Crocus, the small prairie town that W. O. Mitchell has created in his novels and stories, like Stephen Leacock's Mariposa, has been mapped in the Canadian imagination. The original of this mythic place is Weyburn, Saskatchewan, a town of about five thousand people when Mitchell spent his first twelve years there. Its notoriety was assured when Mitchell's first novel, Who Has Seen the Wind, appeared in 1947 to instant popular and critical acclaim. The novel has since sold more than half a million copies.

William Ormond Mitchell, born 13 March 1914, was the second of four sons of Ormond Skinner and Margaret Letitia McMurray Mitchell. In 1921 Mitchell's father, the Weyburn druggist and a popular elocutionist, died suddenly. In 1928 Mitchell had to withdraw from school for over a year because of a tubercular wrist. As Mitchell, quoted in Canadian Heritage (December 1980), recalled this period: "Billy Mitchell ... who ... was, between nine and four...