To protect her family, Sarah Whitman is forced to kill two intruders at her ranch who are fleeing from the law after a government robbery. Those murders haunt her as she searches for her missing husband in the raw frontier town of Fort Worth, Texas during the post-Civil War era. Accompanied by her teenage daughter, infant son, and their pet dog, Sarah is aided in her quest by a saloon madam, a Shakespeare quoting newspaper owner, a young deputy marshal, an alcoholic attorney, and, through it all, the memories of her deceased father. Hounding her every move is a private investigator, Jack Kilpatrick, who suspects Sarah has knowledge of the stolen funds.
The search leads Sarah into a courtroom where lynch law threatens to explode, to a remote Indian village to rescue her son, and, finally, to a sanatorium where she finds the clue that leads to her husband and allows her to "Return to the Bosque."