The fabulous Forty-Niner Gold Rush brought gold-fevered men from all over the world to San Francisco and then on to the raging Sierra Nevada rivers. They rode fast horses, drove wagons and even walked across the Great Plains, but many died or were scalped. Other argonauts boarded majestic sailing ships . . . some of which vanished in the wild storms of Cape Horn. Heather McKenna was left behind with her father in a squalid neighborhood of New York by her brother, Dennis, a dreamer ill-suited to the rigors of the Sierras. And so it is up to Heather to escape New York and a bleak future....