That William Bleasdell Cameron should be included in a collection such as this is largely the result of a strange trick of fate, a classic instance of someone being in the wrong place at the right time. Had he not been serving as a clerk at a Hudson's Bay Company store in a small settlement near Fort Pitt on 2 April 1885, he would not have been witness to one of the bloodiest incidents of the North-West Insurrection, the Frog Lake Massacre. Up to that moment Cameron had shown not the least inclination toward a literary career; indeed, it would be another six years before he actually turned his hand to writing. But on that day he narrowly escaped death at the hands of the wild young men of Big Bear's band of Plains Cree, led by their fierce war chief, Wandering Spirit. For the next two months Cameron, along...