The mines of California and the Comstock Lode were a principal source of gold and silver in which the United States government and many Northern businesses had a tremendous stake. But at least one-third of the pioneer Californians were from the South. The goal of secret Confederate societies was to take California out of the Union and form a Republic of the Pacific. Dawson finds himself the middleman in a bold attempt to infiltrate and expose the conspiracy to raise and equip an army that would engulf California in the Civil War and break the Union blockade that was strangling the South. And his only link to tracing the conspirators is a nine-year-old black child, Mont James!