In 1925, widowed businessman Elijah Winters brings his daughter Cherry from Long Island to stay at a trading post in a remote area some distance from Flagstaff, Arizona. To entertain herself, Cherry flirts with several of the cowboys, not realizing that they are very different from the young men she knew in the East. Also very different is Stephen Heftral, a young archeologist who is searching for an ancient and lost kiva of a primitive Indian tribe that disappeared centuries before in what became the land of the Navajos. Heftral believes that this lost kiva is most probably in a desert fastness called Beckyshibeta, the Navajo word for water hole. Elijah Winters colludes with Heftral to awaken Cherry to a new and healthier way of life by taking her, by force if necessary, to Beckyshibeta. Cherry comes to forget the luxury of her past in the beauty and dangers of the cañons and the thrill of herself making an important archeological discovery.