‘Tell me about your childhood. Were you the cowboy or the Indian?” I ask Guy Vanderhaeghe. The Saskatoon novelist is seated with me at a tiny table in the Broadway Roastery to talk about his much-anticipated new novel, A Good Man.

“The Indian. I was always the Indian,” he laughs. “I had a book that contained all of the instructions for making everything from a breechclout to beadwork. My Shetland pony was a pinto. His name was Patches. I came pretty well equipped. I had a headband too.”

In 1950s Saskatchewan, Esterhazy still had an active livery stable, since some people arrived in town on horseback to do their trade. It sounds like the set of The Englishman’s Boy, Vanderhaeghe’s award-winning novel turned into a CBC-TV miniseries.

The Vanderhaeghe family didn’t own a television set until Guy was 13. This is how the imagination of Canada’s greatest chronicler of the West was formed: isolated in a modest town in southeastern Saskatchewan, creating Indian costumes and devouring books.

For visual stimulation, Vanderhaeghe went to the movies. There were two new shows per week on the local cinema’s big screen. He would take in a Friday-night movie, then walk home and act out the movie (embellishing the plot) in his backyard.

Esterhazy’s nearest service centre was Yorkton. When the prairie lad went to the optometrist for his regular eye appointments, he also carried home a book of children’s literature. The thoughtful merchant had a lending library that consisted of 20 books. There was no public library in Esterhazy until Vanderhaeghe was 10, but that didn't stop him from dreaming about a writing career.

“From the time I could read, I wanted to write. In many ways, I couldn’t distinguish between them. They were both make-believe for me,” Vanderhaeghe explains. Family lore tells of young Guy lying next to his grandmother’s sewing machine and pestering her about how to spell words.

It comes as no surprise that Vanderhaeghe pursued his passion for learning in a more formalized university setting. He holds both a BA and an MA in history from the University of Saskatchewan in Saskatoon. In the mid-1970s, he seriously contemplated a career as an academic historian. “I was being encouraged to go on and do a PhD, but I knew that I didn’t have the chops for that.”

Vanderhaeghe’s master’s thesis was a study of Lord Tweedsmuir’s entire oeuvre and the imperialist ideas he espoused. Lord Tweedsmuir, a.k.a. John Buchan, was Canada’s governor-general, 1935-40. He was also the author of suspense thrillers such as The Thirty-Nine Steps, and he created the Governor-General’s Literary Awards.

“When I was a grad student, I only had two seminars to attend, so that was when I started to write fiction and when my first short story was published.” Vanderhaeghe’s Happy Jack appeared in the second issue of Grain.

In 1978, as a fallback option, the pragmatic sodbuster added a bachelor of education from the University of Regina; he taught high-school history in tiny Herbert, Sask., for one brief year. Before he became a published author, Vanderhaeghe held various jobs as a freelance writer and editor, research officer and library assistant.

In the early 1980s, Vanderhaeghe’s literary career took a fortunate turn. “My first book [Man Descending] was plucked from the slush pile by a secretary. She wanted to move up to editorial so she read my book and started pitching it.” Macmillan of Canada published Man Descending in 1982, and Vanderhaeghe won his first Governor-General’s Award and the Faber Prize.

The Englishman’s Boy (1996) earned him his second Governor-General’s Award. His follow-up, The Last Crossing (2002), was a bestseller and a Canada Reads selection. In the past nine years, Vanderhaeghe has started and set aside another novel and co-written the screenplay for The Englishman’s Boy. A Good Man is the third instalment in the historic late-19th-century Western trilogy.

A Good Man is a sweeping epic that chronicles the end of the Wild West. The novel’s plot unfolds a decade after the end of the American Civil War. Vanderhaeghe deftly explores the very timely theme of how characters attempt to find their place in a newly emerging social order. The novel has already made the long list of candidates for the prestigious Scotiabank Giller Prize.

Vanderhaeghe originally set out to write about Sitting Bull and Major James Walsh, a North-West Mounted Police fort commander based in Saskatchewan’s Cypress Hills. As the concept for A Good Man continued to percolate, the author buried his nose in Ottawa’s National Library archives and rooted around the Nebraska State archives. When he uncovered juicy historical details about Confederate conspirators and Fenian revolutionaries, the plot thickened.

Vanderhaeghe’s discoveries about the history of the Canadian militia also found their way into A Good Man. When he investigated the Battle of Ridgeway (1866), he unveiled some inspiring events and characters. The Fort Erie battle site, the last foreign invasion on Ontario soil, was where Canadian soldiers suffered a humiliating defeat to Fenian invaders led by General John O’Neill.

Vanderhaeghe discovered that Fort Benton, Mont., was home to many Fenian soldiers. It’s also where his Good Man protagonist, Wesley Case, an Ottawa native and former North-West Mounted Policeman, intends to reinvent himself.

Case encounters Fenian revolutionaries, falls in love with a married woman and finally confronts the incident that brought his military career to an end. Major Walsh and Sitting Bull still have pivotal roles to play in this historical novel, but it’s Case’s story that dominates the narrative.

Now that he’s published the final book in his epic Western trilogy, the bookish prairie boy who once lost himself in games of cowboys and Indians will be pulled off to far-flung places promoting A Good Man. And no, he tells me as our interview winds down, there won’t be an Esterhazy boyhood memoir. He’s sticking to fiction.

Patricia Dawn Robertson is a Saskatchewan journalist who lives just down the road from historic Batoche.