John David Hamilton is an award-winning journalist, author, and broadcaster who now lives near Lake Simcoe, north of Toronto. His grandfather was a pioneer cattle dealer who first visited Winnipeg at the start of the railroad boom in 1881. His father was a homesteader on the virgin prairie. He himself was conceived on a bush cattle ranch in Manitoba and spent his early years in remote settlements with his mother who was a frontier school teacher. He started on the Winnipeg Free Press and later was a foreign correspondent in New York, documentary maker for the CBC, and author of the comprehensive social and political history of the Northwest Territories, Arctic Revolution, also published by Dundurn Press.