Charles King

This is the soldier rather than the Georgetown historian who shares his name. King went to West Point, was wounded in Arizona during the Apache campaigns in 1874, served again in Cuba and the Philippines, and was in uniform across five wars and six decades, retiring as a brigadier general. He then wrote around sixty novels out of garrison life, and for a generation they were what Americans pictured when they thought of the frontier cavalry; he also advised the first Western film-makers. The books carry the racial attitudes of the army he served in, and a reader meets that on the contents page rather than deep inside the text, which is worth saying plainly. He died in 1933.