Frank Mayer

Born in New Orleans in 1850, Frank H. Mayer became known as a frontiersman of the American West and later as an author of memoirs about that world. Sources consistently connect him with buffalo hunting, life in Colorado, and his later years in Fairplay, where he died in 1954.

Mayer is best remembered for The Buffalo Harvest, a memoir developed with Charles B. Roth and published after his death. The book helped preserve his stories of bison hunting and frontier experience for later readers, and archival material from the Denver Public Library also notes that he was best known as a buffalo hunter.

Some accounts describe him as a great storyteller, and at least one archive notes that parts of his reminiscences may include tall tales. That uncertainty is part of what makes his work interesting: it sits at the crossroads of lived memory, legend, and the mythic West.