author
Henry M. Avery
A dime-novel adventure writer best known for frontier tales, he published stories under both his own name and the pseudonym Max Martine. His work blends trapper lore, romance, and fast-moving action from the American West.
1 Audiobook
Old Bear-Paw, the trapper king; or, The love of a Blackfoot queen
by Henry M. Avery
About the author
Henry M. Avery was an American popular fiction writer associated with late 19th-century frontier adventure stories. Sources linked to his work identify Max Martine as an alias, and Project Gutenberg lists Old Bear-Paw, the Trapper King; or, The Love of a Blackfoot Queen under Henry M. Avery while noting that alternate name.
A Northern Illinois University profile on Avery describes how he was presented in period newspaper publicity with a colorful, larger-than-life image tied to trapping, scouting, and Native American frontier lore. Whether every claim in those old promotional sketches was literally true is hard to confirm now, but they show the kind of rugged persona that surrounded his fiction.
Today, Avery is remembered mainly through surviving reprints and digital archives of his adventure novels. His stories offer a window into the style and imagination of popular western and wilderness fiction from that era, with all the melodrama and pace readers of dime novels would expect.