The Trickster. Muriel Gray
Chapter 27
Chapter 28: Alberta 1907 Siding Twenty-three
Chapter 33: Alberta 1907 Siding Twenty-three
Chapter 38: Alberta 1907 Siding Twenty-three
Chapter 42: Alberta 1907 Siding Twenty-three
Chapter 46: Alberta 1907 Siding Twenty-three
Chapter 49: Alberta 1907 Siding Twenty-three
Chapter 53: Alberta 1907 Siding Twenty-three
Chapter 55: Alberta 1907 Siding Twenty-three
Chapter 60: Alberta 1907 Siding Twenty-three
Preface to the 20th anniversary edition
Here’s a confession. If The Trickster had been written today instead of twenty years ago it would probably be a much lazier book. There was no internet in 1994. Well, there was a sort of internet. It was called ‘a library’.
The story grew after a two-month winter stay in the Canadian Rockies, in and around the Alberta town of Banff, named after the Aberdeenshire town by the Scots who built the great railway that opened up Western Canada to the world. That fascinating historical connection, combined with the local Native Canadian lore and backdrop of fiercely beautiful, unforgiving mountain landscape, would set any imagination alight. And it did.
The history of the Canadian Pacific Railway alone is enough to fill a whole library of books, as indeed it has, as I discovered when I set out to find more, poring over volumes in Glasgow’s grand Mitchell Library.
But as the story evolved around the native people, whose land this had been long before the Scots and their Chinese labourers arrived to lay iron rails through previously unnavigable wilderness, it