Produced by Donald Lainson
BLACK ROCK
A TALE OF THE SELKIRKS
By Ralph Connor
INTRODUCTION
I think I have met “Ralph Conner.” Indeed, I am sure I have--once in a
canoe on the Red River, once on the Assinaboine, and twice or thrice on
the prairies to the West. That was not the name he gave me, but, if I
am right, it covers one of the most honest and genial of the strong
characters that are fighting the devil and doing good work for men
all over the world. He has seen with his own eyes the life which he
describes in this book, and has himself, for some years of hard and
lonely toil, assisted in the good influences which he traces among its
wild and often hopeless conditions. He writes with the freshness and
accuracy of an eye-witness, with the style (as I think his readers will
allow) of a real artist, and with the tenderness and hopefulness of a
man not only of faith but of experience, who has seen in fulfillment the
ideals for which he lives.
The life to which he takes us, though far off and very strange to our
tame minds, is the life of our brothers. Into the Northwest of Canada
the young men of Great Britain and Ireland have been pouring (I was
told), sometimes at the rate of 48,000 a year. Our brothers who left
home yesterday--our hearts cannot but follow them. With these pages
Ralph Conner enables our eyes and our minds to follow, too; nor do I
think there is any one who shall read this book and not find also that
his conscience is quickened. There is a warfare appointed unto man upon
earth, and its struggles are nowhere more intense, nor the victories of
the strong, nor the succors brought to the fallen, more heroic, than on
the fields described in this volume.
GEORGE ADAM SMITH.
BLACK ROCK
The story of the book is true, and chief of the failures in the making
of the book is this, that it is not all the truth. The light is not
bright enough, the shadow is not black enough to give a true picture of
that bit of Western life of which the writer was some small part. The
men of the book are still there in the mines and lumber camps of the
mountains, fighting out that eternal fight for manhood, strong, clean,
God-conquered. And, when the west winds blow, to the open ear the sounds
of battle come, telling the fortunes of the fight.
Because a man’s life is all he has, and because the only hope of the
brave young West lies in its men, this story is told. It may be that the
tragic pity of a broken life may move some to pray, and that that divine
power there is in a single brave heart to summon forth hope and courage
may move some to fight. If so, the tale is not told in vain.
C.W.G.
CONTENTS
CHAPTER I
CHRISTMAS EVE IN A LUMBER CAMP