Johnny Yuma returns home one year after the war's end to find a gang of thugs have extorted a local mine and murdered his father while his father's deputy and the rest of the town live in fear and despair.
Johnny captures Will Randall who tried to steal his horse so he could flee a pursuing posse. Johnny agrees to testify against Randall, but is surprised how quickly the man's trial and subsequent execution are scheduled. Johnny is determined to find out the reasons behind the hasty proceedings, but gets little help from the townspeople who hate Randall because he served in the Union army.
A mortally wounded soldier stumbles into Johnny's camp. Before he dies, he says only one thing - "Fort Concho". Johnny rides to the fort and discovers it empty of soldiers. The sole survivor is a coward who hid during the fighting and survived by pretending to be crazy knowing Indians do not harm the mentally infirm. Before Johnny can leave, he's captured by Kiowa Indians plan to torture him to death.
Yuma is accosted by two ex Yankee Prisoners seeking to take gold from a Captain Pollack who later Yuma learns is a demented ex-Confederate prison officer who hoards prisoner mined gold with which he plans to reverse the outcome of the war.
Seeing vultures circling a cabin, Johnny Yuma rides to investigate and discovers a family stricken with illness. Johnny rides to the nearest town to fetch the doctor, but the townspeople, led by the hardware store owner insist he leave town immediately because they fear Yuma has contracted diphtheria from the squatters. When Johnny rides back to help the family, the townspeople try to burn down the cabin with Yuma and the sick folk still inside.
Yuma happens upon a ruthless gang of drifters running out of supplies and proceeds to join in the defense of a nearby family that he has learned the gang is targeting.
Realizing Yuma is literate and in admiration of his ability to stand up to illiterate Armbruster family, Liam O'Shea offers Yuma a temporary schoolmaster job and he gains the affection of Peggy of which Troy Armbruster is jealous.
After Yuma kills a man in self defense, he finds himself in the position of having to mediate between the man's dangerously defensive widow and his associates who include his employer and co-workers.
Johnny Yuma seizes leadership of a teen gang whose dream is to rob the local bank and never have to work again. When Yuma spied their comfy fire in a suspiciously familiar mountain nook, the trio attacked him, but the tiny terror fought them off, then eloquently ventured to dissuade them from their sketchy plan. But when Skinny, Billy and Bull track The Rebel with a cause to his hotel room which directly overlooks the bank, the fledgling author interrogates the misfits, then devises a shrewder game plan. Is the bitter, ex-Confederate soldier using the naive teen mob ...
Johnny Yuma fulfills a promise made to a dying Union soldier. He rides into Lassiter City to return a keepsake medal to the boy's family. The mother proudly receives the medal and then asks Yuma to stay on as a cowhand.
Yuma is arrested for vagrancy upon arrival in town put on a road gang of a group of men that the corrupt sheriff has falsely arrested for vagrancy to work on projects without wages and he immediately starts leading a plan to escape.
Yuma arrives in a town in which the local editor checks guns and, when he checks Johnny's, one is discovered missing. It is learned Ted Keller has taken the gun to settle a perceived injustice to his father.
A Confederate colonel and two of his marauders live in seclusion to avoid consequences of the war but the two marauders kidnap a banker's daughter and send Yuma to collect the ransom.
In self defense Yuma kills a man appointed sheriff by his gang leader brother who seeks revenge against Yuma while he intimidates the fearful townspeople to isolate Yuma by transacting no business with him.
Yuma attempts to take a man for killing an Apache woman over gold to the nearest fort for trial but must pit his story against the story of the man to Apache chief Running Wolf who was the father of the woman to whom the man was husband.
Yuma, seeing Glory's banishment for murder, offers to help her to the next town for trial but, while supplying in Glory's town, he runs afoul of Emma who has falsely accused Glory to keep her control of brother Don against Glory's love.
Yuma rescues old Sam Amister from thieves and takes him to his hometown where Yuma learns Amister is hated for grave robbery but Yuma expects there is more to his grave digging than valuable stealing.
Yuma brings items he found on a destroyed horse to location suggested by the items where he is arrested by the Sheriff for suspected murder and remains to defend a Mexican boy then held for the crime and being railroaded by the deputy.
Yuma visits former commanding officer Quincy Bannister who is irrationally and overtly pursuing the prosecution of alleged murder Newt Schofield.
Yuma delivers Gottwald a document in a land dispute with Hauser proving Gottwald's right but, although Gottwald has a bad heart but lacking money for appeal, he agrees to a Hauser deal for a day walk off of other Hauser land in trade.
Yuma in town to deliver a letter to Lick Stribling is targeted by young Virgil Moss who has become a vicious aspiring gunfighter in an effort to defend his family name against the charge of cowardice.
Yuma is befriended by a married couple who perform a shooting act. When the alienated wife forces her affections upon Johnny to persuade him to run away with her, the obsessive husband vows to kill him.
