Harlan Boone Cartwright writes Western fiction the way the high plains hold onto snow—quiet, steady, and with a memory for everything that ever mattered. Born and raised outside Thermopolis, Wyoming, Cartwright hails from five generations of cattle ranchers who worked the Wind River Basin with grit in their teeth and calluses like canyon rock. His family settled there before Wyoming had a state flag, and Harlan still lives on the same spread his great-grandfather carved out with nothing but a team of mules and a dream that didn’t come with an exit strategy.
Though he earned a degree in American History from the University of Wyoming—focusing on frontier law and the shifting lives of Native nations—it was the back porch yarns from old cowhands and Lakota elders that taught him how stories really live. He says his best education came at sunrise, branding calves with a pair of uncles who never read a book they didn’t bleed into.
Before turning to fiction, Cartwright lived a dozen lives most men only read about. He spent twelve years as a wildlife field tech, collaring mountain lions and documenting elk migrations across the Continental Divide. Later, he served as a part-time rodeo medic and a full-time wilderness guide for wayward East Coast execs hoping to “find themselves” by getting lost in the Bighorns. He was also briefly deputized during a blizzard that cut the county off for nine days—an experience that taught him that justice, like barbed wire, only works when it’s stretched tight but fair.
Writing found him late, but struck like a lightning storm on a dry mesa. Cartwright picked up his grandfather’s rusted Remington typewriter in a fit of nostalgia and wound up writing his first novel in the tack room during lambing season. What began as a tribute to old family stories has turned into a celebrated career crafting Western fiction that echoes with gunpowder, silence, and soul. His characters aren’t just cowboys and outlaws—they’re people trying to reconcile the wildness within and the world outside. He writes the West not as myth, but as memory.
His signature style is as sparse and evocative as a prairie wind—equal parts Cormac McCarthy and a campfire confession. He blends lyrical prose with the hard-knuckled grit of men and women tested by distance, isolation, and moral weather. Readers say his books feel like trail dust on your tongue and a song in your chest.
An interesting fact: Cartwright once survived a grizzly encounter by playing dead for four excruciating minutes while reciting Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass in his head. He says he’s never looked at poetry—or bears—the same way since.
Today, when he’s not writing or mending fence, Harlan lives with his wife Annie, a retired botanist, and their border collie, Junebug. He still hauls water from the well when the pipes freeze and believes the West isn’t a place—it’s a way of listening.
Coming Soon
Hollow Trail
In the waning days of the frontier, where the old codes of justice rot beneath polished badges and booming railroads, one man rides not for glory, but for truth.
Elijah Creed is a relic—a former Pinkerton detective with a stiff back, a failing eye, and a trail of regrets that stretches further than the Oregon Trail. He thought he’d buried the past with his badge. But when a weather-stained letter arrives from a distant Idaho outpost, everything he thought he knew unravels. The daughter he never met—conceived in a long-ago mistake and lost to silence—is alive. And wanted for murder.
The law says she led a stagecoach ambush that left five men dead in the Bitterroot wilds. Elijah doesn’t know her face, her voice, or whether he believes she’s innocent. But blood calls louder than guilt, and there’s no peace in the bottle or the Bible.
So begins a cold-season journey through high mountain passes and ghost-bitten towns, shadowed by corrupt marshals, hidden alliances, and the creeping doubt that justice may be just another lie men tell to sleep at night.
Hollow Trail is a Western of the old breed—stark, poetic, and unflinching. For readers drawn to stories of fathers and daughters, lost causes, and the hollow spaces where law and love collide, this novel offers a ride worth taking. Saddle up.