In this story, Henty crafts a rousing adventure drawing on real life cowboy stories. and "In treating cowboy life and ", he tells us, and "indeed, it may well be said that truth is stranger than fiction and ". Henty accurately describes the life of the true American frontiersmen - mining, hunting, lumberjacking, cattle ranching, trapping, fighting hostile Indian tribes, transporting the reader back to the early days of the Wild West with enough mystery thrown in to capture the reader's imagination.