Harold Keith

Harold Keith (1903-1998) grew up near the Cherokee country he describes in Rifles for Watie. A native Oklahoman, he was educated at Northwestern State Teachers College at Alva and at the University of Oklahoma. While traveling in easern Oklahoma doing research on his master's thesis in history, Mr. Keith found a great deal of fresh material about the Civil War in the Indian country. Deciding he might someday write a historical novel, he interviewed twenty-two Civil War veterans then living in Oklahoma and Arkansas; much of the background of Rifles for Watie came from the notebooks he filled at that time.