Jaxon’s photograph, with his library now taking up a good part of a city block, ran as a human-interest story in the New York dailies. But little was said about how the disheveled old man was once the voice of settler protest in the Saskatchewan country in the 1880's and worked closely with the insurrectionist Métis leader Louis Riel during the Red River Rebellion.

Jaxon was born William Henry Jackson in Toronto in 1861. Educated in Classics at the University of Toronto, he moved with his family to Prince Albert, then part of the North-West Territories, in 1882.