The neglected attendees of the Box Canyon Boys Camp find their lives turned around by Cotton, who challenges them to join efforts to save a herd of buffalo and rediscover themselves in the process.
Two children live in squalor with their drunken stepfather, maintaining themselves through their cleverness in catching clams and the hope that they might someday attend school.
A former teacher named Mary Bee Cuddy and a claim jumper named George Briggs escort a group of troubled pioneer women across the American West in the 1850s to a sanitarium in the eastern United States.
