Four-year-old John Butler is captured by the Delaware Indians and is adopted by one of the tribes leaders. Suddenly, after 11 years among the Delaware people, he is forced to return to his original home and parents by the Bouquet military expedition of 1765. But his deep love for and loyalty to his Indian parents and his cousin, Half Arrow, is his reason for rejecting the white man's civilization.

Young Jethro Creighton grows from a boy to a man when he is left to take care of the family farm in Illinois during the difficult years of the Civil War.

The work is structured around the life of protagonist George Willard, from the time he was a child to his growing independence and ultimate abandonment of Winesburg as a young man. Set in the fictional town of Winesburg, Ohio, not to be confused with the actual Winesburg, which is based loosely on the author's childhood memories of Clyde, Ohio.

A toy Indian in a toy canoe takes a journey of several hundred miles through the Great Lakes, the St. Lawrence River, and Niagara Falls before reaching the Atlantic Ocean.