Charles Henry(C.H.) McColloch is born in an Arkansas cabin during the Civil War. At age 13, he leaves the poverty of the family farm to work in a luxury hotel in Hot Springs, one of the few thriving places in America's chaotic Reconstruction period. There he rubs elbows with the likes of tobacco king P.Lorillard, Cornelius Vanderbuilt's general counsel and President Garfield's Secretary of State. But it's love for a spirited suffragette that leads C.H. out west to Oregon.

Lawrence (Kurt) Krann is a thriving Austrian businessman in Vienna who travels to America to check on his gold mine investment in Baker City, Oregon. Shortly after arriving in New York, he is violently thrust out of his posh world into a hardscrabble existence. On an immigrant train headed west, he meets former Union soldier, August Meyer. A man of formidable wit, Meyer possesses many skills necessary to survive the hardships of the American West. Together the two begin a grand adventure in Baker City.

Amidst the gold, con-men, gamblers and prostitutes, the three men become patriarchs of families that eventually twine into one. Long after the mines close, their children remain becoming the bedrock of a ccommunity in ways their parents never imagined.