When the British crushed the last spark of French resistance in Quebec, Alexis Picard's father was a broken man. Refusing to live under the Union Jack, he sent his son, Alexis, on the long trek of the French voyageurs to find land in the Illinois Country still ruled by France.

This journey by canoe along the St. Lawrence and Ottawa Rivers, through the Great Lakes to Green Bay, Wisconsin, and into the fertile Mississippi Valley makes this a tale of rugged adventure. Dogged by mutiny and intrigue on a route infested with blood-thirsty white men and dangerous Indians, Alexis desperately pushed West.

How the teen-ager saved a young Spaniard destined for sacrifice to the Morning Star by the fierce Pawnees, how he discovered the spirits worshiped by America's Indians, his arrival at the Illinois village Fort Chartres, where citizens acknowledged the King of France their sovereign, combine to charge this tale with a gripping fascination.

From the dust jacket