The American fur trade of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries brought together people from many cultures.

One family of African ancestry that achieved notable success in the Great Lakes region was the Bonga family. The first Bongas were likely an enslaved couple belonging to a British officer commanding at Mackinac Island in the 1780s. Freed in 1787, Jean and Jeanne Bonga began a family. Their son, Pierre Bonga, worked in the fur trade for the North West Company, and later for the American Fur Company. Pierre married into the Ojibway tribe and fathered four sons, all of whom participated in the fur trade. One of them, Stephen Bonga was proud of his role in the non-native population and often made the confusing boast of being "the first white child born at the Head of the Lakes, " the region near the present-day cities of Duluth, Minnesota, and Superior, Wisconsin.

As a young man, he was sent away for an education to become a Presbyterian missionary. He quit school, however and returned instead to the Lake Superior area where he married an Ojibway woman and entered the fur trade as an interpreter.

With brothers George and Jack, he spent the Winter of 1823-1824 with an American Fur Company party at a post named "Fort Misery" near the present location of Grand Portage National Monument. Promoted to the position of clerk, Stephen Bonga enjoyed considerable responsibility as he advanced in the fur trade hierarchy. He traded for the company in the border lakes region of northern Minnesota and western Ontario between 1827 and 1833.

As a clerk, Bonga frequently traveled through the waterways that would later become Voyageurs National Park. Stephen traveled widely during his lifetime and canoed on Lake Superior and many of the waterways of the western Great Lakes region, including the area that would later become the St. Croix National Scenic Riverway.

In later life, after he left the fur trade, he served as a guide and interpreter for artist Eastman Johnson. He accompanied Johnson during his Lake Superior travels to the areas of present-day Grand Portage National Monument, Apostle Islands National Monument, and Isle Royale National Park, where the artist sought subjects to portray.

Stephen Bonga died in 1884 near his birthplace, a well respected African American member of both the American Indian and non-native communities of the Minnesota-Wisconsin border region.