Cover -- Title Page -- Copyright Page -- Contents -- List of Illustrations -- Introduction -- 1. Not Much Else Beside -- 2. A Country of Plantations and Estates -- 3. Instant Relics -- 4. Hard-Bitten Country -- 5. Violent Paradise -- 6. Swindles and Salvation in the Antelope Valley -- 7. Mexican Lands in Mexican Hands -- 8. Floods and Utopias -- 9. Taming the Colorado Desert -- 10. Imperial Valley Dreams -- 11. Crashing the Orange Gates -- 12. Exacting Lives in the Breadbasket -- 13. The Rarified Bay Area -- 14. Among the Trees of the North Coast -- 15. Under the Shadow of Mount Lassen
Josh Sides tells the remarkable stories of the men and women who claimed homesteads in California and began a perilous quest to attain the American Dream at virtually any cost