Snake bit Yuma collapses at the home of a marshal targeted by hired killers where he is taken in by the wife who is in the company of Roader, a hired killer feigning friendship, who kills the marshal on his return home and frames Johnny.
Yuma finds a trapper caught in a bear trap and takes him to cabin where he discovers the man's blind daughter who mistakes him for an enemy until the actual brigands come to steal pelts meant to pay for the woman's eye operation.
A bounty hunter taking a beautiful, high class, woman in for murder at a stage depot, is poisoned to death, but Yuma is determined to finish taking her in for the dead man.
Johnny goes to a small Mexican town to retrieve a General's sword for the General's widow, and he finds the circumstances of the General's death differ from what he was told.
Johnny, badly wounded, is taken to the town of Tremblor, where the doctor saves his arm. But why is the doctor being kept in a jail cell?
Yuma gets involved at a stagecoach station when prejudice toward a Chinese father and daughter becomes physical. He assists again as thieves attempt to steal a dowry for the daughter's arranged marriage.
When a sweetheart of Johnny's youth is dying, her husband, a former Union officer for whom she betrayed Yuma, seeks out Yuma so Johnny can say that he forgives the woman and assuage her guilt.
When Yuma comes to meet an unknown woman who has written to him, he discovers her grave, and her embittered brother digging a grave for Johnny Yuma, whom he blames for her death. But Johnny never met the girl, so he joins the man incognito to find the impostor.
Charlie Burton summons Yuma and three other members of a rebel raiding party in which his son was killed. He informs them that he is giving them a gold mine in the Mojave Desert in memory of his son. But mistrust and murder ensue.
Johnny intervenes when fanatical Ezra Taber and his son harass, torment and terrorize a widow because of her former career as a dance hall girl.
Johnny signs on as a hand for a Congressional Medal of Honor winner, former Union soldier Paul Travis, who has settled for health reasons among Confederate sympathizers who mean him harm.
Yuma arrives a year after being summoned by Ted Evans, a drummer from his Confederate regiment, to find the man addicted to pain medication and acts to help Evans break the habit while experiencing interference from an unscrupulous druggist.
Yuma comes upon a woman whose mind has become unstable after the murder of her husband. After the woman mistakes Yuma for her dead husband, he takes her for medical treatment and baits a trap for the murderers.
Yuma arrives in town to begin his job as bodyguard for a man who is killed upon his arrival. Oddly the townspeople are elated by the death but Yuma is determined to have justice and receives unwanted assistance.
Yuma is in a town where the people's failure to accept the war's outcome encourages a boy to seek revenge for his father's death by killing General Grant. To dissuade the boy, Yuma relates a tale of his own struggle with the outcome at Appomattox.
Jeremy Hake receives a double blow of bad news --- that his mine is worthless, and that his family is in need. Hake commits murder in a robbery attempting to help his family. Hake asks Yuma to surrender him for the reward offered for the murder and give the money to his family.
Yuma buys the contract of a war buddy, who is now a boxer past his prime, and attempts to discourage the friend from further competition.
Yuma stops at a bar where a bounty hunter is holding the wife of the outlaw he hopes to collect on. Seeing Yuma's descriptive resemblance to the outlaw, the bounty hunter decides upon an alternative plan---killing Yuma and passing him off as the outlaw. Will the wife go along with this idea?
Bull Hollingsworth asks Yuma to take his son Seldon to town to get some life experiences in being a man, and to collect a debt from a saloon boss who is not very willing to pay it. That part puts Yuma and Seldon in some danger.
Yuma finds himself in the midst of a confrontation between a sheep man haunted by war memories and Mexican bandits.
Yuma is shackled by a sheriff to Traskel and forced to flee on foot with him when Traskel knocks out the sheriff and the horses ride off. Traskel believes that his twin brother is in pursuit and wants to kill him.
Yuma's friend Jim Colburn has been found innocent of a murder for which he was to hang. Before the news of his innocence arrived, Colburn escaped from jail with a posse unaware of his innocence in pursuit.
The Ricker family frames Yuma for a murder that one of them has committed and then arranges for Yuma to flee town before he is hanged. But Yuma refuses to leave.
Yuma escorts young Demetria to an arranged marriage after her family escorts are killed by Apaches. On the way, she starts to express feelings for Yuma, which begins to trouble him.
Yuma witnesses as Roy Shandell murders his partner to keep the money from a stage robbery. Yuma nabs Shandell and delivers him to the Socorro jail but Shandell's father uses nitroglycerin to force the son's release.
After his horse is killed by Apaches, Yuma is found by a stagecoach driver. On the stage is Travers, who is blind and tormented by a previous stagecoach encounter with Apaches, in which his wife was killed when they were left by a driver.
John Sims, Yuma's godfather, saves him from an attack by Indians at his campsite. He asks Yuma in turn to help him track renegade Indian Masi and take his scalp, as revenge for the killing of his wife.
Yuma stops to visit Dunsen who arrives in town and commences to randomly shoot townspeople. The townspeople believe Dunsen's war service has driven him mad and want to kill Dunsen but deputy Maggio permits Yuma to talk Dunsen to sanity.
