| Bison Book, following a long period of unavailability, is certainly welcome. |
| Stanley Vestal was the pen name of Walter S. Campbell, long-time professor of English and director of courses in professional writing at the University of Oklahoma, Norman. Kansas-born, in 1887, he spent his youth in Oklahoma where he played regularly with Cheyenne youngsters, thereby gaining an affinity for Indians that never left him. As a Rhodes Scholar at Oxford and a captain of Field Artillery in France during World War I, Vestal saw something of Europe, but the focus of his attention as an author always remained fixed upon the Old West. |
| From his unwavering passion for writing came histories, biography, novels, short stories, articles, writers' manuals, and verse. Vestal's four novels and his verse, including the poem "Kit Carson's Last Smoke," which found its way into The Old Santa Fe Trail, can be charitably described as unmemorable. The biographies, on the other hand, although outdated still make lively reading, owing no doubt to the author's choice of stirring subjects like Kit Carson, Jim Bridger, Big-Foot Wallace, mountain man Joe Meek, Sitting Bull, and Sitting Bull's nephew Chief White Bull. |
| During the Depression years, university professors' salaries were extremely low, Vestal's being a scant $1,000 annually, according to his biographer, Ray Tassin. To make matters worse, Vestal was a self-admitted poor businessman who, despite his supplemental income from writing, could never quite pay all the family bills. Thus when he contracted with Houghton Mifflin in 1937 to do |
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