It is 1883, and hunting buffalo has all but emptied the plains, shrinking a once-mighty herd from about 60 million to just a few thousand souls. Sandy McKenzie, Stewart Granger, a famous buffalo hunter for the Army Engineers, watches his own small herd of cattle fall to a stampede of bison. He teams up with a new partner, the obsessive Charles Gilson, Robert Taylor, who believes killing is natural and even primal. While McKenzie grows weary of the endless chase, Gilson derives a stark, chilling pleasure from his “stands”—the ability to extinguish an entire herd in a single, calculated moment. They recruit an old friend of McKenzie, a legendary skinner known as Woodfoot, Lloyd Nolan because of his peg leg, and a young hand named Jimmy O’Brien, Russ Tamblyn, whose mother was Dakota, to join their caravan.
When Gilson tracks down and destroys an Indian raiding party, he takes a captive Indian woman—handled by the Indian girl, Debra Paget—and a toddler. The presence of the captive woman sows tension, and Gilson’s grip on reality begins to slip, pushing him toward a dangerous, paranoid brink. He grows convinced that McKenzie has stolen a valuable white buffalo hide. In truth, Jimmy had taken the hide and placed it in a tree along with the body of one of Gilson’s victims, a detail rooted in the religious customs of their people.
Across a bone-strewn landscape, Gilson relentlessly pursues McKenzie, the woman, and Jimmy to a cave perched high on a bluff. The air is bitterly cold and snowfall presses in as McKenzie urges caution and humanity. He persuades Gilson to let Jimmy continue with the cattle, which are bound for the Indian agency where the starving people wait for aid. Night falls, and Gilson declares his distrust of McKenzie, insisting he come down come morning. A solitary buffalo appears, and Gilson shoots and skins it with a brutal practicality, muttering, > “You'll keep me warm.”
Morning light reveals the consequences of Gilson’s fixation. McKenzie and the Indian girl emerge from shelter to find Gilson frozen to death, his gun still pointed toward the cave as if waiting to ambush them. The raw buffalo skin has become a cruel, icy coffin, its dampness turning fur and flesh into a chilling emblem of winter’s cruel arithmetic. Snow gathers on the pelt, making it resemble the white buffalo itself. The two riders press on, leaving the dead man behind, while the camera climbs to the treetop where the white buffalo skin hangs as a stark, haunting trophy.
