R. B. (Richard Baxter) Townshend

Born in County Cork in 1846, Richard Baxter Townshend was educated at Repton and Cambridge before heading to the American West. Sources on his career agree that he spent several years in Colorado and Texas, where he ranched and gathered the material that later shaped his best-known writing about frontier life.

After returning to England, he became associated with Wadham College, Oxford. He wrote adventure stories and historical works, but he is especially remembered for A Tenderfoot in Colorado, a memoir-like account of his time in the Rockies that has kept his name alive with readers interested in the old West.

Townshend died in 1923. He is also remembered in a small but unusual way through Edward Elgar’s Enigma Variations, whose third variation is linked to “R.B.T.”