Called "the Canadian Burns" in his own time, Alexander McLachlan lived humbly but not inconspicuously. Six volumes of poetry were published in his lifetime; his work was anthologized, recited in schools, praised by Ralph Waldo Emerson. Henry David Thoreau, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, and other Americans, and revered by an influential group of Canadians including Thomas D'Arcy McGee, George Brown, and George Monro Grant. McLachlan achieved this surprising fame partly because of contemporary hunger for a "native bard" and partly because of his strong lyric expression of pioneer attitudes.

Born in Johnstone, in the Clyde Valley of Scotland, on 24 May 1818 to a rigorously Calvinist mother (Jane Sutherland McLachlan) and a Chartist and Temperance-activist father (Charles McLachlan), McLachlan became an apprentice in a Glasgow tailor shop and began writing radical verses. He followed his immigrant family to Upper Canada in 1840. His father's sudden death left the young Scot with a...