This fascinating account is based upon the real-life travels of historic figure and adventurer Alexander Henry. Henry was a noted fur trader in both the Lake Michigan and Lake Superior region during the eighteenth century with intimate knowledge of life and culture among native people. Henry was admired for his bravery and grit when facing the hardships of frontier life. He was a canoe traveler on the river highways and lakes of the region and also walked hundreds of miles through the immense forests and featureless prairies in all seasons. He charted the geography of much of central North America for generations of Americans and Canadians who today figuratively follow his snowshoe tracks and the wake of his canoes.

Henry provided one of the very few first-hand descriptions of Ojibwe, Odawa, Cree and Assiniboine culture at the time when native people were still living from the land, speaking their own languages, and practicing their age-old cultural traditions. As an adopted member of an Ojibwe family, Henry knew and described their lives in the mid-eighteenth century from a personal perspective which is rarely available to native people and modern ethnographers.