Willy Poe is a newcomer to Michigan's Upper Peninsula -- a shy, lonely young lawyer yearning to meet the girl who will call him William. On a lovely day in July in 1873, he meets her. Her name is Laughing Whitefish.

She presents him with as exciting, challenging and hopeless a case as ever set a precedent. At issue is an elemental question of raw justice: Can Laughing Whitefish, a Chippewa Indian, collect a debt owed her father? She has unimpeachable proof -- a tattered document giving Marji a share in the fabulous Jackson iron ore mine. And no one denies the validity or authenticity of the document...but an Indian?