Outrider of Empire: The Life and Adventures of Roger Pocock

A dreamer of dreams, an adventurer, and a man of many ideas, Roger Pocock was an inveterate, world-ranging traveller. But Canada was always the land he loved best after his native Britain. Although his service in the NWMP proved brief and undistinguished, the experience launched his career as a writer, and provided a major source of inspiration, both for his stories and in the creation of his greatest and longest-lived achievement, the Legion of Frontiersmen. Frontiersmen were men of action, rather than words, and few of them wrote of their experiences, so we are left with few formal written accounts. Roger did write about his own life, but his two autobiographies fail to tell the whole truth. This is scarcely surprising, for he made many mistakes in his life and many were serious ones, though any degree of culpability in the death of Sir Arthur Curtis fell well short of murder. Both Roger and the society that shaped him are long gone. But his life of adventure, with its many failures and a few outstanding successes, is well worth recording for what it reveals about both the man and his social milieu. For, truly, Roger Pocock lived the life that many an adventurous boy of the time might have desired.