If, as Northrop Frye has suggested, the Canadian character has largely been shaped by the vast distances that separate us and by our almost stubborn efforts to stay together across those distances, then Frederick Philip Grove’s first published work, Over Prairie Trails (1922), should rightly be considered a defining Canadian text.

A slim volume of just over 150 pages, the book documents, in a series of seven sketches, Grove’s long and occasionally perilous weekly trips by horse-drawn carriage through the Manitoba countryside to visit his wife and child. Nothing particularly momentous happens on any of these trips – the trails are so raw that he seldom encounters even another human being – but there’s something about the slightly repetitive nature of the text (Grove followed the exact same path each time out) and the highly specific detail of his impressions of the northern terrain that make the sketches reverberate with broader associations, as if they were distillations of the entire history of Canadian pioneering.

Seven successive takes on one repeated drive do not exactly hold the promise of zippy reading, and there are admittedly a few boring passages, but for the most part Over Prairie Trails is a beautiful, engaging work. Of the seven sketches, a full five take place in winter, and the book as a whole comes across as a tribute to the prostrating power of that most Canadian of seasons. In the chapter entitled “Snow,” Grove memorably describes the appearance of a line of telephone poles, the last he will see on his journey: “The first of the posts stood a foot in snow; at the second one the drift reached six or seven feet up; the next pole … stood like a giant buried up to his chest and looked singularly helpless and footbound; and the last one showed just its crossbar with three glassy, green insulators above the mountain of snow…. It looked so harsh, so millennial-old….”

Grove was born in Prussia (now Poland) in 1879 and spent the first half of his life travelling the world, voraciously searching for exotic experiences. By 1912, he had already written several of his more renowned novels, including A Search for America and Settlers of the Marsh, but because he was unable to get them published, he was compelled to take a teaching position in the Manitoba community of Gladstone in order to support himself. It was there that he met his wife, a fellow schoolteacher, and when she took a position 34 miles north in the pioneer district of Falmouth, it led to the weekly commutes chronicled in Over Prairie Trails.

Throughout the book, there is a clear sense of an incurable vagabond finally, almost giddily, returning to his old ways. “I am essentially an outdoor creature,” says Grove in one sketch, “and for several years the fact that I had been forced to look at the out-of-doors from the window of a town house only, had been eating away at my vitality.” Accordingly, the old-world formality of some of Grove’s prose is constantly interrupted by a new-world “tally ho!” gusto. Take his description of the pre-dawn sky: “The stillest hour! In starlit winter nights the heavenly bodies seem to take on an additional splendour, something next to blazing, overweening boastfulness. ‘Now sleeps the world,’ they seem to say, ‘but we are awake and weaving destiny.’”

All of the sketches end with Grove reuniting happily with his family, but unlike Odysseus, who longed only to be home for good, Grove is always helplessly thinking ahead to his next journey. And is there not something in that, too, that is appropriately Canadian? It is as if Grove is standing in here for a whole generation of people who willingly, almost masochistically, confronted and endured our inhospitable climate.

For modern readers, Over Prairie Trails holds an extra fascination in that it envelops us in a world long lost, a world that still held the promise of great journeys. On certain days, Grove’s travels took only four or five hours out of his day, but on others they took from dawn to far after dusk, and were sometimes treacherous enough – due to sleet and snow – that he couldn’t be sure they would be completed at all. Furthermore, Grove’s knowledge of weather patterns and of the local flora and fauna seems, to my mind at least, so advanced as to verge on the mystical. I finished the book with a vague feeling of inadequacy and a vow to get out to the country more in the future.

Part of the reason Canada is thought to be bland and lacking in identity is that we don’t have much in the way of seminal texts – writing that helped forge and define the national character. Americans had Twain and Whitman and Melville and Hawthorne to tell them who they were and where they were going. Based on the evidence of Over Prairie Trails, I’d say Grove was decidedly the equal of Henry David Thoreau, and it’s a shame the book has never been better known.