Everywhere the tribes of the dead press in on the living and work at their memories. The widowed Minta Honer goes to meet her parents, Senator and Mrs. Green Randall, at the pier, and while she is gone two of her children are consumed in flame. Nooksack Indians must rid her of these ghosts, squeezing them from her body, starting with her shoulders, ending with her feet. Beneath such shadows, enthusiasms flare riotously. The account begins with the Fraser River gold rush in 1858, just 18 miles away in British Columbia, and ends with the Klondike rush of 1897.
Hard times is over.
Amid flux and loss, people have time to be worldly. None of this prevents Senator Randall's second daughter, June, from marrying the apparently feckless Clare Fishburn, or prevents beautiful young Grace, who keeps house for a Seattle madam, Old Mother Damnable, from marrying Clare's intense, surly brother Glee. And every time there is a rumor of Whatcom becoming a railway terminus or a center for Japanese trade, real estate booms and speculation and its attendant angel, embezzlement, seize the civic soul. Having taken possession of the soul of a calf that he strangled in his boyhood, Obenchain now plans to take possession of the soul of one of his fellow citizens, a possession which has nothing to do with real estate, which is not on the temporal plane. Ms. Dillard's tale is packed with oddity of character and incident.