Kate Beecher, a young woman from Boston, looks ahead with a sense of restless longing to the life her family and friends expect her to embrace. She doesn't know what she wants, or who, until she moves with her family to the wild Montana Territory of the 1860's. Just eighteen and quietly struggling against the social constraints of the era, Kate meets a woman who fires first her imagination, and then her dreams. Jessie Forbes, a fiercely independent but touchingly tender rancher, finds in Kate the passion she had unknowingly sought all her life. This is the story of their struggle to love in a land and time as cruel as it was beautiful.