author
Theresa Gowanlock
1863–1899
A Canadian pioneer and memoirist, she is remembered for one of the best-known firsthand accounts of captivity during the 1885 North-West Resistance. Her writing turns a frightening stretch of frontier history into a vivid, personal story.
1 Audiobook
Two Months in the Camp of Big Bear
by Theresa Gowanlock, Theresa Delaney
About the author
Born Theresa Mary Johnson in Upper Canada in 1863, she married John Alexander Gowanlock in 1884 and soon moved with him to the North-West Territories. The couple settled near Frog Lake, where their lives were shattered during the violence of 1885.
After the Frog Lake killings, she and Theresa Delaney were taken captive by followers of Big Bear and later released. That experience became the basis for Two Months in the Camp of Big Bear, the memoir she published with Delaney in 1885, giving readers a direct account of fear, survival, and life on the prairie frontier.
She later returned to Ontario, where she died in 1899 at just 36. Though her published work is brief, it remains an important firsthand record of a defining episode in western Canadian history.