Madeleine Oakes, a Red River Colony Metis mother of four grown children, is astonished late one September day in 1869 when a woman she envisions as the Virgin Mary strides into her home and demands a cup of tea. Her astonishment quickly turns to disbelief when the true identity of her visitor is revealed. Suffering the woman’s scathing defamation, Madeleine flees her home in turmoil. The retribution she exacts will have consequences beyond anything either of them could have imagined.

Madeleine’s vision is Elizabeth Fraser, a young woman from Toronto’s genteel society who has come west with the homestead’s irascible patriarch, Murdoch McGillivray, under unexpected and inexplicable circumstances. Surviving the prairie winter that nearly takes her life, she will serve what she deems her wild west purgatory in the flat and endless landscape that is about to become the province of Manitoba and a magnet for the influx of settlers from Ontario.

Elizabeth’s arrival coincides with the Hudson’s Bay Company sale to Canada of its 1.5 million-square-mile Prince Rupert’s Land fur-trade empire. When Canadian government surveyors arrive unannounced in the environs of Winnipeg and its adjacent HBC post of Fort Garry to begin their work on land where Metis families have lived for generations, they unknowingly light the fuse that will lead to armed resistance by a people determined to defend their rights.