FACT, FICTION AND FANCY...This is a novel. Its characters and scenes are imaginary. There was no prairie town Little River or the Brown Buffalo Band, or Squaw Hill in the Northwest Territories of Canada and what became the Province of Alberta. None of the characters depicted herein were real. But in what I choose to call Novelized History, the story draws on incidents and characters in history, from native Canadian stories, the records of explorers, fur traders, indentured boy clerks, missionaries, the military, the Northwest Mounted Police, railroaders and politic cal fi gures in North America and Europe from the 17 th Century to the last decade of the 20 th Century.