Pathfinding on Plain and Prairie

In the dying light of the 19th century, a missionary family ventures into the vast Canadian Northwest, where the buffalo herds thin and the old ways crumble before the march of settlement. John McDougall records his years among the Cree and Blackfoot nations with an eye for vivid detail and a colonist's faith, yet his account carries an unexpected tenderness for the peoples he sought to convert. He describes the brutal winters, the desperate journeys by dog sled, the ceremonial dances that both frightened and fascinated him, and the slow catastrophe unfolding as railways and reserves reshaped a world that had endured for millennia. This is not Indigenous perspective, but it is something rarer: a missionary's candid reckoning with a land and its peoples he could neither fully understand nor forget. For readers drawn to primary accounts of the North American frontier, to the complicated ethics of early religious encounter, and to the prose of an era when missionaries still wrote like naturalists and explorers.