Pratt is prevailed upon to travel to San Francisco (in the Nicodemus Legend persona) to help a young Caucasian woman, who has spent her entire life among the Arapaho Indians, find her birth parents. In tracking them, he inadvertently stirs up a controversy and must protect the woman and her child from ravenous media and rabid racists.
To promote his newest book, Pratt is asked to serve as a buffalo hunting guide for a group of German publishers who believe he actually is the heroic character, Nicodemus Legend. Repelled by the notion of hunting, he and Bartok, along with some Arapaho Indians, devise a mythical, mechanical buffalo ""monster"" to ward off the hunters—but only attract more to the area.
Legend winds up in the middle of a feud between competing paleontologists who think they've made the find of the century in Sheridan—the only problem is the dinosaur bones may be buried directly under Pratt's favorite watering hole, the Silver King. So Legend faces not only the frenzy of the fossil diggers, but the conflict between Creationists and Darwinians.
Mordechai, a charlatan evangelist, arrives in Sheridan and bilks credulous farmers of their money and land by predicting the end of the world. So Pratt, impersonating his rakish character Nicodemus Legend, infiltrates the preacher's camp and with Bartok's help, stages an end of the world, bringing the preacher to true religion.