Charles R. Batten was born on September 18, 1922 and raised on a farm in Adel, Iowa. He volunteered for the United States Navy during World War II, serving on the PCE 885, a battleship in the Southern Pacific. He married Barbara Watkins, whom he refers to as “Bobby,” on September 14, 1944.

Following the war Charles and his wife worked for the Forest Service in Idaho operating a firefinder, a device used to spot forest fires. In 1946, he found a job in a planing mill belonging to Potlatch Forests, Inc., located in Potlatch, Idaho. He enrolled at the University of Idaho the following year and in 1950 he graduated with a bachelor’s degree in forestry and was soon hired by the forestry section of the Chicago and North Western Railway System in St. Paul, Minnesota.

In 1960, Batten began work for American Forest Products Industries, Inc., where he was employed in the public relations division. There, he worked to educate the public about the logging to create a favorable image of the industry. Beginning in the early 1970s, Batten wrote a weekly column for the Gazette Telegraph in Colorado Springs, which reflected libertarian ideals on the use of land and natural resources. In 1973 was appointed Director of Communications for the California Forest Protective Association in Sacramento, California. He moved to Logan, Utah in 1994, where he continued to write and became involved in organizations like the Cache Soil Conservation District and Blacksmith Fork Soil Conservation District. He passed away in Grand Junction, Colorado on April 1, 2015.