1865. The American Civil War is ending. Eighteen years after the famine ship Star of the Sea docked at New York, the daughter of two of her passengers sets out from Baton Rouge, Louisiana, on a walk across a devastated America. Eliza Duane Mooney is searching for her younger brother she has not seen in four years, one of the hundred thousand children drawn into the war. His fate has been mysterious & will prove extraordinary. It`s a walk that will have consequences for many seemingly unconnected survivors: a love-struck cartographer, a haunted Latina poetess, rebel guerrilla Cole Mc Laurenson, runaway slave Elizabeth Longstreet & the mercurial revolutionary James Con O` Keeffe, who commanded a brigade of Irish immigrants in the Union Army & is now Governor of a western wilderness where nothing is as it seems.