Alice, Donna and Rose are on Going to California in the middle nineteenth century. They won't be hunting for gold, they have plenty of wealth, but Rose's parents, Joanna and Stephen, have heard California is cultured and sophisticated, with libraries and museums the girls will benefit from exposure to. Ray doesn't want them to go. He doesn't see how it could have healed from the sin-sick place he visited a few years earlier. Joanna and Stephen find out, to their sorrow, that Ray was right. The three young ladies get an education, but it isn't the one planned by their parents. Drugged, kidnapped, left in the desert, and taken to the Unita mountains for a long hard winter give them an education of another kind. All of their fathers, of course, go looking for them and get lost themselves. Alice, in spite of herself, misses Ray, and Ray is frantic. He runs through an Indian war and the desert looking for her. How will they , or will they find their way home? What will they all learn as they go through the valleys of fear and depression? And where are their fathers?