About the author

Ruth Elsie Mather was herself a child of the frontier. Her parents were Western settlers whose home was lit by kerosene lamps and heated by burning the sagebrush and greasewood being uprooted and cleared away to make the new land arable.

She is a retired college instructor and a genealogist whose own family tree includes Cotton Mather, Abraham Lincoln, Daniel Boone, and William Clark of Lewis and Clark. Over the past decades she has contributed articles on Western history to numerous magazines, journals, and encyclopedias, and has with coauthor F. E. Boswell written four mining-frontier histories, all published by university or other scholarly presses:

  • Hanging the Sheriff: A Biography of Henry Plummer
  • John David Borthwick: Artist of the Gold Rush
  • Gold Camp Desperadoes
  • Vigilante Victims: Montana's 1864 Hanging Spree

    Her Western studies have earned her a listing in Who's Who in the South and Southwest, Who's Who in America, Who's Who in the World, and Dictionary of International Biography.

    Her first novel, The Cottonwood Murders: Unsolved, is scheduled for publication in December 1998.