Laura Gibbon's life is forever changed when, at the age of seven, she witnesses her father's assassination on the streets of Smithland, a river town in pre-Civil War Kentucky. Laura, whose mother died in childbirth, is left an orphan and sent to Iowa to be raised by relatives she has never met. In 1861 she falls in love with her first cousin, Will Gibbon. Within weeks after they are married, Will volunteers as a surgeon in the Union Army and goes off to war.

"Through The Canebrake" follows the lives of Will and Laura as the Civil War gathers momentum. From the bloody fields of Shiloh to...