When Catherine Boland is forced to sell her hat shop in Belle Fourche, South Dakota, after extracting herself from a violent relationship with a man named Lonnie Spicer, she moves to Deadwood to try and rebuild her life. Catherine gets a job as a bank teller, and soon meets a young ranch hand named George Arbuckle, who is so shy he can barely speak to her. When the coupple falls in love, Catherine has no way of knowing that George has been manipulated into joining a group of local vigilantes that she has actively campaigned to stop. When the truth comes out, their relationship is tested, and the challenge goes to another level when Catherine is violently raped soon after their marriage.

Arbuckle is the prequel to Russell Rowland's debut novel, In Open Spaces, which the New York Times called 'a novel of muted elegance' and about which Ivan Doig said "Russell Rowland has given us a vivid and distinctive piece of homespun to take its proper place in the literary quilt of the West."