The prey of the strongest

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 Canadian Pacific Railroad in the Kicking Horse Pass and on the Shushwap, when you and men like you were hustling to put 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 the track of other roads, which, in their parlance, broke out when the C.P.R. was finished: when End of Track joined End of Track: when the very bottom of their world fell out because two Worlds, East and West, were united by our labour, yours and theirs and even mine. Others of them are perhaps famous. They may have some mighty mountains and a way station named after them, as you may have, for all I know: they may even be Managers! And what so great as a Manager of a Through Continental Road, after all? There are Ministers and Monarchs and other men of note, but to my mind the Managers top them all. That is by the way, and you shall not take it as flattery: the humble worker with the pick and shovel and hammer and drill and bar, like myself, cannot but think with awe of the cold clear heights in which they dwell.
Years ago, when I was toiling on another grade, in another sort of rock-cut, hewing out a trail for myself in the thick impenetrable forests of which the centre may be Fleet Street or where Publishers dwell, I came across you. And it is to my credit that I never let you go. Most men represent other men or shadows, but you represented yourself and a great part of my old life: you stood for the Grade, for the Mountains, and the Passes, for the steel rails, for the Contractors with whom I worked, for the Road, for all Railroads, for Canada and British Columbia, linked and made one at last. You know what Colonial fever is: that disease of desire which at intervals afflicts those of us who have come back out of the Wilderness. You were often the cause of it and the cure of it. Perhaps I owe you one: perhaps but for your giving me a chance of vicarious consolation in our talk, I might have laid my bones by some other railroad in the West on the illimitable fat prairies of our Canada. Therefore I offer you this book. I offer you only a sketch, a rough and incomplete sketch, of certain obscurer aspects of life in one of the finest countries in the world, a country for which I have as much hope as I have affection. I have not tried to put the Pacific Slope into a pannikin. To cram British Columbia into a volume is as easy as trying to empty Superior with a spoon. For it was a full country when I knew it: when your Big Bosses came along with drills and dynamite and knocked the Rockies and the Selkirks into shape to let your Railroad through. In those days the World emptied many thousand of its workers into your big bucket, and in that bucket I was one drop. I had as partners, as tilikums, men from the Land of Everywhere: not a quarter, hardly a country, of the round world but was represented in the great Parliament of the Pick and Shovel and Axe that decreed the Road, the Great Road, the one Great Road of all!