Theresa Gowanlock

Born Theresa Mary Johnson in Upper Canada in 1863, she married John Alexander Gowanlock in 1884 and soon moved west to Frog Lake in what is now Alberta. The journey and the settlement life that followed placed her at the edge of a fast-changing frontier, where she showed a strong interest in the land and the people around her.

In April 1885, during the violence at Frog Lake, her husband was killed and she and Theresa Delaney were taken captive for about two months. After regaining her freedom, she helped tell the story in Two Months in the Camp of Big Bear (1885), a book that made her known to readers across Canada and beyond.

She later returned to Ontario, where she died in Tintern in 1899. Though she wrote from a deeply personal and painful point of view, her book remains an important eyewitness account for readers interested in Canadian history, frontier life, and the way lived experience can become literature.