Stanley L. Wood

In 1873, George Grant,[note 2] a Scottish silk merchant in London bought some 77 square miles of land in Kansas and proposed to set up an English colony there which he called Victoria.

[6] When the family arrived in Victoria they found, not the bustling colony they had been promised, but a single two-storey stone building, the railway station, which also functioned as a hotel.

The family found the carousing of the young men, and of the local cowboys, was intolerable and fled to Kansas City, with the very last of their money.

Wood's father got a job with the Union Pacific land department at Lawrence, Kansas, and the family moved and the children attended school there.

Still seeking his fortune, Woods' father left his job in Lawrence and began to travel around Kansas demonstrating a patent well-digging auger.

He was demonstrating the auger at a farm near Wichita, Kansas, on 27 May 1877, when he experience some symptoms that made him rush to the doctor's office.

[12]: 235 Kirkpatrick states that Wood's first illustration work was The Tales of The Spanish Boccaccio: Count Lucanor: Or the Fifty Pleasant Stories of Patronio translated by James York from the original by Prince Don Juan Manuel published in 1888 by Pickering & Chatto.

Houfe notes that Wood was "employed almost continuously by Messrs Chatto's as an illustrator of boys' adventure stories".

[16] The Illustrated London News sent Wood to South Dakota in 1888 where he was able to build on his juvenile experience of the American Old West way of life and for many years produced work with a cowboy and Indian flavour.

His many Africana illustrations included those for the books of Bertram Mitford (1855–1914) - The Gun Runner (1893), The Luck of Gerald Ridgeley (1894), The Curse of Clement Wayneflete (1894), Renshaw Fanning's Quest (1894), The King's Assegai (1894), A Veldt Official (1895) and The Expiation of Wynne Palisser (1896).

[21] The story was published first as a serial in Answers one of the publications produced by Alfred Harmsworth (1865–1922),[note 6] for whom both Connor and Leighton worked.

[note 7] Romances was a follow-up to Crellin's first book Tales of the Caliph (1887, T Fisher Unwin, London)[27] published under the pseudonym Al Arawiyah, and being nine additional stories set in the world of the Arabian Nights.

Wood died at his home at 23 Windsor Road, Palmers Green, North London, on 1 March 1928,[29] having been ill for some time.

[30] Samuels report that there were no auction records for Wood when their encyclopedia was written, but that the estimated price for a 10x14 inch (25.4x35.6 cm) oil-on-board painting showing cowboys spooking a town was about US$1,200 to 1,500 in 1976.