Allowing him to "tell the best story and tell the truth", Brown's notes were self-reflexive, and drew attention to the artistic choices he made when putting together the book. Brown makes explicit the inaccuracies in the book, as when he realized his drawings of William McDougall did not match up with descriptions of him by biographers as a "portly" and "heavily built man". Brown chose not to redraw McDougall's scenes, deciding he "could live with that level of inaccuracy". He also admits that he deliberately changed some of the historical details, as when he has Prime Minister Macdonald in talks with the Hudson's Bay Company in London—Macdonald was not in London at that time and did not directly participate in the negotiations. In other instances, Brown noted where he paid special care to historical details: the dialogue of Riel's trial comes directly from court transcripts. Brown makes clear in his notes the amount of research undertaken for the book, emphasizing both its authenticity and his desire to show the different aspects of Riel's ambiguous story. Many of his changes were made for space considerations, as he intended to limit the book to about two hundred pages.