He was a soldier, reaching the rank of major general, and a humanitarian. He was captured by a group of Confederate partisans that included his future brother in law. His career included the battles of Antietam, Chickamauga and the Geronimo campaign during the Apache Wars. Yet George Crook’s story has remained mostly untold until now.

This month, after 11 years researching and writing, Paul Magid has published the first of a two-volume biography of the general, called George Crook: From the Redwoods to Appomattox (University of Oklahoma Press, $39.95).

The project was a departure for Mr. Magid, who spent his life as a lawyer, first in the Peace Corps and then as the General Counsel for the African Development Foundation. It was in Malawi that Mr. Magid was first a Peace Corps volunteer, from 1969-1971.

“When I retired I just decided I was gonna get as far away from Africa and things African as I possibly could,” Mr. Magid said in a recent conversation at his West Tisbury home.

“I always had an interest in the American West and particularly the Indians and the Indian Wars,” he said. “Originally I just thought I would do a lot of research on the Indian Wars. Just do a lot of reading because there are just tons of books out there. Then I thought, well if I’m gonna do all that reading maybe I’ll try to do something.”

That something turned out to be a book, but Mr. Magid needed to find a way to focus his broad subject. “I began looking around for an historical figure that I could use to tie it all together and I saw this movie, it’s called Geronimo! where Gene Hackman plays George Crook.”

The film’s portrayal of General Crook as a consummate fighter against the American Indians and yet a humanitarian who used his position in the army to mitigate the suffering of the native people intrigued Mr. Magid. “I thought that was a really interesting dichotomy. I had started off with the assumption that most of the Army was pretty anti-Indian.”

General Crook served in the Army from 1852, after his graduation from West Point, to his death in 1890, the year of the Battle of Wounded Knee, which marked the end of the American Indian resistance.

“His career just seemed like a really good metaphor for the period,” Mr. Magid said.

While he was well known in his own time, General Crook lived in an era of great figures who loomed large in the public imagination — Sherman, Grant, Custer, Boone are all names that have remained in our consciousness. Crook’s own reticence and less flamboyant personality have kept him mostly unknown.

His autobiography is patchy, covering only the time between his graduation and the Battle of the Rosebud in 1876, and it was written on the backs of order forms. “He stuck it in a desk drawer. He just really never was enthusiastic about the idea of publishing it.

“He didn’t publish a memoir, and that [is what] really put a lot of people on the map. A lot of the events that he took part in involved people that were much more colorful than him.

“He was kind of a plain guy,” Mr. Magid said, yet “he was very eccentric. When he was famous, which was during his own time, he was known for going out on the trail in a canvas suit with a pith helmet on and carrying a shotgun and riding a mule, which in its own right is fairly colorful. He was kind of the opposite of Custer, who was very flamboyant. He was deliberately un-flamboyant.”

“It was a public that was really attracted to flamboyance and not this sturdy, behind-the-scenes steadiness that he portrayed.”

With so little in the way of personal papers to aid an historian or biographer, many have stayed away. Mr. Magid relied on Crook’s reports from the field as well as accounts of him by his contemporaries. “There was quite a bit of information on him because he became a national figure.”

Still Mr. Magid admits he was “a little afraid of the writing part of it.”

He spent the first three or four years of the project researching Crook. But after a career spent writing legal briefs and memos, Mr. Magid decided he needed to learn how to write for a different sort of audience.

“I wanted to make this story really accessible,” he said.

So he went to Johns Hopkins University to get a master’s degree in nonfiction writing.

“After about two or three years I had about 1,500 pages of material.”

He met a publisher from the University of Oklahoma Press at a history conference in Nebraska, who was interested if Mr. Magid could cut it down to 300 pages. This put Mr. Magid into a bit of a funk, but he came up with a solution: two volumes. “My whole purpose was really to provide a detailed biography.”

Mr. Magid’s last brush with history in the academic sense was in college; he studied history for his undergraduate degree from Johns Hopkins before going on to study law at Columbia. He had toyed with the idea of entering academic life, but he was drafted directly after law school and, after joining the Peace Corps, his life took a different course.

“I think Americans generally know very little of their own history. If you talk to anybody who knows anything about Western history, they’ll know who George Crook was, but that’s a small minority of the American population. And then, of course, overseas he has no relevance whatsoever.”

A biographer becomes the keeper of the life he chronicles and this is especially so with Mr. Magid and General Crook. Two other books about Crook have been released in recent years, but neither has rescued the general from relative obscurity. Mr. Magid hopes to change that with his comprehensive biography, based on Crook’s own field reports and accounts of him by his contemporaries, both those who admired and disliked him. Mr. Magid is hard at work on volume two.

“Whenever he [Crook] took part in a major engagement, he usually did so in a subordinate role, so he wasn’t one who made headlines.” He is now.