author
Robert Morris Peck
1839–1909
A frontier soldier turned memoirist, he wrote vivid first-hand stories of the American West drawn from years in the U.S. Cavalry and on the buffalo plains. His best-known book, The Wolf Hunters, blends adventure with the feel of lived experience.
1 Audiobook
The Wolf Hunters: A Story of the Buffalo Plains
by Robert Morris Peck
About the author
Born in Washington, Mason County, Kentucky, on October 30, 1839, Robert Morris Peck enlisted in the First U.S. Cavalry as a teenager in 1856. He served on the western frontier, including time around Fort Leavenworth and in campaigns on the plains, experiences that later shaped his writing.
Peck is remembered for recording frontier life in a direct, story-driven way. A National Park Service note on his writings describes him as a soldier who left behind letters, diary entries, and journals, and the introduction to The Wolf Hunters says he drew on his own adventures in Kansas during the winter of 1861–1862. That book, published after his death with George Bird Grinnell as editor, remains his best-known work.
He died in 1909. Today, his writing is valued less for polish than for immediacy: it offers readers a lively window into cavalry service, hunting, travel, and everyday survival in the nineteenth-century West.