgiving, 1868, George Armstrong Custer and the Seventh Cavalry attack a sleeping Cheyenne village on the banks of the Washita. Ironically, the village was presided over by Black Kettle, the foremost peace chief of the Cheyenne Nation.

During the senseless slaughter of men, women, and children, the soldiers find Eden Murdoch, a white woman presumed dead years before. The army expects to use her for propaganda purposes, and to refute accusations that the Cheyenne village posed no threat to white settlers, but Eden refuses to take part. She refuses to even acknowledge that the army "rescued" her from a "savage" society.