Memories from the Back Trail

About the Book

About the Author

WILLIAM GARDNER BELL, author, editor, and historian, is a New Yorker whose interest in the American West grew out of boyhood vacations in Wyoming’s Jackson Hole country, was fostered during several years as a dude wrangler, packer, and guide there, and fully matured in World War II military service at notable frontier posts in Wyoming, Kansas, and South Dakota. After enlisted service as a horse trooper and noncommissioned officer in the 4th Cavalry Regiment, he was commissioned at the United States Army’s Cavalry School, rode with the 28th Cavalry Regiment on the Mexican Border in American horse cavalry’s denouement, and served in the Italian campaign as a platoon leader, company commander, and battalion staff officer in the 350th Infantry Regiment. During the war years, he wrote for several service publications. All of this was excellent preparation for a five-year postwar tour as editor of the Cavalry Journal and its continuation, Armor Magazine. This background led in turn to a career as a military historian in uniform and under civil service in the army’s historical office. Bell is the author of books on his regiment’s occupation tour in the Italian province of Venezia Giulia; of Westerner books on the Snake River and soldier-scientist John Gregory Bourke; and of official volumes on Secretaries of War and Secretaries of Army, and Army Commanding Generals and Chiefs of Staff. His writings and photography have appeared in national publications, military journals, and magazines devoted to his lifelong interest, Western Americana and Western art, fields in which he is a long-time collector.