Big Sky Calling

In the winter of 1864, James O'Connors enlisted in the 2nd Wisconsin Cavalry and left his wife Rosa and their four children behind on Jackson Street in Janesville, Wisconsin. He died alone in Vicksburg, Mississippi, and never came home.

Rosa was left with nothing. No husband, no income, no clear path forward - only four children who needed her to figure something out. What she found, and what it cost her, is the story this book sets out to tell.

Set against the backdrop of Civil War-era Wisconsin, Big Sky Calling: The Roots follows Rosa through poverty, displacement, and the slow, hard work of rebuilding a life from almost nothing. Along the way, it traces the institutions, the neighbors, the chance encounters, and the small turns of fate that made survival possible - including the Wisconsin Soldiers' Orphans' Home, a remarkable piece of state history that gave children like Rosa's somewhere to land when there was nowhere else to go.

This is historical fiction rooted in real people and real places. The names are largely real. The struggles were real. The words and scenes have been imagined with care, drawn from family history, genealogical research, and the historical record of the times.

Big Sky Calling: The Roots is the first book in the Big Sky Calling trilogy.