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!
I have seen many countries, as you know, but none can ever be to me
what B.C. was when I worked there. It fizzed and fumed and boiled
and surged. It was in a roar: it hummed: it was like the Cañon when
the grey Fraser from the North comes down to Lytton and smothers the
blue Thompson in its flood. We lived in those days: we worked in
those days: we didn't merely exist or think or moon or fool around.
We were no 'cultus' crowd. We lit into things and dispersed the
earth. Some day, it may be, I shall do another book to try and
recall the odours of the majestic slain forests and the outraged
hills when your live Locomotives hooted in the Passes and wailed to
see the Great Pacific. In the meantime I offer you this, which deals
only incidentally with your work, and takes for its subjects a
Sawmill and the life we lived who worked in one on the lower Fraser,
when we and the River retired from the scene that to-day ends in busy
Vancouver and yet spreads across the Seas.
It is possible that you will say that there is too much violence in
this story, seeing that it is laid in British Columbia and not South
of the Forty Ninth Parallel. Well, I do not hold you responsible for
the violence. Even in law-abiding B.C. man will at times break out
and paint the Town red without a metaphor. There is a great deal of
human nature in man, even when suppressed by Judge Begbie: and
Siwashes will be Siwashes, especially when "pahtlum," or drunk, as
they say in the elegant Chinook with which I have adorned a veracious
but otherwise plain story. Take it from me that there is not an
incident, or man, or woman in it who is not more or less painted from
real life. That amiable contractor for whom we all had quite an
affection, whom I have thinly veiled under the name of Vanderdunk, is
no exception. He will, I feel sure, forgive me, but some of the
others might not and they are veiled rather more deeply. This I owe
to myself, for I may revisit B.C. again and I cannot but remember
that, for some things I said of folks out there many years ago, I was
threatened with the death, so dear to the Western Romancer, which
comes from being hung by the neck from a Cottonwood. If ever I do
see that country again, I hope it will be with you. As my friend
Chihuahua would have said, "Quien sabe?" My best regards to you,
tilikum! Here's how!
Your sincere friend,
MORLEY ROBERTS.