The stories were carefully examined by several ethnologists, among them Alice Cunningham Fletcher, a lecturer at Harvard University.

The work for the covers and for the headings of the chapters and three of the full-page drawings was done by Angel De Cora.

[5] The Chicago Tribune gave the book a mixed review, but was laudatory of the artwork: Much of the material has been drawn from the same sources that served Henry Wadsworth Longfellow when he was writing Hiawatha, but Miss Judd offers the facts and the stories apparently just as she took them first in her notebook.

The traditions and myths which occupy the greater part of the book have all the charm of folklore and fairy tales, but while they are told in the simple, childlike language of the [Native American], the beautiful metaphor and fanciful imagery with which the [Native American] embellishes his language is entirely lacking...

The first part of the book, 'Sketches of Various Tribes of North American Indians', reads more or less like an extract from an encyclopedia, but the second and third parts, 'Traditions and Myths' and 'Stories Recently Told of Hiawatha and Other Heroes', cannot fail, because of their subject matter, to be entertaining to the average reader... Several of the illustrations in the book, as well as the cover design, are the work of Miss Angel de Cora, a gifted young Indian artist, thus giving to the pictorial features of the volume an unusually true reproduction of the atmosphere of Indian life.