Shy professor and beautiful Native American activist race a deadly corporation to find an old Indian treaty that may give a third of Colorado back to Native Americans. [Part 1 of a film trilogy or TV mini-series]

SYNOPSIS:

In 1865, U.S. agents slice off an important line of a treaty with the Indians to cheat them out of a large reservation in the mountains of Colorado. A genius Cheyenne, WAKAN LONG RIVER is assigned to protect an unabridged copy of the treaty. Pages of his historic journal surface and begin to provide clues to the treaty’s whereabouts. A land-grabbing, water-stealing corporation, California Water and Trade, Inc. (CWT), would prefer the treaty remained lost. An unlikely hero enters the story.

Like 11% of Americans and many leading men (Tom Hanks, Harrison Ford, Brad Pitt, Kevin Costner), WES POWELL, a young Professor and climate predictor in Colorado suffers from shyness in small groups. But when an old Berkeley classmate, Indian activist, JOHNNY GREYFEATHER, is found dead in Denver, Powell is swept into a murder investigation. To make matters worse, he is stalked by his carefree, infatuated graduate student, MAGGIE ESPOSITO, and by a beautiful attorney from the Bureau of Indian Affairs, SILVER WHITEHORSE, who has her own political agenda. But Powell’s real nemesis in CLAYTON WEGNER, the head of CWT. Wegner covets Powell’s climate prediction models, and tries bribery and extortion to hire him. Accurate weather forecasts three months out will save California agriculture a billion dollars each year. Water is the transparent gold of the West.

Before he’s killed, Greyfeather mails Powell a handwritten, unofficial copy of a Cheyenne treaty. Rumors of the treaty and a potential large reservation in the headwaters of the Colorado River basin shake Wegner and the Governor of California because primary water rights would revert to Indians, who could strangle California’s economy. CWT will stop at nothing to suppress the treaty’s surfacing. The chase is on, providing the most exciting and dangerous spring break of Powell’s life.

The violence escalates at familiar historic sites throughout the western Great Plains and mountains. Love snuggles in despite shyness, prejudice, social injustice, greed, and unscrupulous politics. Powell slowly allows Silver into his heart, and vice-versa. The ingenious wits of our primary heroes, Powell and the Wakan, triumph over incredible odds. In the end, our heroes come together in a figurative sense at the Denver Mint. After surviving his third missile attack, Powell solves the Wakan’s riddle and determines the location of the unabridged original treaty of 1865 and the Wakan’s original journal, which carefully chronicled the quest for justice, gold, revenge, science, and survival. The U.S. Supreme Court cannot ignore THE TREATY and the corroborating historical documents, and reluctantly returns a large portion of Colorado and the primary water rights to the Cheyenne, Arapahoe, and Apache people. The Indians finally win one! Wes Powell and Silver Whitehorse ride off into a considerably different Colorado sunset.

THE TREATY