Pablo Grande, a notorious mountain man from the Colorado Territory, creates a Wild West Show in New York City. He finds a young boy, named Charles Smith III., boxing for a living in the immigrant camps. and trains him to be a trick shot artist and star of the Grande Wild West Show. Pablo gives him the name of Santa Fe Smith and has Ned Buntline promote him with dime novels telling of the heroic adventures of Santa Fe. Smith. The dime novels and his skill with a gun make him a household name in the east and the west and he soon wants to be the man everyone thinks he is. He fights against a gang of thieves extorting the immigrants and kills three men in an amazing gun fight. But the glory of the battlefield fades as Smith sees the three men die before his smoking guns. In a revenge shooting Pablo Grande is killed instead of Smith. Smith vows never to wear a gun nor be Santa Fe Smith again. Charles Smith III, dressed in eastern fashion goes west for the first time in his life to take the body of Pablo Grande to the Ute burial grounds in the Colorado Territory. He appears to be an eastern tenderfoot and no one knows him by sight in the west - no one knows that he is the famous gunfighter Santa Fe Smith. Victoria Huntington, a proud western girl is returning home on the same train with Smith to the Colorado Territory. In one short year, in an eastern finishing school for girls she has changed from being a cowhand sitting on a horse scratching a flea to a proper lady sitting in the parlor sipping tea. As she says, "from chasing a heifer to being a heifer." She is flirting with eastern men in her new found power of being a beautiful society woman. Every man is at her command except one man, named Charles Smith III, who pays her no mind, "must be a dumb steer!" She thinks as she seeks refuge from her hurt feelings in reading the "Adventures of Santa Fe Smith" and her rejected heart wishes that "Santa Fe Smith would scare the pants off the greenhorn eastern man named Charles Smith III!" All across America she tries to win his attention and falls in love with him even in his rejection to her flirtations. She discovers that he hates guns and she thinks he is an eastern weakling. She vows to turn away from her affections for Charles Smith and seek to find a western man like Santa Fe Smith - to carry her off into a western sunset. Henry G. Hines, a powerful banker hires a 100 gunmen and threatens to take over the mineral wealth of the Rocky Mountains and rule over the Colorado Territory. Henry is an extraordinary man, until he and his army run into a tenderfoot named Charles Smith III, alias Santa Fe Smith.