THE LITTLE COURTROOM IN FORT Saskatchewan was all but empty on a cold March day in the year 1880. The judge glanced at the giant Negro prisoner, Daniel Williams, and the accused outlaw, thief and murderer rose to his feet roaring: "Jesus, save me!"

Who was this man? What, beyond his prowess with a gun, caused people to spread the legend of his deeds for seventy-five years after his death? Was he really a vicious outlaw, or was he a simple, sometimes misguided missionary determined to bring Christianity to the Indians? Daniel Williams was a Negro slave on a Georgian plantation when emancipation suddenly thrust him out into the bewildering world of freedom. To his simple way of thinking, if freedom were to be found in the North, then the farther north he went, the freer he would be. Thus he became a Canadian subject and an employee of the Hudson's Bay Company. But when accidentally drawn into a shooting fray with some prospectors, he shot two of them in self defence and thereupon took to the woods and joined a tribe of Indians.

Yet Dan Williams was deeply religious and it was not long before he was trying to convert every Indian, from Chief Komaxala down to the lowliest squaw. Inexorably, his Bible and his gun drew him on, to deeds which soon became the basis of the legend, and which led him to the dramatic climax of his life.

From the dust jacket