The Grey Fox: True Story of Bill Miner - Last of the Old-time Bandits

UK: University of Oklahoma Press, 1992. Hardcover. Used: Acceptable. Condition good, hardback with dust jacket ref ZKVQ. Of all the outlaws in the Old West - and there were many hundreds of them - Bill Miner, the last of the old-time bandits, came closest to matching the polularity of England's Robin Hood. Jesse James, Billy the Kid and John Wesley Hardin may have been better known, but none could command the reverence accorded Bill Miner by people in every walk of life, from businessmen to housewives. He had a magnetism like no other. Active for more than four decades, Miner began his criminal career in California in the 1860s and ended it in Georgia in 1911. He stole horses and robbed stagecoaches, and when railroad tracks replaced stage roads, he robbed trains. He was caught and imprisoned only to be released or escape and to rob again. He considered his victims to be corporations rather than people, and he did not consider it wrong to rob, for instance, the Canadian Pacific Railway, which he said had plenty of money and robbed the public. In this book, Mark Dugan and John Boessenecker trace Miner's life from Onondaga, Michigan, to Milledgeville, Georgia, where he died in prison in 1913. They reveal his character and his unusual ability to charm men and women alike, even his victims. He carried weapons but did not kill; he always worked with an accomplice or two or sometimes three, usually younger men; and the authors contend that he is the only proven homosexual outlaw the West has known.