Yuma aids Ulysses Bowman in a gun battle and accompanies him back to his camp where Yuma learns that Ulysses is in the habit of offering a chest with two hundred dollars to any man who will marry his daughter Felicity.
A woman doctor, her sister, and their ailing father have been left behind by townspeople fleeing hostile Indians. A group of Mexican insurgents led by a demagogic Commandante and bent on reclaiming old Spanish Land Grants arrive in town to take advantage of the situation.
A sadistic former Union prison guard who tortured Yuma wants revenge for the punishment he suffered when Yuma escaped from the POW camp.
When Yuma arrives to give Laurie Buford her late father's affects, he learns that she is being forced into marriage to a brutal man, so he vows to stop the marriage.
George Campbell, who blames Yuma for his brother's death in the war, provokes a gun battle in which Yuma is wounded after being forced to kill Campbell's nephew. Yuma's godfather John Sims then comes to help Yuma escape from Campbell's vengeance.
When a newswoman observes Yuma defending a boy against an adult bully, she decides to promote him as the typical Western hero in a news story, much to the Yuma's displeasure and possibly detrimental to his safety.
Yuma is chosen by an esteemed but unethical itinerant actress to take part in her performance. While Yuma and she dispute wages, they are kidnapped by a man who demands that the actress performs for his traumatized daughter.
Yuma arrives in a town in which an old friend of his father is sheriff. He learns an advance team of marauders, including the man who killed Yuma's father, has arrived. But none of townspeople, including the sheriff, want to defend the town.
Yuma rescues Arthur Sutro, who was staked to an ant hill by Indians. Sutro tells Yuma he is responsible for him now. But Sutro wants to rob Yuma's peacefully reclusive and scholarly friend Portal of an imagined fortune of gold.
Yuma is on a mission to rescue his cousin Eddie who has become a student of gunslinger Dawes.
Elderly Kiowa Sammy Hart is believed to have kidnapped a boy, who has actually gone to stay with Hart in his last hours. But the boy's father is on the hunt planning to kill Sammy, and Yuma hopes to stop him.
Yuma arrives in a town with a woman to help her search for her husband. The husband has written of a successful mine but the townspeople are most resistant to help in the search.
Yuma is forced to kill outlaw Jake Fellows in a gunfight and then learns he has a deaf mute son. Yuma proceeds to help the boy find a home but two of Fellows' associates are on the trail to take the boy to recover loot that they think he held.
An embittered confederate prison camp survivor talks Yuma into a card bet of two weeks servitude on the man's property. When Yuma loses the bet, he learns that service must be under the prison camp conditions the man suffered.
After convincing a woman living alone at her homestead that he is not an outlaw, Yuma joins forces with her to fend off marauders who have robbed a bank and killed a neighboring family.
Emily Hardy is awaiting the return of her fiancé Danny Brown from prison. But Emily 's brother Vergil is bent on revenge against Danny, who killed his son in self-defense. though Vergil convinced the town to convict him of murder.
Yuma joins an uneasy voluntary alliance with two other men. They hope to bring back a fugitive bank president from Mexico to testify about a bank failure scheme which may force homesteaders to lose their land. But they will have to evade the Mexican militias in bringing him back.
Three murderous stage robbers hold up the stage Yuma is on, killing the drivers. When they find that a mining executive on the stage was not carrying the payroll with him as they thought, they plan to hold the man's son for ransom until they get it. But a saloon girl offers to take the son's place.
Seeking water, Yuma is forced to side with two brothers who are in a stand off in a feud with their uncle and cousin, who betrayed the brothers' father and brother after a bank robbery, and are now better fortified and supplied.
Yuma strays into Mexico and becomes involved in the conflict between a successful matador and the rest of his family, who are against his grooming his son to follow in his profession.
Because he had been a member of secret group during the war, Yuma is asked by Jefferson Davis' wife to ensure her husband's safety upon his prison release. But one of the members of the group means to kill both Davis and Yuma.
Johnny tracks down the man who knocked him out at his campsite and stole his horse and gun. When he finds him, he is forced to dig a bullet out of the man's brother, a well-known gunslinger.
When the posse chasing Ben White and his gang capture White's wife, Yuma is given the task of taking her to a town jail while the posse searches for the outlaw. But the treachery of White's wife places Yuma in a precarious situation.
While traveling with a posse, Yuma encounters the quarry's wife, who is having a baby. He stays with her and the baby while the outlaw is trapped between the posse and two bounty hunters.
When Yuma stops to see his old friend Coley Wilks, Yancey Daggett takes Coley hostage. Yuma is then sent to negotiate a deal with Coley's brother, a sheriff, to exchange Coley for Yancey's brother who is scheduled to hang.
A Shoshone chief keeps three prisoners in exchange for three braves held in jail. But Yuma then learns that the braves have already been killed. Since they had killed a white woman, the chief decrees that just two hostages will be executed, and Yuma must decide who. Last in the series.