The Life and Adventures of Roger Pocock
Geoffrey A. Pocock
By the time Roger Pocock began his record-setting 3,600-mile odyssey down the Outlaw Trail of the Old American West in 1899, he had already been a pirate, a missionary, a soldier of fortune and a cowboy. Roger Pocock was an inveterate, world-ranging traveller who crossed paths with many influencial people, including Prince Louis of Battenburg and Rudyard Kipling.
Canada was always the land Roger loved best after his native Britain, perhaps because his brief stint in the North West Mounted Police during the Northwest Rebellion 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.
The Frontiersmen were men of action rather than words and Outrider of Empire:
The Adventures of Roger Pocock goes a long way towards telling the story of the often calamitous peregrinations of this endearing character.
“Civilization is a poor thing to one who has lived the spacious life of the West.”
—Roger Pocock in Rules of the Game
“Roger Pocock was different from the majority of other gentlemen adventurers because he was a thinker, a man who dreamed dreams, but whose dreams and whose attempts at their realization too often ruled his head and turned him into a Don Quixote, tilting at windmills.”
—The Frontiersmen Historian
“Roger Pocock was so modest that few except his closest friends could guess that life to him was, and always had been a splendid adventure.”
—from Roger Pocock’s obituary in The Times, November 1941
About the Author
Though Geoffrey Pocock shares the same surname as the Founder of the Legion of Frontiersmen, he claims no near relationship. Nevertheless, he has spent a quarter of a century researching the Legion’s history and the lives of many of its members. Geoffrey Pocock lives in a village on the Sussex Downs in England.
400 pages • 6’’ x 9’’
B&W photos, maps, bibliography, index
978-0-88864-448-0 • $34.95 (T) paper
Biography/Adventure Travel/History
