In the late nineteenth century Charles King brought the exploits of the United States Army on the far frontier into the nation's literature and thereby helped shape the public's image of military exploits in the West. A soldier who lived the arduous experiences he depicted, King resisted the temptation to inflate the romance of daily army life and achieved popularity while accurately rendering the details of the frontier. When King's novels made their way by wagon to army posts isolated in the deserts of the West, officers and soldiers alike rushed to read them, eager to see if they could identify the real-life people and events King had turned into popular fiction. During a military career that spanned an unprecedented seventy years he was able to lay aside his rifle to turn out more than sixty books--sometimes writing four or five a year.

Intelligent and attuned to his...