Doug Hocking

Doug writes award winning history that focuses on presenting what really happened in an exciting and entertaining manner. His work has received a Spur Award, Co-Founders' Award for Best History, a Finalist for the Will Rogers Medallion (silver) and was a 2019 Finalist in History for the New Mexico-Arizona Book Awards. His historical fiction brings the Old West back to life while making another generation proud of the accomplishments and struggle of their ancestors. Each book is a history lesson wrapped in an riveting story.

Doug has led an exciting life. Born near New York City, a fact he very seldom admits, he learned to speak from his Cornish grandmother. Still very young, Doug was taken West where he grew up on the Jicarilla Apache Reservation in the Rio Arriba of New Mexico among piasonos and indios. At 18 he hitchhiked to Albuquerque and enlisted in Army Intelligence.

The next decade was spent in Thailand, Taiwan, at the Pentagon and at bases so secret the Army often wouldn't say where they were. This made it difficult to comply with orders to report, but Doug is a great intel analyst and interpreted the "indicators" to track them down. Doug stopped in Taiwan for several years and acquired an undergraduate degree in Business Administration from the University of Maryland. Returning to the US he studied Ethnography in graduate school and then returned to the Army in Armored Cavalry finding the cavalry more fun than musty tomes of forgotten lore. In Germany, he was eyeball to eyeball with the Soviet beast before it fell. His final tour of duty was the most difficult of all, trying to turn Military Intelligence lieutenants into officers. He also played a role in intelligence gathering and interpretation during the first Gulf War.

Since then Doug has earned honors with a graduate degree in US history and garnered his certificate as a field archaeologist in historical archaeology braving a summer at a wilderness camp with college students in southern Colorado excavating Fort Massachusetts. "Bears only poked their heads into the mess tent a couple of times." Doug has built homes, taught college and worked in the hospitality industry. He spends time exploring lost towns, ruins, old forts and trails, interpreting foundations and trash, ranging far.

His work appears regularly in the Journal of Arizona History, the Cochise County Historical Journal, True West Magazine, Wild West Magazine and Roundup.