Carrie Buck is a young intellectually disabled woman who is persuaded to fight against the courts for custody of her newborn daughter after it's taken from her since Carrie has been declared mentally incompetent to raise her baby by herself.
The adventures and misadventures of Tom and Huck on the Mississippi River in Missouri with their involvement when they fall in with a gang of con artists, take up with a ragtag circus, help a freed slave buy his sister's freedom, and then see a dastardly villain get her.