Dead Man's Walk is a powerful prequel to best-selling author Larry McMurty's Pulitzer Prize-winning Lonesome Dove. Gus McRae and Woodrow Call are still teenagers when they enlist as Texas Rangers. Soon they are roaming the untamed West, coming of age while they cheat death. Under the command of a former pirate, the young men ride for Santa Fe, where the mission is to forcibly take the city out of Mexican hands.

Eleven years after Lt. John Dunbar became the Comanche warrior Dances With Wolves, he and his wife Stands With a Fist and their three children live peacefully in the village of Ten Bears, until a band of white rangers mount a violent attack on the village, and Stands With a Fist and her infant daughter are carried off.