Henry Budd was born a Cree boy in the country north of Lake Winnipeg, about the year 1812, and nobody wrote his father's name down, or his mother's. His father was dead before the story starts. In 1820 a chaplain named John West came through Norway House looking for boys to fill a school he was founding at Red River, and Budd was one of the two he got. The other was the son of a chief called Withewacapo, a boy named John Hope. Two years later, on a Sunday in July 1822, West baptized them both. He wrote in his register that Henry Budd was an Indian boy of about ten who could already read the New Testament and repeat the catechism correctly, and he gave him the name of his own old rector back in England, a man the boy would never meet. His mother was still living. She would still be living eighteen years later.

He was not a boy in a story yet. He was a boy in a school, and then a young man with a job: labourer and clerk for the Hudson's Bay Company, and after his contract was out, a farmer with land of his own near St Andrews. He married Betsy Work in 1836. He took over the day school at the Upper Church in 1837, which is the ordinary sort of turn a life takes, farming to teaching.

Then in June 1840 the missionaries asked him to go north and start something where there was nothing, and he went, his wife and his mother with him. Cumberland House would not do, so he moved down the Saskatchewan to the place the Cree called W'passkwayaw, and built a house that was also the school and also the meeting place, and for two years he did it with no clergyman over him at all. When John Smithurst finally came up in June 1842 to see what had happened, he baptized thirty-nine adults, twenty-seven infants and twenty-two schoolchildren. That is what two quiet years had come to.

Bishop Anderson came in 1850, named the station Devon, took Budd back to Red River and taught him theology himself, and on 22 December ordained him deacon: the first Indian in North America, as the record of the time puts it, admitted to the ministry of the Church of England.

Two years after that he set out to open a station further up the river, at Nepowewin, and he knew before he left that he was not wanted. "I do not know how I may be received by the Indians of Nepowewin," he wrote, and then set down what he had heard: that a chief named Mahnsuk had sent word down that he had better not come, for he would oppose his landing anywhere in the Nepowewin. Budd left his family behind at Cumberland. "I chose to go alone for the first winter," he wrote. He landed on 8 September 1852 and stayed.

What happened there is worth telling carefully, because it is not what a mission story usually does. In September a man named Wulluck told him, at length and courteously, why he would never become a Christian: that if he did, he would have no chance of ever meeting again the relatives and friends who had gone before him to the other world, and that God had made his people different from the white people and given them their own mode of worship. Budd wrote every word of it into the journal he was sending to London, and he did not argue back on the page.

He worked. On 15 June 1853 he wrote a single sentence at Nepowewin: "I have finished the translation of the Psalms this day. The whole of the 150 Psalms are now translated into the Cree." A month later, copying them out in the syllabic characters, he said why he was bothering with syllabics at all: "to get it printed for the old people among the Indians." He had thought about who would be holding the book.

That July he came downriver to Christ Church and was ordained priest, on a Sunday, with James Hunter reading the prayers and the bishop preaching. He wrote out afterwards what had been in his head while he knelt: "The most solemn vows that man can make to God on earth are now upon me: still greater expectations are raised with regard to my usefulness in this land. The Society in England will expect more from me, the eyes of all the clergy in this country will be upon me, and the eyes of my countrymen are daily upon me." There is no complaint anywhere in it. He asked only for prayers, that he might be faithful unto death and at last receive the crown of life.

He buried other people's children with tenderness, and wrote down what they said. A girl called Mary Bell, dying that same July, waved her hand for someone to come nearer and told him, "Now you can be praying: pray now, for I like to hear you."

Then it came to his own house. In September 1864 his son Henry, ordained only weeks before, died of consumption. Within a month his wife died. Three weeks after that his daughter died, aged fourteen. He wrote to London the following June and said the thing plainly: "my dear son Henry, my own beloved wife, and my dear and tender daughter, all taken from me in the short space of six weeks." His first letter, he admitted, had been written "in the midst of tears, of much weakness in body, and depression of spirit." He thanked the Society for its kindness to his son. He said he would try to think of them not as they had been, poorly and sickly and dying, but as glorified spirits. He sent three of his surviving children down to Red River because he could not care for them, and kept one: "a little boy, nine years old; he is to be my companion."

He kept going for another ten years. In May 1867 he came back down to the station he had founded, "coming down a rapid stream all the way," to take charge of Christ Church, and found himself nearly the last man standing in that whole country. "We have all natives now in all the Church Missionary stations in North America, with the exception of Red River itself," he wrote. "I have the whole of the Saskatchewan district to myself now." The next January he described what the work had become, and it is not the sentence anyone expects from a frontier missionary: "My work then for the most part is pastoral, the same as any English parish."

He died suddenly on 2 April 1875, the Friday of Easter week, and was buried three days later in the churchyard of the church he had built the first version of, under a granite stone. Years afterwards an archdeacon asked an elderly Cree man whether he had been very sorry when Mr Budd was taken away. "Sorry," the man said, "does not express what we felt. My own father died some years ago, but when Mr Budd died, I felt for the first time what it meant to be an orphan." In 1853 Budd had asked God for one thing, that he might be faithful unto death and receive at last the crown of life; and that is the prayer the whole record shows being answered.