David Lavender

David Sievert Lavender was born on February 4, 1910, in Telluride, and died on April 26, 2003, in Ojai, California, aged 93. He studied at Mercersburg Academy and then Princeton, graduating in 1931. He worked as a gold miner and cowboy and ran his stepfather's cattle ranch until the bank repossessed it in 1935.

He wrote for pulp magazines and Boys' Life, moved to Ojai in 1939 and began teaching English at The Thacher School in 1943, a post he held until 1970. His memoir One Man's West appeared in 1943, and The Big Divide in 1948 established his reputation as a serious historian.

Other books include Bent's Fort (1954), Trail to Santa Fe (1958), Westward Vision (1963), The American West (1969) and Let Me Be Free (1992), about the Nez Perce. Wikipedia reports that he was nominated twice for the Pulitzer Prize, though it does not say for which books, and that scholars admired his accuracy and objectivity. His Telluride boyhood, mining jobs and ranch work gave him the first-hand knowledge that shows in his pages.

Lavender wrote about trails, forts, rivers and mining country with a practical sense of the ground he described. He was not an academic, and much of his writing drew on first-hand knowledge of mines, mountains and ranches. Most of his output is history, but Red Mountain shows he could also tell the story as a novel. The common thread is the settlement of the American West as experienced by the people who built roads, claims and towns there.

The subjects this author is catalogued under. Open Library record.