An American adventurer, Captain Jack Forest, rides across the Chihuahuan desert into Santa Fé for the Feast of the Corn, and meets Chiquita, the dancer the whole town is talking about - daughter of a Tewana war chief, brought up by the mission padre. Around them move a scheming grandee with a secret marriage behind him, Forest's own disapproving family off the tourist stage, and a lost Spanish mine called the Esmeralda. Ritter Brown wrote it as a romance of the desert Southwest, and it ends not in a drawing-room but before ten thousand Tewana riders. Fifty-six plates of painting from 1870 to 1929, including work by John Sloan and Childe Hassam, catch the crowded barrooms, rooftops and holiday crowds of the era.