author
Robert Morris Peck
1839–1909
A former cavalryman turned memoirist, he wrote with the direct, lived-in detail of someone who had actually crossed the Plains in the years before the Civil War. His best-known book brings together frontier travel, hunting, and campfire storytelling in a vivid account of Kansas in 1861–1862.
1 Audiobook
The Wolf Hunters: A Story of the Buffalo Plains
by Robert Morris Peck
About the author
Born in Mason County, Kentucky, in 1839, Robert Morris Peck enlisted in the First U.S. Cavalry while still a teenager. Later accounts of his life describe him serving in the West from the late 1850s, experiences that gave him the material for the frontier writing he became known for.
Peck is best remembered for The Wolf Hunters: A Story of the Buffalo Plains, published by Scribner's Sons in 1914 and edited by George Bird Grinnell. The Library of Congress describes it as a narrative of adventures in Kansas during the winter of 1861–1862, and Project Gutenberg's introduction presents it as a memoir-based account drawn from Peck's own experiences on the Plains.
His writing has lasted because it feels close to the ground: practical, observant, and shaped by firsthand travel in a fast-changing West. Even in a short biography, he comes across less as a literary celebrity than as a witness whose stories preserve a rough, personal view of frontier life.