A young Irish immigrant flees the Great Famine and joins a U.S. Army regiment overseeing the removal of the Choctaws from their ancestral home, unknowingly uniting the Irish and Choctaw nations. While Henry Finneran (Finn) strives to make enough money to bring his family to America, his mother, Nessa tries to keep the rest of her family alive as they’re forced to enter a local workhouse.

In 1847, Vanessa (Nessa) Finneran is forced to take her family to the workhouse in Skibbereen, Ireland, after her eldest son, Finn, barely escapes the Royal Irish Constabulary for stealing food. Working his way across the Atlantic by disposing of passengers who die along the way, Finn arrives on the Island of Manhattan before Lady Liberty is there to welcome immigrants. In fact, the Irish are anything but welcome. Unable to get a job, 19-year-old Finn enlists in the Army and is sent to Fort Smith in Arkansas. There, he joins a regiment that will escort members of the Choctaw tribe from their ancestral home in Mississippi to land in Arkansas. During this journey, Finn comes to know Peter Pitchlynn; half Choctaw and half Scotch-Irish, Peter straddles both worlds as he works to save the Choctaw people.

Finn also comes to know and care for Peter’s niece, Tula, who has no desire to keep one foot in both worlds. She wants to keep the Choctaw ways alive, even if it means marrying a Lighthorseman who enforces their laws, which sometimes means flogging his betrothed.

While Finn struggles to earn enough money for his family’s passage to America, Nessa does whatever is necessary to keep her other children alive. The workhouse is extremely overcrowded. Husbands are separated from wives and parents from their children. Disease and death spread as quickly as hopelessness. Yet the workhouse is still preferable to life outside its stone walls. Thus, Nessa must constantly find new ways to keep her children alive: working in the infirmary to gain access to medicines in short supply; pleading for changes with the workhouse’s Board of Guardians; and, finally, escaping the workhouse in the desperate hope that money from Finn has finally arrived.

In the end it isn’t only Finn helping his people survive, but the Choctaw people, who send what little money they have to the poor of Ireland. The bond between the Irish and Choctaw is born from the shared experience of being removed from their own lands because they are labeled as undesirable and lazy. A sad history we continue to create.