The novel is the story of the people who have inhabited the area on the southern shore of Suisun Bay, half way between San Francisco on the west and the Sacramento-San Joaquin River Delta on the east. It begins with the Chupcan Indians in the early eighteenth century who are said to have lived there for over five thousand years.The story moves through the arrival of the Spanish; the establishment and life at Mission San Jose; life at the real Rancho Monte del Diablo and the fiction...