Young Jamie Robbins yearns to explore, to venture beyond the small world he's known in his sleepy hometown of Ridgeford on the Mississippi River. It's not that fishing with his best friend, David Allen or joining him in frolics with Mrs. Ross' two teenage daughters don't bring him fun and friendship, they do, and he enjoys them right where he is. But, each time he watches a steamboat pass by, or when Miss Chamberlain reads to the class about far-away places, his wanderlust returns and makes him restless. This restlessness is remedied when on April 12th, 1861 Confederate General P.G.T. Beauregard opens his shore batteries up on the Union-held Fort Sumpter in Charleston Harbor...the Civil War begins...

Although Jamie wants no part of war, any war, he gives in to David's pleas to join one of the fast-forming Illinois militia regiments, and side-by-side, they march off to war. Though wounded at Shiloh, Jamie survives, and in doing so sees himself as having grown into manhood. It is then that he finds other new adventures, ones which have nothing to do with armies and battles. Call it "love-at-first-sight", it happens to Jamie the first time he lays eyes on Loisanne Montgomery on a bright autumn day in 1862 while fishing for catfish...

Follow now, as Jamie Robbins, starting with an unplanned and unwanted adventure to save his country discovers that beyond the horizons of his youthful dreams, a life that offers much, gives much, and sometimes takes much is waiting for him....