C. J. (Clarence John) Blanchard

Writing as C. J. Blanchard, Clarence John Blanchard is credited by Project Gutenberg as the author of The Mentor: Reclaiming the Desert and is listed there with the dates 1863–1945.

His 1918 Mentor piece presents desert reclamation for a general audience, and the text identifies him as being with the United States Reclamation Service. Other period references connect his name with articles on reclamation and western development, including work published by Scientific American and references to him as a statistician in the Reclamation Service.

Taken together, those sources suggest a writer whose nonfiction focused on irrigation, public works, and the transformation of the American West. He seems to have worked less as a literary figure in the usual sense than as an interpreter of big engineering and settlement projects for readers curious about how dry regions could be made habitable and productive.