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Leavenworth Train: A Fugitive's Search for Justice in the Vanishing West
Leavenworth Train A Fugitive's Search for Justice in the Vanishing West Author:Joe Jackson This gripping book brings alive a daring prison escape and a relentless twenty-four-year manhunt that pitted desperate inmates against their keepers, the citizenry of Canada against the American brand of justice, and one man against his pursuers and the demons of his past. It is 1910, the waning days of the Old West. The Pinkertons and the hard ... more »hand of federal law enforcement have corralled most of the region's fabled outlaws. Into this world steps Frank Grigware, who at age twenty sets out to find gold in Idaho. Yet, he chooses his friends poorly, and is convicted of a train robbery he had no hand in. Sentenced to life in the first federal penitentiary, Leavenworth, he joins five other prisoners in hijacking a supply train and ramming it through the joint's west gate. Joe Jackson retraces Grigware's flight through the American prairie, across the Canadian frontier, and into a new life where he became a husband, father, and mayor of a small town. The FBI tracked Grigware through the 1920s and '30s, finally reaching across the border to locate him in the mountains of Alberta. When American justice demanded his extradition, Canada's response was surprising: This is the sort of man we want settling our land. An international incident ensued with the two countries' values pitted against each other, and Grigware in the middle. Jackson's narrative ends with a surprising twist, showing that justice is capricious, the servant of time, place, and ambition, yet tempered by the mercy of women and men.« less