James Beardsley Hendryx was born in Sauk Centre, Minnesota, the son of the owner and publisher of the local newspaper. He grew up with the novelist Sinclair Lewis. As a boy, Hendryx and his friends were amateur woodsmen, skilled at hunting, fishing, trapping, swimming, and riding boxcars. In 1899 Hendryx studied law at the University of Minnesota (which he paid for in part by running weekly poker games), but he left after one year and decided to travel the country. Before he was out of his 20s he had worked several jobs, including selling hardware and life insurance, buying bark for a tannery in Kentucky, running levels on a proposed electric railway in Ohio, book-keeping for a sheep-shearing plant, punching cattle on several big spreads in Montana and Saskatchewan. While in Montana, he met two notorious outlaws, Kid and Lonny Curry, members of the Wild Bunch who were hiding out in the mountains. In 1898 Hendryx and a friend took $1,400 in poker winnings and went to pan gold in the Yukon. They found that they had arrived too late into the gold rush: their claims were poor and the cost of living in the Yukon too high. After 14 months, he took a position on a salmon boat and landed in Vancouver, spent another year punching cattle, and then drifted to Cincinnati where his father was editing a newspaper. Hendryx got a job writing feature stories for a different newspaper, then sold his first piece of fiction and quit working to become a full-time writer. His first novel, The Promise, was published in 1915. He married and in 1921 he bought 300 acres of forest land on Grand Traverse Bay in Michigan, settling in the former resort hotel. Over the next 30 years he wrote more than 70 novels and many short stories of outdoor adventure. Many of his stories were serialized in "The American Boy". Although he wrote primarily as a means to spend most of his time hunting and fishing, he was a careful craftsman. He made at least one trip each year to Ottawa to consult with authorities of the Royal Canadian Mounted in Ottawa and to get new maps of the wilderness areas so he could be accurate in his fiction.
