Finding a fur trader's journal is unusual. Finding a trader's journal in French is even rarer. Finding a journal in French and written on birchbark is completely unprecedented. The Yellowknife Journal is a full-colour facsimile of the birchbark journal kept by Jean Steinbruck, a soldier of German descent who was likely sent to the colonies by a prince as partial payment of a debt. Steinbruck accompanied Alexander McKenzie to the Arctic ocean before working as a fur trader for the North West Company in the Great Slave Lake area. As required by the Company, he kept a journal of his daily trafficking with the natives around his post. In the hard winter of 1802-03, he ran out of paper and was forced to use the birchbark sheets used for patching canoes to keep his daily entries. Historians and collectors have heard of traders resorting to birchbark sheets when they had no paper at their post, but as it was customary for traders to keep a rough journal and then rewrite a fair copy to send in to the company, no other examples of these birchbark journals have survived.

In private hands for almost two hundred years, the journal has surfaced thanks to Henry de Lotbiniere Harwood's passion for Canadiana and his own family's history. A descendant of the Seigneurs of Vaudreuil and Rigaud, de Lotbiniere Harwood uncovered, preserved and passed on the journal to his children. This unique Canadian artifact includes a transcription of the French journal entries accompanied by the English translations, as well as a lively and accessible introduction by Harry Duckworth, a noted expert in the field.