John West

Ordained in the Church of England, he became the first chaplain sent by the Hudson’s Bay Company to the Red River colony in 1820. Working under the Church Missionary Society, he helped establish some of the region’s earliest Protestant schools and churches, and his years in North America made him an important eyewitness to a formative period in western Canadian history.

He is best known as the author of The Substance of a Journal During a Residence at the Red River Colony, British North America, published in 1824. In that book, he described travel, settlement life, missionary work, and his encounters with Indigenous communities, giving modern readers a detailed if strongly colonial-era perspective on the region.

After returning to England, he continued in church work until his death in 1845. Today, he is remembered less for literary style than for the historical value of his writing, which preserves one of the earliest extended English-language accounts of the Red River settlement.