Treading the Narrow Way

His father gave him an Irish name, his English mother wanted Gladstone, and Robert Emmett Barrett has been negotiating that family compromise ever since.

Barrett’s memoir opens on the wide, lonely plains beneath the Rocky Mountains, where his family settled when he was six and the nearest town had scarcely a dozen people. Years later, at seventeen, he takes a job on the railroad’s lowest rung, among hard-pressed homesteaders competing for scarce work. He tells of prairie hardship with a comic eye—and remembers an eighteen-dollar loan that cost him far more than its face value. In a world where a job is a prize and a debt can strip a man to the bone, what helps Barrett keep his footing?

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