Raised in a canoe and cabin, William Warren is a child of the frontier. A man who grows to witness firsthand the injustices of the US government and its corrupt officials as they remove the Ojibwe people from their lands.

As an interpreter, Warren fights from within, until the tragedy of Sandy Lake forces him to realize that there is no stopping progress; he must preserve the oral histories at any cost.

With manuscript in hand, he collects the tales of the elders, and risks his life on a dangerous cross-country journey to New York in the midst of winter.

Fighting ailing lungs, the effects of laudanum, and bigotry, this is the story of how William Warren lived, and how his book, History of the Ojibway People, was lost, rediscovered, and published, becoming a first-of-its-kind history of a Native American people taken directly from the words of his grandfathers, and still printed to this day.