What Was Written

In the spring of 1873, the Cypress Hills sit beyond the reach of effective law. The Dominion of Canada claims the territory on paper, but along Battle Creek authority belongs to traders, freighters, whiskey men, and whoever can make an agreement hold long enough to survive the season.Into this unsettled country comes a man with a damaged past and an unexpected talent for order. At the trading posts of Farwell and Solomon, he begins recording land claims, settling disputes, and building the fragile routines of civil life among people who have little reason to trust one another and no institution capable of forcing them to.Beyond the forts, Assiniboine camps gather after a winter of starvation and displacement. South of the border, armed wolfers ride north from Montana searching for stolen horses and an accounting they believe is owed to them. Between the camps and the traders, the settlement holds together through improvised arrangements, personal bargains, and words entered into ledgers as though writing them down might make them permanent.As tensions tighten around Battle Creek, the question facing the settlement becomes less whether violence will come than whether anything built there - a ruling, a church, a household, a name - can survive once it does.Set against the historical events leading to the Cypress Hills Massacre, What Was Written is a novel about authority in the absence of law, and about the fragile structures people create while waiting for history to arrive.