Twenty-four years after escaping from Leavenworth penitentiary in Kansas, convicted mail train robber Frank Grigware found himself back behind bars in the Royal Canadian Mounted Police barracks in Edmonton.

For years the fugitive, much like the escaped convict Jean Valjean in Victor Hugo’s 1862 novel Les Miserables, had hid in plain sight as James Fahey, a respected Jasper citizen, family man and carpenter, who had helped build Jasper Park Lodge.

So he was as shocked as the rest of the townsfolk at his arrest, and equally shocked, but very grateful, for how the mountain town rallied around to support him.

“I am glad the case is going to be cleared up,” he told Journal reporters T.A. Mansell and Homer H. Ramage in an exclusive interview. “I have paid a terrible price for something I didn’t do.

“I had nothing to do with the mail robbery. I was absolutely innocent. I didn’t even know about it until after I was arrested.”

Grigware was 20 when he was sentenced to life in prison, along with four other men in their 20s and 30s, for taking mail from a train they held up and threatened to blow up with dynamite outside of Omaha in 1909. The take was $500.

Grigware escaped in 1910 after a year behind bars, slipped into Canada, and had been on the lam for almost a quarter century until a Mountie arrived at his door. He’d come to the attention of police after being caught with a marten he’d illegally trapped in Jasper National Park. His fingerprints identified him as a wanted man.

Two Jasper friends arrived in Edmonton several days later with $10,000 collected from the townspeople to bail him out until his extradition hearing on April 13. Other friends throughout Alberta and particularly in Jasper, stood ready “to pledge the entire value of their town, if necessary, to aid (Grigware),” the front-page story said.

Grigware said he was a shingler, a trade he’d learned from his dad, when he started hanging out with the gang in Omaha. He didn’t know they were mail robbers until after they were arrested.

Grigware was accompanying another man living in the same rooming house to pick up a package on the outskirts of town. They had got off a street car and had walked a little distance when they were surrounded by police officers. He didn’t know the package contained revolvers the other man had hidden in a sandbank.

Grigware was taken to jail to join the others; he was tried and convicted.

Although he had escaped, Grigware said he paid a high price for his freedom, having cut off all contact with his parents and siblings in Spokane, Wash., and worrying every day what would happen to his wife and three children if he was caught and returned to prison.

Ironically, the other four men who were convicted and also escaped prison with him, had all been pardoned or paroled by 1919.

His exemplary life in Alberta prompted the people in the Peace River district, where Grigware had once been mayor of Spirit River before moving to Jasper in 1924, to gather a petition pleading President Franklin D. Roosevelt to pardon Grigware. They were joined by the man who was governor of Kansas when Grigware escaped.

Thousands of other people on both sides of the border made similar requests, the Alberta legislature passed a resolution, unprecedented in Canadian history, also asking for a pardon, and Prime Minister R.B. Bennett urged diplomats to present it to Roosevelt.

The United States decided not to extradite Grigware and he returned to Jasper.

He died in 1977 and is buried in a cemetery in Lacombe.

czdeb@edmontonjournal.com