Frederick H. Dewey

Born in Nashua, New Hampshire, on November 5, 1853, Frederick H. Dewey—identified in a Northern Illinois University biographical entry as Frederick Hastings Dewey—moved with his family to California in 1873 after graduating from the Rochester Military Academy in 1870.

He went on to work as a special writer for the San Francisco Chronicle and, beginning in 1879, spent more than three decades on the staff of the San Francisco Call, where he served as a commercial and financial editor. Alongside journalism, he wrote numerous stories and magazine pieces, including popular adventure titles such as Spanish Jack, the Mountain Bandit; or, The Pledge of Life and Will-o'-the-Wisp, the California Trooper.

Modern readers can still find his fiction through public-domain collections, including Project Gutenberg and The Online Books Page, which list works such as Cato, the creeper; or, The demon of Dead-Man's Forest and The phantom tracker; or, The prisoner of the hill cave. He died in 1913.