Already the gateway for illegal Canadian liquor during Prohibition, the Motor City becomes a crucible for American class conflict during the Great Depression, with an army of laid-off Ford workers drifting into the ranks of the burgeoning union movement. To keep the hundreds of thousands still employed by Henry Ford in thrall, he recruits black laborers migrating from the deep South to serve as “strike insurance.” The Model T mogul also has bought a sizable chunk of Brazil's Amazonian rainforest, vowing to grow his own rubber for tires, but stubbornly refusing to include a botanist in his troop of would-be jungle tamers. As a series of biological plagues descend on the Fordlandia plantation, the racial melting pot he has created in Detroit begins to boil over, and not even the Sage of Dearborn can control the forces that have been unleashed.

In September 1890, the academic year begins at the Carlisle School, a military-style boarding school for Indians in Pennsylvania, founded and run by Captain Richard Henry Pratt. Pratt considers himself a champion of Native Americans. His motto, “To save the man, we must kill the Indian,” is severely enforced in both classroom and dormitory. As the young students navigate surviving the school, they begin to hear rumors of a “ghost dance” amongst the tribes of the west --- a ceremonial dance aimed at restoring the Native People to power and running the invaders off their land. As the hope and promise of the ghost dance sweeps across the Great Plains, cynical newspapers seize upon the story to whip up panic among local whites. The US government responds by deploying troops onto lands that had been granted to the Indians. It is an act that seems certain to end in slaughter.

It begins in the highlands of Scotland in 1746, at the Battle of Culloden, the last desperate stand of the Stuart “pretender” to the throne of the Three Kingdoms, Bonnie Prince Charlie, and his rabidly loyal supporters. Vanquished with his comrades by the forces of the Hanoverian (and Protestant) British crown, the novel’s eponymous hero, Jamie MacGillivray, narrowly escapes a roadside execution only to be recaptured by the victors and shipped to Marshalsea Prison, where he cheats the hangman a second time before being sentenced to transportation and indentured servitude in colonial America "for the term of his natural life." His travels are paralleled by those of Jenny Ferguson, a poor village girl swept up on false charges by the English and also sent in chains to the New World.