A powerful dramatic trilogy of the conquering of the Pacific Northwest's Alta California. Three nations compete and four cultures collide, the Indigenous people, the Spanish, the Mexicans, and finally the Americans in a span of 83 years. Historical events and generations of strong men and women are woven together by fiction combined with facts. The great missions and ranchos rise and fall. Empires are won and lost. Nation's war and the titans of the time struggle to adapt to the fast-changing world around them. Immigrants travel by ships and the Oregan trail to a promised land filled with hardship, disease, and the elusive wealth from gold. Volume one -Loss of an Empire, immerses the reader in Alta California's Colonial beginnings. Tracing the years 1790 to 1821. The High California missions rise. The Spanish and indigenous Peoples struggle. The end of a way of life, for a thousand years, begins. The stage is set at Monterey Harbor with the arrival of Ignacio Vallejo, a Spanish yellow Jacket soldier, and a Yuki Village near the Valley of The Moon, Sonoma, when Muata, Yellow jacket in Nest, the sun of a Medicine Man, is born. Spain's authority crumbles, and Mexico rises. Volume one is a standalone book and an electrifying begging to a trilogy filled with hope, despair, violence, greed, valor, kindness, and love.