It is an historical novel, focusing on the life of Adaline Carson, the daughter of the explorer, Christopher (Kit) Carson. Adaline, whose story is largely publicly unrecorded, is half-Arapaho. She is raised in part by Kit's sister in Missouri, following the death of her younger sister who fell into a soap cauldron in Taos, New Mexico. Her father takes her to Missouri and leaves her there until she is fourteen, then later returns her to Taos via a wagon train. In Taos, she falls in love with a young man, Pablo, who witnessed her sister's death, and introduces her for the first time to La Muerte. Unhappily, she is forced into a marriage with an acquaintance of her father, a white man, Louis Simmons. She travels to California on a transcontinental sheep drive which her father is leading, and Simmons, too, goes along on the drive. Subsequently, the marriage is dissolved. The bulk of the latter half of the novel deals with her in California, having a miscarriage, frequenting the gold mining camps, learning how to be independent, raising cattle, and having passing relationships with Charles Frémont and his wife, Jessie, on their ranch in Bear Valley. They were friends with her father. She forms a relationship with Gerard Perlot, a miner, who has invented a revolutionary mining machine. He is killed under mysterious circumstances by someone from a large mining company, the Merced Company. In the end she longs to return to her father for the unrequited appointment she feels her life has been pitched toward, but, revisited by La Muerte and the memory of Pablo, she dies near Mono Lake, California.