James B. Hendryx

9 De–1963

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 Prom

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