A California town springs up on a man's land because a river changed course, and Daniel Harcourt becomes rich, respectable and the founder of a first family - with one letter in his desk that could undo all of it. Harte made the gold rush into literature and gave America its gamblers and its snowbound cabins; this later novel leaves the mining camps for the generation that made money out of them, and it is much colder. Fifty-six plates of rivers and estuaries by Fitz Henry Lane and Winslow Homer, from 1831 to 1925, follow the water that made and could unmake the Harcourt fortune.