author
John R. Cook
1844–1917
A soldier, buffalo hunter, and frontier memoirist, he wrote from firsthand experience about the violent, fast-changing world of the Southwest Plains. His best-known book blends adventure with eyewitness history from the Civil War era and the buffalo range.
1 Audiobook
About the author
Born in Ohio in 1844, he moved with his family to Kansas as a boy and came of age on a turbulent frontier. Sources consistently describe him as a soldier, hunter, and author, and note that he served in the Union Army while still very young before later becoming known for his accounts of life on the plains.
Cook is best remembered for The Border and the Buffalo, a memoir of the Southwest Plains that draws on his experiences around Kansas, Indian Territory, and the buffalo range. The book helped preserve a vivid, firsthand picture of border conflict, buffalo hunting, and frontier life in the late nineteenth-century American West.
He died in 1917. What makes his writing stand out is its directness: instead of a distant history, his work reads like someone who was there and wanted to remember the people, danger, and enormous scale of the plains before that world disappeared.