Roger Pocock

Born in England in 1865, Roger Pocock spent much of his early adult life in Canada after arriving there with his father in the 1880s. Archive records describe him as an adventurer, soldier, journalist, and author, and note that he joined the North-West Mounted Police in 1884 before leaving a few years later after severe frostbite.

That rough experience fed directly into his writing. He published fiction and nonfiction shaped by western and frontier life, and reference sources remember him especially as an adventure writer and journalist with a taste for firsthand material.

Pocock is also remembered outside literature as the founder of the Legion of Frontiersmen in 1905. He died in 1941, leaving behind books that reflect the restless, wide-ranging life he lived.