author
Frank Mayer
A buffalo hunter, marshal, soldier, and storyteller of the American West, he wrote with the rough immediacy of someone who had actually lived the frontier he described. His best-known book, The Buffalo Harvest, helped preserve one man’s view of a vanishing era.
1 Audiobook
The Song of the Wolf
by Frank Mayer
About the author
Born in 1850, Frank H. Mayer lived a remarkably long life that stretched deep into the frontier period he later wrote about. Sources consistently describe him as a Western frontiersman as well as an author, and his writing is closely tied to his years as a buffalo hunter and to other work in the American West.
His best-known book is The Buffalo Harvest, which was published in 1958 after his death and presents his recollections of buffalo hunting. Denver Public Library also holds an oral history interview recorded shortly before he died in February 1954, though the archive notes that the interviewer could not fully verify all of Mayer’s stories.
That mix of firsthand memory, legend, and lived experience is part of what makes his work interesting today. Rather than writing as a distant historian, he wrote as someone remembered for having seen a changing West up close.