If William Fee and Francis Murray, our two absconding servants from the Potomac Company in the 1780s, had miraculously reappeared at a C&O work camp in 1850, they would have recognized many features of their canalling trade: shanty life, manual toil, everpresent disease and injury. But the scale of the work, the absence of unfree labour forms, the presence of contractors and the distant and impersonal relations between workers and the ultimate bosses, not to mention the bitter feuds both among workers and against employers, would have struck the two Rip Van Winkles as wholly new. Clearly much ground had been covered. On the other hand, if Fee and Murray had remained in canalling after their untoward flight from the Potomac, lived to a ripe and active old age, and survived the cavalry charge at Beauharnois, they would have experienced the industrial revolution. Perhaps they would have revelled in their freedom, or maybe bemoaned the need to put a house over one's head and food on the table solely from wages that were too low or irregular. Either way, there was not much that they could do about it. For all their experience, they had been made workers and workers they would remain.