Set in Nazi-occupied Norway during World War II, it recounts the story of several Norwegian children who use sleds to smuggle their country's gold bullion past German guards to a waiting ship, the Cleng Peerson.

[5][6] The book is set in Norway in 1940, and starts out with four Norwegian children, Peter, Michael, Helga, and Lovisa playing on their sleds after school.

[7] The plan is that all the children above ten years of age in their school will carry the gold past German sentries on their sleds and leave it by Uncle Victor's ship, which would then take it, for safekeeping, to America.

The town's doctor creates a false epidemic that affects only the smaller children and paints them from head to toe with red dots.

He tells them that his name is Jan Lasek, and that he is a young Pole who was captured by the Nazis when they invaded Poland, and forced to serve in the German army.

"[4][10] McSwigan stated in an author's note "that she [had] tried to be as accurate as possible in describing how the children carried the gold on sleds" while admitting that some details were changed.

Over and over, an Associated Press dispatch or one from United-International has set me to wondering: What kind of patriots were those Norwegians who saved their gold by having their children sled it down a mountain past the occupation forces, as I subsequently made my characters do in Snow Treasure?

"[12] News reports published in The Baltimore Sun in 1940 described the Bomma as "a little gray Norwegian coasting motorship [and] the central figure in a mystery shipment of $9,000,000 in gold which moved in and out of the port Monday night."

Once loaded, the armored trucks trundled off the pier and traveled through deserted city streets at midnight accompanied by a squad of police on motorcycles and in radio cars.

"[12] An article published in The Cairns Post, an Australian newspaper, on 22 August 1941, reported that £15,000,000 in gold bullion — packed in 1500 crates and requiring 30 trucks — had been smuggled past German troops from Oslo to Åndalsnes, 480 kilometres (300 miles) to the north, where British warships were waiting.

Outriders went ahead advising patriotic Norwegians of the coming convoy to prevent its ambush by Quislings... Then, one by one, the trucks, led by village guides, slipped through the Nazi lines and reached Andalsnes.

The rest of the gold was ferried across the fjord to Molde... That night Norwegian patriots, men, women and children, were gathered together and told what lay in the cases.