Lisa Waters, a half native American married to a freedman attorney, becomes the social queen of Fort Smith. She forms a lifelong friendship with the wife of John Ross, the Cherokee political giant but alienates the opposition, Treaty Party leader Standhope Watie. Her famous Trail of Tears sister's cruel murder exposes simmering public tension that forces a move to Tallequah, her mother's ancestral home. Business and commercial growth propels the family's prosperity but prompts an identity struggle. Influenced by Ezra, her husband; Moss, a fiddler ex-slave activist; and Mary Stapler, the nation's first lady, she organizes a freedom railroad and founds a women's rights movement. Unrest disrupts these efforts and thrusts her confused personality into the civil war as a US army nurse. She loses a beloved spouse and sense of reality at the Battle of Pea Ridge, then adopts a grief driven quest for blood lust vengeance.
The freedman musician rescues the widow and flees the conflict to a secluded valley sustained by a Union affiliated indigenous minority. Pin guerrilla fighters gather to resist Stan Watie's First Cherokee Mounted Rifles. Social strife consumes and divides native Americans, but Lisa's motherhood instinct adopts an orphan, James, and his sisters. The grieving woman's hatred of her husband's killers motivates vicious attacks against Confederates and earns a title, the Judaculla, after a mythic warrior. She assumes leadership of the unit but loses the fiddling savior, captured and imprisoned at the infamous Fort Davis Detention Camp. She begins an aggressive campaign against General Watie and his nephew, Elias Boudinet. The rebels capture her surrogate son, and the Pins imprison the General's kin. A prisoner exchange negotiation confirms the general murdered her sister years earlier.
Stimulated by the revelation, Lisa and her fighters join Federal troops at the Battle of Honey Creek, where Confederate military domination ceases. That success does not stop Watie. He burns the capital at Tallequah, the Park Hill Ross estate and captures the President. Appomattox ends official conflict, but General Watie refuses armistice. She releases her devotees and returns to the valley. Without Yankee help, massive indigenous rebel support creates masked night riders and battles Reconstruction. Northern sympathizers suffer from victory, including veterans living in Lisa's basin. Winter's starvation forces the head to abandon her wards and hunt for food with James. She fails and succumbs to disease, which delays a return. Arriving in the Spring, the leader discovers a devastated graveyard with a few survivors alive, nourished by cannibalism. Losing her followers and adopted daughters destroys the woman's soul and sends her on a desperate search for redemption.
Lisa obsesses on the education and care of Cherokee children along with the released but destroyed prisoner, Moss. James devotes himself to a girl disturbed by eating her relative's flesh. A Union army group returns to the recovering encampment with financing for a field hospital. The Waters matriarch sees harnessing steam to manufacture railroad ties and coal leases in Choctaw territory as a profitable opportunity to service an expanding rail network. Enterprise stimulates the native American economy. Political stress against Reconstruction destroys the business and her relationship with her son. She retires to her defunct wood mill and her home. A deranged impoverished Stanhope Watie attacks his old enemy with imaginary troops and kills Moss, her last defender. She captures the General and returns her foe to hang before his family. As the noose tightens, she questions her similarity to his evil and cuts him free. She retreats and asks her son's forgiveness. Their indigenous culture and the two as family welcome the turn of a new century.
