A 1958 feature film of the same name was adapted from the novel and produced by Walt Disney Productions, starring Fess Parker, Joanne Dru, James MacArthur, and Wendell Corey.

The title song was composed by Lawrence Edward Watkin, Paul J. Smith, and Hazel ("Gil") George.

True Son did not want to leave as he was fully assimilated and considered himself Lenape; he disdained white society.

Accompanied by a young soldier, Del Hardy, True Son is taken to Fort Pitt, where he is met by Harry Butler, his blood father.

That evening he slips out of the Butlers’ house and discovers his Lenape cousin, Half Arrow, nearby.

Their reunion is tempered by learning that men from Wilse's shop shot and scalped their friend, Little Crane.

True Son is used as bait to lure a band of settlers into an ambush, but he gives away the plan when he sees a child among them who reminds him of Gordie.

Adopted by a Lenape family, he became assimilated into their culture, undergoing years of traditional lessons of strength and patience, with fire and freezing water tactics, until he was fifteen.

Cuyloga is True Son's adoptive Indian father and believed that the boy had become culturally Lenape.

His wife adopted the boy, who was then considered to be a member of her clan, as the Lenape had a matrilineal kinship system.

Del Hardy is a young colonial soldier who is to ensure True Son returns to his birth family.

Wilse believes that True Son has been brainwashed by the Lenape and can no longer be trusted as a white man.

At one point, a Black slave tells True Son and Gordie about Kittatinny, Second, and Stony (or Short) mountains.

John Elder (1706–1792), known as "the Fighting Parson," became the pastor of Paxton Presbyterian Church, located in present-day Paxtang, in 1738.

Elder's Protestant Scots-Irish family was from County Antrim, Ireland, and he was a graduate of the University of Edinburgh, Scotland.

Elder was also a leader of the Paxton Boys, a vigilante frontier group formed to protect White settlers from Indian attack.

The Paxton Boys are perhaps best known for having massacred a group of Conestoga Indians who had been placed in protective custody in a jail in Lancaster.

The return of White captives described in The Light in the Forest was a traumatic experience for many, especially for those who had been adopted and assimilated when young.