William MacLeod Raine was born in London in 1871, but after his mother died, his family migrated to Arkansas and settled on a cattle ranch. After graduating from Oberlin College, he became the principal of a school in Seattle while contributing columns to a local newspaper. Later he moved to Denver, where he worked as a reporter and editorial writer. He also began to publish short stories, eventually becoming a full-time freelance fiction writer. In 1920 he was awarded an M.L. degree from the University of Colorado where he had established that school's first journalism course, and during the First World War 500,000 copies of one of his books were sent to British soldiers in the trenches. He died in 1954 and was posthumously inducted into the Hall of Great Westerners of the National Cowboy and Western Heritage Museum in 1959.
