Restless sixteen-year-old Fredi Steinmetz longed for adventure and riches, especially when his serious-minded twin brother returned to Germany to study medicine. What better way to go about finding both then to go west, following the Gold Rush from Texas to California, So - he hired on as a teamster, and then a drover with a venture taking a cattle herd over the southern deserts – to California. He made friends and met up with many a person who would later be famous – or notorious: Jack Slade, Sally Skull, Charlie Goodnight, to name just a few. But Fredi didn’t reckon on bandits and robbers, including Juaquin Murrietta, making friends with a mysterious piano-playing Fenian, or rescuing the man who would later become Judge Roy Bean from being lynched. He also didn’t count on working for the firey newspaper editor whose murder would kick off the Vigilante Committee of 1856 and their violent sorting out of San Francisco. He hoped to find gold in the riverbanks of the Yuba River … but did not count on murder, meyhem and mystery … or touring the mines in the company of child star Lotta Crabtree and her theatrical troup. The wild, wild west, was never wilder, in this picaresque advendure by the author of The Adelsverein Trilogy, and Sunset and Steel Rails - in which Fredi Steinmetz appeared, as a much older man.