Rod Thompson

Author of The Black Hills Thrilogy. Born to poor dirt farmers in South Dakota, I spent the first years of my life on a farm where I went barefoot, rode a horse to a one-room school house,was taught to shoot by age eight, slopped the hogs, milked cows, and collected cow chips for the stove. Being close to The Black Hills mountains, I was raised on legends of Crazy Horse, Wild Bill Hickok, and Calamity Jane; and at sixteen, looked down into Dead Man's Gulch over which Jesse James jumped his horse to escape a posse. My father, born in 1898 while Geronimo was in exile, loved to tell stories, and I loved to listen. For years I sat at the feet of the master, learning the art of story telling and soaking up the parlance and experience of living the end of an era. I love it when reviews tell of readers laughing and crying and becoming excited while reading my stories. I do my dead-level best to help readers feel what I was feeling when I was doing the writing. People often ask why did I choose to become a writer: It was in me.