The Canyon

Accompanied by Champion, his faithful Morgan, Reuben Lee had followed the trail from Louisiana to Santa Fe trusting and being betrayed at each step along the way. The trail led him west into the Arizona Territory and he followed it, not to get somewhere, but to get away. Looking for the lost “Source of All the Waters,” he stumbled upon the Grand Canyon. At the bottom of the Canyon, he found the hidden village of the Havasupai where two white women were held captive. Reuben instantly fell in love with Helen Winston, the golden-haired teen-age daughter.

Helen’s family had been en route from St.Louis to California in the early 1840’s when their wagon train was attacked and Helen and her mother taken prisoner. Reuben persuades Helen to escape with him, accompanied by her friend Spring Morning, the daughter of a Spanish ambassador. The Havasupai chase the trio up the trail to the Canyon's rim and through the forest toward Flagstaff. Helen's childishness brings the threesome close to calamity time after time, but is offset by Spring Morning's courage and maturity.

They reach the town of Sojourn where Reuben must compete for Helen's attention with a horde of single men. But the Havasupai have not abandoned the chase. The town of Sojourn is destroyed in the Indian attack and Reuben and the two girls are the sole survivors.

Reuben and the girls live off the land avoiding the Apache until they find the Southern wagon route to California. Approaching a burnt-out wagon train to see if they can aid the survivors, they narrowly avoid a group of bandits who are robbing the corpses.

Soon Reuben discovers that the town of Hostler's Rest, near the site of present-day Phoenix, is not what it seems and that Spring Morning is the woman he has loved all along.