Complete and unabridged, with 57 full-page plates by Martin Johnson Heade, Albert Bierstadt and George Catlin. California after the conquest: Maxime Valois, a Louisiana Creole, rides into the gold-rush territory, is drawn to the Mexican family that holds the great rancho of Lagunitas, and falls in with Philip Hardin, a cold Mississippi lawyer who means to litigate the old grants away and hold the new state for the South. Then the Civil War takes Valois east with a Louisiana regiment, while Hardin keeps his eye on Lagunitas. Richard Henry Savage had been a soldier and an engineer, and wrote fast and from ground he knew. Fifty-seven plates, from Charles Bird King's painted chiefs to Edward Hicks's peaceable kingdoms, carry the novel's long view of a native land being signed away.