Dedication: In the entire history of mankind, there has been no race of men who have lived with more passion, poetry and nobility than the American Indian of the 19th Century. Never have there been braver knights, more reckless horsemanship, such tragic nobility... Bound together by some strange enchantment that dismissed all misery and poverty, blending the reality of the great outdoors with fantasy, rituals, spirits and dreams, they have created a sober history that will never die; poetry made of blood, not flowers, that will touch a light to the spirit as long as America is remembered...To this magnificent race of men and women - the American Indian - this picture is respectfully dedicated.
Beginning voiceover narration by Dawn Wells in the role of "Clayanna": "In the summer of 1840, a smallpox epidemic wiped out over half of the Blackfoot Nation. I was a young woman then, and this country was known as the Indian territory. Forty-nine years later, after the wagon trains moved westward, and the cowboys arrived with their herd of cattle, and pushed the buffalo off the grasslands, it was to become the state of Montana. But in my youth, the big sky country belonged to the eagle, the elk, the buffalo, and the bear. The people here were as much a part of the land as the wind and the sun. Looking north was Canada, where the aloof and proud Blackfoot tribes blended like shadows into the landscape. There, for generations, they have told around their campfires the legend of a great young chief of the Blackfoot and a white girl. I was that girl and the Blackfoot chief was called Winterhawk. Because his people were in deadly peril, Winterhawk was forced to ride to the white man's camp. The only white people in this country then were mountain men and a few missionaries. Some of the mountain men, like Winterhawk's friend Elk Horn Guthrie, married Indian women and built strong bonds of friendship with the tribe. Back then, Winterhawk was probably the most mysterious Indian in the west, even to the Indians. No white man but Guthrie had ever seen him. We'd heard of Winterhawk, but there was some doubt if he really existed. It was said by the Indians that this legendary and mysterious young chief, riding like the wind on his spotted white horse, was a messenger of spirits, and he could smell like a wolf, run like an antelope, and see like an eagle. The furs he trapped were said to be the finest in the land." The voice-over narration continues intermittently throughout the film and ends with: "Suddenly I knew what I had to do. That it was my life, and only I could choose the path I would travel. I knew Cotton would be all right. I was not to see my brother again for many years, 'til he was grown with a family of his own. I and Winterhawk melted into the forest in the mountains, and the howl of the coyote echoing in the moon-lit canyons became our music, and the wail of the wind, and the cry of the winterhawk, our song."