Set in the West of 1846, Buffalo Man is a love story between a young non-Mormon boy and a Mormon girl. Anna Sinclair is only fourteen-years-old when she leaves Nauvoo with her family for the trek west to the Great Salt Lake Valley. Wes Hamlin is a sixteen-year-old non-Mormon who is falsely accused of killing a Mormon. He runs from the law and hitches up with an old cantankerous mountain man, Crocker Sloan, who introduces him to trapping and living with the Lakota Indians. Over the next three years the two youngsters experience numerous adventures as they move west, occasionally meeting and eventually falling in love. Yet, before their love can be realized Wes must establish his innocence and Anna must resist her family's desire for her to enter a polygamist marriage.