It is 1976, and a newly qualified teacher is down on his luck in 'love' after recently having spent two years in a co-educational training college.
It is then, as a result of a repetitive dream, that he is coerced into investigating what proves to be a Time Capsule hidden in a wood. Trapped inside by his inquisitiveness he is then manipulated into programming it, and in such a way as to end up in mid-west North America ten years prior to their Civil War.
Once there he discovers the hard way what the 'West' was really like at that time, and whilst doing so becomes crossed in love with two, or one might almost say three very different girls at the same time.
Principally though, they are a White Settler's daughter, who is the sister of a cowboy he befriends there, and a Sioux Indian girl, both being involved, at different times in saving his life. In the end though he has to make a choice, or almost has it made for him, ably abetted by his unknown sponsors.
Then comes the necessity of trying to take her home without appearing to have murdered her. For such it would otherwise seem as far as her next of kin remaining there are concerned. An enactment again mostly played out by his sponsors, if one which results in months of further anguish on his part before his sleuthing resolves it in the end.