Sam Steele's Forty Years in Canada: History or Fiction?

Harwood Steele's sketch of a fight scene

Comparing Paterson’s retelling of the capture of Constable Graburn’s murderer to Steele’s account in the memoir reveals a number of similarities between the documents. Moreover, an analysis of the manuscripts and the published book demonstrates that the capture scene only appears in the later manuscripts, and this scene is very similar to what is recounted in the Paterson letters. 

The first two drafts—one handwritten (A) and the other typed with handwritten corrections (B)—only mention Graburn’s murder and the pursuit of justice. There is no information about the murderer’s capture, until the third draft (C). 

As an aside, note Steele’s lack of punctuation and paragraphing in manuscript A, and how much changes in manuscript B. Now typed, with paragraphs and a great deal more punctuation, manuscript B looks much more like the final product. Still this copy includes a great deal of handwritten edits—some in Steele’s handwriting and the rest unidentified. Steele credited his daughter Flora for her work producing a typed copy of the manuscript and for her work helping him to edit the first drafts.[1]

The following documents include transcriptions but do not include transcriptions of the notes in the manuscript margins.