CAPTAIN MAYNE REID
Author of
“The Rifle Rangers” “The Wood Rangers”
&c., &c.
ILLUSTRATED
LONDON
SIMPKIN, MARSHALL, HAMILTON, KENT & CO.
GLASGOW: THOMAS D. MORISON
BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH
Captain Mayne Reid was born at Ballyroney, County Down, on the 4th April, 1818, and was the son of the Rev. Thomas Mayne Reid. Mayne Reid was educated with a view to the Church, but finding his inclinations opposed to this calling, he emigrated to America and arrived in New Orleans on January, 1840. After a varied career as plantation over-seer, school-master, and actor, with a number of expeditions in connection with hunting and Indian warfare, he settled down in 1843 as a journalist in Philadelphia, where he made the acquaintance of Edgar Allan Poe.
Leaving Philadelphia in 1846, he spent the summer at Newport, Rhode Island, as the correspondent of the New York Herald, and in December of the same year, having obtained a commission as second lieutenant in the 1st New York Volunteers, he sailed for Vera Cruz to take part in the Mexican war. He behaved with conspicuous gallantry in many engagements, and was severely wounded and disabled at the storming of Chapultepec on the 13th September, 1847.
Returning to the United States in the spring of 1848, he resumed literary work. But in June, 1849, he sailed for Europe in order to take part in the revolutionary movements going on in Hungary and Bavaria, arriving however too late, he turned his attention again to literature, and in London in 1850, published his first novel “The Rifle Rangers,” in two volumes. Between this date and his death, he produced a large number of volumes, which indeed no one else was capable of writing, for in them are avowedly embodied the observations and experiences of his own extraordinary career.