Bertrand W. Sinclair (1881–1972) was a Scottish-born novelist who became a leading writer of North American Western and frontier fiction in the early-to-mid twentieth century. Born Bertrand William Sinclair on 6 September 1881 in Edinburgh, he emigrated with his family to Canada and later spent time in Montana, working as a cowboy on the northern range before turning to writing — experience that gave his early fiction its authentic cattle-country detail. He began publishing Western fiction in the 1900s and 1910s, contributing to the pulp magazines before moving into novels. His notable works include Raw Gold (1908), North of Fifty-Three (1914), and Big Timber (1916), and later Poor Man's Rock (1920) and The Inverted Pyramid (1924), the last two reflecting a move away from cowboy stories toward novels of the British Columbia salmon-fishing industry after he settled on the Pacific coast. In 1905 he married Bertha Muzzy, who wrote under the pen name B. M. Bower and became one of the most successful Western novelists of the era in her own right; the couple divorced in 1912. Sinclair later resettled in British Columbia, whose maritime and industrial life shaped his later fiction and gave him a broader range than the label of cowboy novelist suggests. He is generally classed alongside contemporaries such as B. M. Bower and Zane Grey as a popularizer of the Western. He died on 20 February 1972 in Pender Harbour, British Columbia.
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