CAMPAIGNING WITH KING - Charles King - Chronicler of the Old Army by Russell, Don

Lincoln 1991, Univ. Pr of Nebraska, 1st US ed. hard bound in dust jacket, Fine/Fine condition, 6 1/4 x 9 1/4, xxix, 187 pp, illus, notes,index. Appendice lists all King's published works '.---------------------------------------------------------Captain Charles King (1844-1933) served seventy years in America's military forces and was decorated for fighting in five wars-a living rebuttal to the notion that old soldiers fade away loquaciously in their downtown clubs. But he did spin yarns. In fact, he became one of the best known chroniclers of the frontier army and the Indian wars of the 1870s, and an immensely popular writer of fiction. From his pen flowed dozens of novels and histories that made him the American Kipling.--------------------------------------------------------------Long overdue, Campaigning with King is the first study of that remarkable man's military and literary careers, written after his death by Don Russell, a respected authority on frontier history. Russell had talked with and corresponded with King since the late 1920s to produce an authentic and colorful book. "If you know King's life," Russell writes, "you can trace nearly every episode in his stories to some personal experience, and that includes some that seem wildly extravagant. But his was an age of melodrama in life as well as on the printed page-Custer and Buffalo Bill are controversial figures today just because we cannot believe anyone like them ever existed. King was in the campaign that resulted in Custer's Last Stand, he saw Buffalo Bill fight Yellow Hand, he knew Winfield Scott, Abraham Lincoln, Ulysses S. Grant, Philip H. Sheridan, Nelson A. Miles, and Arthur MacArthur and his son Douglas .... His life was a greater romance than any he created-and he actually lived all the romance he created.