Growing up on the Missouri-Kansas border, I heard many stories about the troubles before and during the Civil War involving Kansan Jayhawkers and Missouri Bushwhackers. My older brothers told me that they often ate their lunches across the road from their one-room country school in a former battlefield. They picked up remnants of the battle.

Then when a lady attending one of my Elderhostel classes told me briefly about her ancestor's experience during the Battle of Lexington on the Missouri River in September 1861, I knew I had to put all of this into a novel.

During the Civil War Missouri was divided in sympathies, truly brother against brother. The circumstances involving Missouri were different from any other state, and are little known outside of a few Missourian Civil War buffs. I used the true story of a young woman's heroic solo trip up the Missouri River to bring home her brothers, one in the Union Army and one in the Confederate. During the story, to build up some background for the trip, she is involved in the small battle/skirmish that took place a mile and a half from my home farm near Nevada, Missouri.

I use necessary battle scenes to tell the story. However, my focus is mainly about the women, older men, and family slaves left home who truly know that war doesn't solve anything but causes more conflict.