Journalists and poets, economists and political historians, have told the story of Canada’s railways, but their accounts pay little attention to the workers who built them. The Bunkhouse Man is the only study devoted to these men and their lives in construction camps.

Edmund W. Bradwin went into the camps in 1904 as a worker-instructor for Frontier College. Later he became principal, a post he held until his death in 1954 at the age of seventy-seven.

Jean Burnet (1920-2009) was Professor Emerita and former Chairman of the Department of Sociology at Glendon College, York University. She was a member of the research staff of the Royal Commission on Bilingualism and Biculturalism, and is the author of Next Year Country, published by the University of Toronto Press.