Much of Michigan's history is not contained in the grand stories of great personages involved in epic accomplishments. Rather, the state's history--and for that matter, the histories of the world and even our own families--is in truth of a local scale and in minute detail, so local and so minute that it often goes unnoticed and unappreciated. But put together, those "histories" are the true substance of its fabric. And so it is with Sprague Taylor. He writes of people whose lives were marked by a majestic river, Michigan's Tahquamenon, and the land it sustained.