CLERKS FOIL OUTLAWS IN THE LAST TRAIN ROBBERY
At 11:30 p.m. on May 8, 1906, two masked men pulled guns on the engineer of the C.P.R. train the Imperial Limited just east of Kamloops.
“You stop this train at the 16-mile board and do not go a damn foot further,” said one of the masked men, aiming his gun at the driver’s head. “We’ve got a friend that’s going to meet us there, and we do not propose to disappoint him.”
B.C.’s last train robbery had begun.
The train stopped at a small flag station between Kamloops and Ducks (now Monte Creek), where a third masked man emerged from the darkness. The engineer and fireman were told to get off, then escorted to the back of the train. The mail car was cut loose from the main body of the train, then driven a mile down the track.
The engineer and fireman were told to break into the mail car. When they started to clang at the door with hammers, a mail clerk opened the door and asked what was going on. One of the robbers burst in and told the two clerks to put their hands in the air. He asked for the “registered sacks,” rifled through them, and took out seven registered letters.
Unsatisfied, he asked: “Where in the hell is the Frisco pouch?”
The mail clerk replied there wasn’t one.
“That seemed to surprise the robber,” reported the Vancouver World. “He may have been figuring on holding up some San Francisco relief money (for a devastating earthquake that had happened three weeks earlier).”
The robbers turned their attention to the back of the car, where they probably hoped to find cash or gold. But they picked the wrong car — this one was filled with newspapers and mail bound for overseas.
The World reported there was an estimated $30,000 in registered mail in the car, but clerks A.L. McQuarrie and W.M. Willis had successfully conned the robbers into thinking they’d seen it all.
There was also an “express” car in front of the mail car that reportedly had two gold bricks worth $80,000. But it had been uncoupled with the rest of the train by the robbers.
The crooks disappeared into the darkness, the train was recoupled, and it sped into Kamloops to spread the news it had been robbed.
“Hundreds” of men set out to find the robbers, lured by a $11,500 reward for their capture.
The day after the robbery, the World carried a story on B.C.’s first train robbery on Sept. 10, 1904 at Silverdale near Mission, when three men with guns got away with $7,000. The paper didn’t know it at the time, but both robberies were led by the same man: Bill Miner.
Miner was one of the last great outlaws of the American west, a guy whose career started off robbing stagecoaches and ended robbing trains. Miner spent much of his life in prison — he did 33 years in U.S. jails before he was released from San Quentin in 1901, at the age of 55.
He lived off the proceeds of his 1904 robbery in Princeton and Hedley for two years, going under the name George Edwards. He never admitted to being Bill Miner — he was identified by photographs and a tattoo.
After the Ducks robbery, Miner and his cohorts Shorty Dunn and Lewis Colquhoun set their horses free in the hopes the posse would follow them.
But it didn’t work, even when three other men were arrested near Vernon on May 11 in connection with the robbery.
With the help of native trackers, the police caught up to the bandits on May 14 near Douglas Lake, about 80 kilometres south of Ducks. Shorty Dunn had a German Luger pistol on him, and got into a gunfight with police that ended when Dunn was shot in the leg and surrendered.
“Train Robbers Captured After Sharp Encounter With Police,” read the World’s headline.
The trio was taken to Kamloops, where they were photographed by Mary Spencer, the only professional photographer in town. After a brief trial, Miner and Dunn were sentenced to life, and Colquhoun got 25 years.
Miner escaped from the B.C. Pen in New Westminster on Aug. 8, 1907 by digging a hole under a fence. In 1911, he was caught trying to pull another train robbery, and he died in the Georgia State Penitentiary in Milledgeville, Ga. on Sept. 2, 1913.