Dale L. Walker Collection

Dale Walker is the author of twenty books, 400 magazine articles, 700 book reviews, short stories, and literary criticism. He was born in Decatur, Illinois and took a degree in journalism from the University of Texas at El Paso. A freelance writer since 1960, he specializes in Western American history, military history, 19th and early 20th century journalism and war correspondence, Jack London studies, and is a biographer, historian, anthologist, newspaper book columnist, reviewer, and editor. Januarius MacGahan was born in New Lexington, Ohio on June 12, 1844. Although very poor he managed to go to school and learn enough on his own to eventually teach school in Huntington, Indiana, moving to St. Louis in 1863 to be a newspaperman and book-keeper. In 1868 he went to Europe to study languages. At the outbreak of the Franco-Prussian War he became a war correspondent first for the New York Herald and the London News. This led to experiences with the Commune in Paris, travel through Europe with General William Tecumseh Sherman in 1871-72, further travel through Asia in 1873, cruises in the Mediterranean and to Cuba, Key West, and New York that same year, time with don Carlos' army 1874, accompanying the Pandora expedition to the Arctic in 1875, travels in Bulgaria and Russia in 1876-77, and his death while in Constantinople in 1878 at the age of 34. He was hailed as the Liberator of Bulgaria for his writing on the atrocities committed on those people by the Turks during the Russo-Turkish War. At his death he left a wife and son who returned to the United States.