When Dreams Come True

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.