[2] In Ottawa in 1868, Mair was introduced by civil servant and writer Henry Morgan to young lawyers George Denison, William Foster, and Robert Haliburton.

[2] Mair reported for the Montreal Gazette during the first Riel Rebellion in 1869-70, during which time he was twice imprisoned, and sentenced to execution, but managed to escape that fate in the Spring of 1870.

At a dinner given by Alexander Begg; Annie McDermot Bannatyne, the Métis daughter of Andrew McDermot and wife of Andrew Graham Ballenden Bannatyne, reacted to Mair's account of tensions between Métis and white wives with a public slap and horse-whipping, which inspired the first western roman-à-clef, Begg's 1871 Dot it Down: A Story of Life in the Northwest,[5] presenting "a caricature of Mair as a self-important Upper Canadian flirt who dots down his sneering observations about the west", according to the Dictionary of Canadian Biography.

He travelled thousands of miles through the northwest, and kept a journal of his experiences which contains historical details about the treaty negotiations,[6] and about the native and Métis people and places of the time.

[9][10] The Dictionary of Canadian Biography (DCB) states that Dreamland "demonstrates a conventional colonial approach to poetry.

However, the book was praised by "the established poet Charles Sangster, who referred to Canada's sophisticated literary tradition as one that was habitually overlooked in the popular press.