He produced a map of the area of where Frank had gone trapping for martens. He got really pale, and his wife said, “You look sick.” The guy at the theater was a local historian whose father had been the owner of the theater back when Frank went there. I also went to the theater where he watched I Am a Fugitive From a Chain Gang, which was exactly what he was. In Jasper, in the Canadian Rockies, I went to the house he had built and met a woman who had known him when he was older and she quite young. I went to Leavenworth and got most of my good information from the National Archives in Kansas City. I didn’t go into any of the mines-I’d get killed. I didn’t go to Denver, as I didn’t know where he had stayed, but I did get a map of some of the old silver mines in Coeur d’Alene, and I hiked back there. He went to Denver, where he joined this gang. Whenever I do one of these books, I always try to follow in the footsteps of my characters if I can. I was wandering around the West, following his footsteps, and I thought: This is great. He became a real test of justice differences between the Canadian and American systems, the Canadians saying he had rehabilitated himself, and the Americans saying once you’ve gone bad, you can’t go back. Within a year he escaped from a work train and left for Canada. Frank Grigware was convicted of train robbery and sent to Leavenworth. Leavenworth Train, my second book, was about a guy who was involved in one of the last train robberies in the West. I’d only really done one other Western book, but I loved doing it. That’s when I decided to kind of go whole hog with the book’ ‘ seems to be revered by native American traditionalists, while Catholics, who tried to stamp out his religion, were playing around with the idea of making him a saint. That’s when I decided to kind of go whole hog with the book. He seems to be revered by native American traditionalists, while Catholics, who tried to stamp out his religion, were playing around with the idea of making him a saint. I’d done a little bit of research, and I remembered American theologians were calling Black Elk the only truly bona fide American holy man of the 20th century. I think the one that brought me to this was the Red Cloud book, and I remembered Black Elk Speaks was one of my favorite books when I first came across it in either high school or college. I started thinking: What does it take for a society to think of someone as truly holy?… And then I started seeing books about native Americans. They raise them up, and then they destroy them. My previous book was about the 1927 air race that made Charles Lindbergh famous.…Even back then Americans quickly turned people into secular heroes and saints. When I start looking around for the next book, there’s usually unfinished business or an unfinished subject from the previous one. Jackson is working on a book about the Spanish-American and Philippine-American wars. Leavenworth Train: A Fugitive’s Search for Justice in the Vanishing West was a 2002 Edgar Award finalist from Mystery Writers of America in the best fact crime book category, and Black Elk: The Life of an American Visionary won a 2017 Spur Award from Western Writers of America in the best Western biography category. Some of his work strays far from the West, but Jackson previously had success with a Western book. He spent a dozen years as an investigative and police beat reporter for The Virginian-Pilot newspaper in Norfolk, Virginia, where he teaches creative writing at Old Dominion University. His father was a rocket scientist during the Mercury, Gemini and Apollo programs, and Jackson majored in English and psychology in college, then worked briefly as a suicide councilor before moving into journalism. Joe Jackson might not seem your typical Western historian.
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