BY
MORLEY ROBERTS
LONDON:
HURST AND BLACKETT, LIMITED,
Paternoster House, E.C.
1906
PREFACE
To Archer Baker,
European Manager of the Canadian
Pacific Railroad
MY DEAR BAKER,
Of all the men I worked with on the CanadianPacific Railroad in the Kicking Horse Pass and on theShushwap, when you and men like you were hustling toput it through, I am not, nowadays, in touch with one.They are, doubtless, distinguished or have gone under.Some of them, perhaps, lie in obscure graves beside thetrack of other roads, which, in their parlance, "brokeout" when the C.P.R. was finished: when End ofTrack joined End of Track: when the very bottom oftheir world fell out because two Worlds, East and West,were united by our labour, yours and theirs and evenmine. Others of them are perhaps famous. They mayhave some mighty mountains and a way station namedafter them, as you may have, for all I know: they mayeven be Managers! And what so great as a Managerof a Through Continental Road, after all? There areMinisters and Monarchs and other men of note, but tomy mind the Managers top them all. That is by theway, and you shall not take it as flattery: the humbleworker with the pick and shovel and hammer and drilland bar, like myself, cannot but think with awe of thecold clear heights in which they dwell.
Years ago, when I was toiling on another grade, inanother sort of rock-cut, hewing out a trail for myselfin the thick impenetrable forests of which the centremay be Fleet Street or where Publishers dwell, I cameacross you. And it is to my credit that I never let yougo. Most men represent other men or shadows, but yourepresented yourself and a great part of my old life: youstood for the Grade, for the Mountains, and the Passes,for the steel rails, for the Contractors with whom Iworked, for the Road, for all Railroads, for Canada andBritish Columbia, linked and made one at last. Youknow what Colonial fever is: that disease of desire whichat intervals afflicts those of us who have come back outof the Wilderness. You were often the cause of it andthe cure of it. Perhaps I owe you one: perhaps but foryour giving me a chance of vicarious consolation inour talk, I might have laid my bones by some otherrailroad in the West on the illimitable fat prairies ofour Canada. Therefore I offer you this book. I offeryou only a sketch, a rough and incomplete sketch, ofcertain obscurer aspects of life in one of the finestcountries in the world, a country for which I have asmuch hope as I have affection. I have not tried to putthe Pacific Slope into a pannikin. To cram BritishColumbia into a volume is as easy as trying to emptySuperior with a spoon. For it was a full country whenI knew it: when your Big Bosses came along with drillsand dynamite and knocked the Rockies and the Selkirksinto shape to let your Railroad through. In those daysthe World emptied many thousand of its workers intoyour big bucket, and in that bucket I was one drop. Ihad as partners, as tilikums, men from the Land ofEverywhere: not a quarter, hardly a country, of theround world but was represented in the great Parliamentof the Pick and Shovel and Axe that decreed the Road,the Great Road, the one Great Road of all!
I have seen many countries, as you know, but nonecan ever be to me what B.C. was when I worked there.It fizzed and fumed and boiled and surged. It was ina roar: it hummed: it was like the Cañon when thegrey Fraser from the North comes down