Charles King

Born in Albany, New York, in 1844 and raised in a prominent military family, Charles King graduated from West Point in 1866 and served in the Army during the Indian Wars, including under General George Crook. An injury in the 1870s pushed him away from active cavalry service, but it also helped launch his writing career.

King went on to write and edit more than 60 books, many of them novels and memoirs rooted in his firsthand knowledge of army posts, frontier life, and military campaigns. Among the works most often associated with him are Campaigning with Crook, Fort Frayne, and The Colonel's Daughter. His fiction was widely read in its day and is still of interest for its vivid picture of military life in the American West.

He also continued his public service after his early army years, serving in the Wisconsin National Guard and later as a brigadier general of volunteers during the Spanish-American War and the Philippine-American War. He died in Milwaukee in 1933, leaving behind a body of work that bridges popular fiction, military history, and the mythology of the frontier.