I thought I knew the bloody saga of Frog Lake. Then I learned another side of the story

One bright morning in April, I embarked on a long day’s drive through the tawny fields of Western Canada, heading for a place I have been wondering about for most of my life.

Steering north and east from Calgary, I passed tall grain silos, swaybacked old sheds and thawing ponds full of migrating ducks. After more than six hours, I reached my destination: a small, fenced patch of mown grass where two dusty country roads meet. In it stood a fieldstone cairn and two short lines of rusting metal crosses. On each of them was a name and the word “massacred.”