About 1889, the Campbell family relocated to Guthrie in the newly established Oklahoma Territory, where he learned Native American customs from his boyhood playmates, knowledge which would later be useful in his writing career.
[2] Vestal taught for three years at Male High School in Louisville, Kentucky, before he became a professor of English at the University of Oklahoma at Norman, where he became known for his courses in creative writing.
He temporarily left the university on three occasions, as a captain in an artillery regiment during World War I, as a Guggenheim Fellow from 1930 to 1931, and under a Rockefeller Fellowship in 1946.
[2] Between 1927 and his death on Christmas Day 1957 from a heart attack in Oklahoma City, Vestal wrote more than twenty books, some novels, poems, and as many as one hundred articles about the Old West.
[3] He is interred as Walter S. Campbell at the Custer National Cemetery in Big Horn County, Montana.