Interred wtih Their Bones: Bill Miner in Canada, 1903-1907, by Peter Grauer. Kamloops: Partners in Publishing, 2006, p/b $35.00.  Reviewed by Danielle Metcalfe-Chenail As any casual student of Canadian history can tell you, there are certain stock characters and themes that inevitably appear in textbooks. The Canadian Pacific Railway (CPR), we are often told, linked the far-flung province of British Columbia to the rest of Canada, creating a country that extended "from sea to shining sea." To police this expanding nation, Canada had the North West Mounted Police - the Mounties - who upheld the Dominion's commitment to peace, order, and good government. The United States, of course, is always on hand for useful juxtaposition in these texts: traditional tellings of Canada's nation-building years emphasize our "niceness" compared with America's wars of independence, vigilante-style justice, and bloody battles with indigenous peoples.
In Interred with Their Bones, Peter Gruaer has hit upon a story where the CPR, Mounties, indigenous peoples, and the Wild West connect in fascinating ways. Grauer's principal aim in this work is to trace Bill Miner's activities in B.C. between 1903 and 1907. Miner, an American stage coach and train robber, was in his late 50s by the time he crossed the border, having spent much of his life behind bars. In the Interior of B.C. he took the name George Edwards, charmed the locals, and undertook more train robberies to finance his penchant for prositutes, gambling and fine living. In the process, Miner perpetrated the first robbery of the CPR, was pursued and apprehended by law enforcement agents with the help of Secwepemc (Shuswap) trackers, and then executed an intrepid escape from B.C.'s New Westminster penitentiary.
Grauer's 600-page work is a chronological account of Miner's time in B.C. and easily encompasses enough material for three different books. The promotional materials slot Interred with Their Bones in the historical true crime genre, but whole sections could be lifted to create community histories of the towns through which Miner passed. While historical true crimes generally evoke a place at a particular moment in time - Savannah is central to John Berendt's Midnight int he Garden of Good and Evil, for example - Grauer's detailed descriptions disrupt the Miner narrative. Furthermore, while the work is purportedly about Miner, Grauer includes so much biographical material on other individuals that Miner is often overshadowed. In the end, Miner and his crimes are buried, and the reader becomes lost in minutiae.
It is clear that Grauer loves his subject. My hunch is that after six years of research he fell into a common-enough trap: he simply could not bear to cut any of the material he had gathered. After all, he worked hard to gain access to previously restricted materials, conducted interviews with setters who met Miner at the turn of the century, and attempted to synthesize all the available primary and secondary sources on Miner's B.C. activities in this work. While reading, however, I had the distinct feeling that the sources had gained the upper hand and Grauer had lost the book's focus. Part of this is due to the book's "raw" feeling: a professional editor could have significantly improved the readability of the book by re-organizing secions, culling extraneous passages, and tightening the prose.
There are moments in the work that indicate Grauer could be a successful writer in the historical true crime genre. When Gruaer recreates Miner's robberies and escape from prison, he generates a sense of immediacy and suspense that is muddied in the longer descriptive passages. His use of dialogue is also well done, and I kept hoping for more. In addition, Grauer does a solid job situating the book in the Interior's landscape, providing evocative descriptions of the terrain. Miner became intimately familiar with this region while planning his crimes, and Grauer convincingly argues that it was this knowledge that allowed Miner to escape to the United States undetected.
This book could be a useful tool for professional and amateur historians in several ways. Grauer includes wonderful maps, photos, and images in this work as well as long passages from his interviews. He also reproduces documents from the time period: CPR and law enforcement telegrams, trial transcripts, poems, and House of Commons debates, for instance. And, while the amout of detail interrupts the narrative, it is certainly valuable for genealogists, local B.C. historians, and those interested in the operations of the CPR and NWMP.
After reading Interred with Their Bones it is clear that the events surrounding Miner's time in Canada are still a compellign and instructive moment in our nation's past. While this work is a useful compendium of sources and facts, it does not present Miner's escapades in gripping narrative form and thus ultimately fails as a historical true crime story.
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