Not much is known about Geraldine Bonner. She was born in 1870 in New York.
Her father, a journalist and historical writer, moved his family from Staten Island
to the mining camps of Colorado when Geraldine was 10. Two years later they
moved again, this time to San Francisco, where John Bonner became the editor
of the San Francisco Argonaut. Geraldine started writing for the Argonaut at 17,
and wrote her first novel, Hard Pan, in 1900. It was set in the boisterous mining
camps of her youth, and she took the novel's title as her pen name. Geraldine
wrote short stories for Harper's and Vogue, among other periodicals, as well as
several novels.