Miss Katherine Mayo comes of Mayflower stock, but her birthplace was Ridgway, Pennsylvania. She was educated in private schools at Boston and Cambridge, Mass. Her earliest literary work to appear in print was a series of articles describing travels in Norway, followed by another series on Colonial American topics, written for the New York Evening Post. Later, during a residence in Dutch Guiana, South America, she wrote for the Atlantic Monthly some interesting sketches of the natives of Surinam. After this came three years wholly devoted to historic research. The work, however, that first attracted wide attention was a history of the Pennsylvania State Police, published in 1917, under the title of Justice To All.

This history gives the complete story of the famous Mounted Police of Pennsylvania, illustrated with a mass of accurate narrative and re-enforced with statistics. The occasion of its writing was a personal experience—the cold-blooded murder of Sam Howell, a fine young American workingman, a carpenter by trade, near Miss Mayo's country home in New York. The circumstances of this murder could not have been more skilfully arranged had they been specially designed to illustrate the weakness and folly of the ancient, out-grown engine to which most states in the Union, even yet, look for the enforcement of their laws in rural parts. Sam Howell, carrying the pay roll on pay-day morning, gave his life for his honor as gallantly as any soldier in any war. He was shot down, at arm's length range, by four highway men, to whom, though himself unarmed, he would not surrender his trust. Sheriff, deputy sheriffs, constables, and some seventy-five fellow laborers available as sheriff's posse spent hours within a few hundred feet of the little wood in which the four murderers were known to be hiding, but no arrest was made and the murderers are to-day still at large.

"You will have forgotten all this in a month's time," said Howell's fellow-workmen an hour after the tragedy, to Miss Mayo and her friend Miss Newell, owner of the estate, on the scene. "Sam was only a laboring man, like ourselves. We, none of us, have any protection when we work in country parts."

The remark sounded bitter indeed. But investigation proved it, in principle, only too true. Sam Howell had not been the first, by many hundreds, to give his life because the State had no real means to make her law revered. And punishment for such crimes had been rare. Sam Howell, however, was not to be forgotten, neither was his sacrifice to be vain. From his blood, shed unseen, in the obscurity of a quiet country lane, was to spring a great movement, taking effect first in the state in which he died, and spreading through the Union.

At that time Pennsylvania was the only state of all the forty-seven that had met its just obligations to protect all its people under its laws. Pennsylvania's State Police had been for ten years a body of defenders of justice, "without fear and without reproach". The honest people of the State had recorded its deeds in a long memory of noble service. But, never stooping to advertise itself, never hesitating to incur the enmity of evildoers, it had had many traducers and no historian. There was nothing in print to which the people of other states might turn for knowledge of the accomplishment of the sister commonwealth.

So, in order that the facts might be conveniently available for every American citizen to study from "A" to "Z" and thus to decide intelligently for himself where he wanted his own state to stand, in the matter of fair and full protection to all people, Miss Mayo went to Pennsylvania and embarked on an exhaustive analysis of the workings of the Pennsylvania State Police Force, viewed from the standpoint of all parts of the community. Ex-President Roosevelt wrote the preface for Justice To All, the book in which the fruits of this study were finally embodied, and, in the meantime, Miss Newell devoted all her energies to the development of an active and aggressive state-wide movement for a State Police. Justice To All, in this campaign was widely used as a source of authority on which to base the arguments for the case. And in 1917 came Sam Howell's triumph, the passage of the Act creating the Department of New York State Police, now popularly called "the State Troopers".

In the course of collecting the material for this book, Miss Mayo gathered a mass of facts much greater than one volume could properly contain. From this she later took fifteen adventurous stories of actual service in the Pennsylvania Force, of which some, including "Israel Drake" appeared in the Saturday Evening Post, while others came out simultaneously in the Atlantic Monthly and in the Outlook. All were later collected in a volume called The Standard Bearers, which met with a very cordial reception by readers and critics.

During the latter part of the World War, Miss Mayo was in France investigating the war-work of the Y. M. C. A. Her experiences there furnished material for a book from which advance pages appeared in the Outlook in the form of separate stories, "Billy's Hut," "The Colonel's Lady" and others. The purpose of this book was to determine, as closely as possible, the real values, whatever those might be, of the work actually accomplished by the Overseas Y, and to lay the plain truth without bias or color, before the American people.