Alicia Ortega, the 14-year-old daughter of a Mexican army veteran, struggles to protect the Ortega family’s land and black-market dock from conniving suitors. The family’s wealth and honor are at stake. Daughters from the ranches are pursued by Yankee immigrant merchants and sailors hoping to cash in on rich lands and access to Pacific ports. Indigenous girls are valued by traders, trappers, and US sponsored surveyors for their knowledge of the terrain and their network of tribal relations. Many are sequestered on the Franciscan Mission compounds, trained as domestic workers for the White settlers and separated from their families. Those individuals who have not converted to Catholicism under the pressure of the Mission system find that their traditional territory and tribal ways are vanishing. This story features the lives of young Mexican, Spanish and indigenous California girls, in the early 1800's prior to California statehood, who are aggressively courted by land-hungry Yankees and rough-cut fur traders in the Spanish colony. State and local historic documents, as well as Mission archives, document family lineage and livestock and land grant transfers via marriage in the territory. Golden Secrets is Book Two in the Mission Bells trilogy for YA readers. The series of historic adventure-themed accounts focuses on the lives of teens from various social and ethnic strata.