Volume 1 of Dragon Tooth Gold begins the story of Aaden Callahan and Anna Mercier; two landed immigrants. They met while teaching at Columbia University in New York City. The year is 1841. The young Dr. Callahan woos and wins the heart of the smart and beautiful Anna. Their courtship isn’t easy. Anna’s abusive and dominating father doesn’t approve and works through his connections as an investment banker to have Aaden fired from the University. Their relationship turns deadly when Anna’s father challenges Aaden to a duel to settle the matter with deadly force. Aaden embarrasses Anna’s father beyond repair in front of thousands of spectators in Faculty Park, across the street from the front gate of the University. Losing the duel and missing an earlobe, the banker’s world crumbles around him. He takes his life in a drunken stupor when he finds his accounts frozen and receives divorce papers from his wife’s lawyers.

Aaden and Anna are spirited away from New York on his younger brother’s whiskey schooner Blessed by the Wind. The Blessed is no ordinary schooner. Armed and deadly they fight off pirates in Pamlico Sound and take aboard a blacksmith and his apprentice slave who is his adopted son. They encounter a clairvoyant in Jamaica encounter more troubles having to fight an Argentine frigate on their way to New Orleans.

Anna’s mother settles in St. Louis and establishes The Black Freedom League. Aaden though is eager to homestead further west. He takes his wife and the servant family from St. Louis to Independence, Missouri, where there is land to homestead and a future to carve out of the wilderness. There, he establishes an empire partnering with blacks he buys and frees to take up homesteads around his holdings. Aaden spends his years building his lumber and brewery business. Anna founds a school in Independence for children of all colors and creeds. The abolitionist culture they create causes many problems the pro-slavery dominated state resulting in conflicts with slavers and even an assassination attempt.

Aaden and Anna raise four children. Eli, the first, and twin boys, Jacques and Roland, and then finally a girl, Suzette. As the nation looms toward civil war, Anna yields to pressure from her mother and allows her boys to join the Army Supply Service. The post commander at Fort Leavenworth promises to keep the boys close to home. After a tornado sweeps through the lumber mill and brewery, however, the boys take a contract to join a wagon train all the way to Santa Fe, New Mexico. Suzette defies her grandmother who wants to take her on a clipper ship around the horn to Los Angeles and runs away to join her brothers on the trail west.