Paulette Jiles, a horse-riding poet who wrote historical novels that evoked the grit and natural grandeur of the 19th-century American West, notably in “News of the World,” in which a Civil War veteran and a 10-year-old girl embark on a 400-mile journey in search of the girl’s relatives, died on July 8 in San Antonio. She was 82.

Her death, in a hospital, was confirmed by her step-granddaughter, Faith Elaine Lowry, who said the cause was gastric complications. Ms. Jiles disclosed in a blog post in June that she had been diagnosed with “some kind of nonalcoholic cirrhosis of the liver.”

Ms. Jiles published six books of poetry, two memoirs and nine novels. Together, more than a million copies of her works have been sold in the United States, according to BookScan, a sales tracking system.

Her novels drew inspiration from Civil War-era history and from her own horseback trail rides through Missouri and the Southwest as she explored the region’s fraught past in granular and seemingly lived-in detail, often through long, perilous journeys that her characters undertake.

Her writing coupled extensive research with austere prose, snappy dialogue and textured characters who reappear from book to book, offering continuity to devoted readers.

One character, based on a real historical figure, is the rugged and honorable Capt. Jefferson Kyle Kidd, the Civil War veteran from “News of the World” (2016) who makes a living keeping a frontier public informed by reading aloud to them from newspapers. He becomes roped into a wildly hazardous journey from Wichita Falls, Texas, to San Antonio to return a stoic German girl to her relatives after she is recaptured by U.S. soldiers from the Kiowa tribe.

The novel, which sold more than 700,000 copies, was shortlisted for a National Book Award and adapted into a 2020 film directed by Paul Greengrass and starring Tom Hanks.

In a review of “News of the World” in The Times, the critic Janet Maslin called the novel “a narrow but exquisite book about the joys of freedom,” proprietary love, pure adventure and cultural reconciliation. “That’s a lot to pack into a short (213 pages), vigorous volume,” she wrote, “but Ms. Jiles is capable of saying a lot in few words.”

In an earlier novel, “The Color of Lightning” (2009), a freed slave named Britt Johnson searches for his wife and son across Texas after the Civil War. Though he learns of the rights granted to formerly enslaved people under the newly passed Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments to the Constitution — the latter from a news-reading Captain Kidd — he never lingers in one place for long. He prefers his freedom on the road, “a very long and thin nation to itself, a country whose citizens were isolate and untrammeled, whose passports were all carte blanche,” Ms. Jiles wrote.

Writing about “The Color of Lightning” in The New York Times Book Review, the Canadian writer and poet Steven Heighton celebrated Ms. Jiles as a savant of what he called the “Poet’s Western,” a lyrical subgenre of historical fiction shaped by writers like Cormac McCarthy.

Ms. Jiles wrote from a small writing studio above her one-room cabin on a 32-acre ranch near Utopia, in Texas hill country, where she also played the penny whistle in a bluegrass band, sang in a local choir and made frequent riding trips to Mexico and elsewhere. At the ranch, she kept two horses, Buck and Jackson, two cats and a koi fish.

Paulette Kay Jiles was born on April 4, 1943, in Salem, Mo., one of four children of Leonard Jiles, an insurance salesman who served in World War II, and Ruby Racy-Jiles, an oil painter.

Paulette graduated from Center High School in Kansas City in 1961 and studied at the University of Central Missouri in Warrensburg before enrolling in the University of Missouri-Kansas City. She graduated with a bachelor’s degree in romance languages in 1968.

In 1969, Ms. Jiles moved to Canada and worked as a freelance journalist for the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation in Toronto, traveling to the Quebec Arctic and northern Ontario to help Cree and Ojibway communities set up Indigenous-language radio stations.

She found early success with her writing in Canada, where she remained throughout the 1970s and much of the ’80s. Her first poetry collection, “Waterloo Express” (1973), was published by the House of Anansi Press and edited by Margaret Atwood, who worked for the publishing house at the time. Ms. Jiles’s second collection, “Celestial Navigation” (1984), received a Governor General’s Award, Canada’s highest literary honor.

In an email, Ms. Atwood described Ms. Jiles as “tough, smart” — a serious writer who “pulled no punches.” She wrote that Ms. Jiles once persuaded her to rescue a neglected, unshod horse that she’d found in a damp field. Ms. Atwood fictionalized the moment in “White Horse,” a story included in her 2006 collection, “Moral Disorder.”

Ms. Jiles returned to the United States in the late 1980s and published her first book under an American imprint, “Blackwater” (1988), a collection of poems and prose that had appeared in various publications; one piece was a lyrical retelling of the exploits of the outlaws Jesse and Frank James.

Around that time, Ms. Jiles was camping along the Jacks Fork River in southern Missouri with a cousin when she met Jim Johnson, a retired Army lieutenant colonel, as he was resting during a trail ride. The two hit it off and, at Mr. Johnson’s suggestion, they later embarked on a seven-month road trip across the country to meet Ms. Jiles’s extended family, an episode she recounts in her 1992 memoir, “Cousins.”

After marrying in 1991, Ms. Jiles and Mr. Johnson lived out of a Winnebago R.V. and traveled throughout the Southwest and Mexico, settling down in the King William neighborhood of San Antonio in 1995. They divorced in 2003, and Ms. Jiles moved to Utopia soon after.

In addition to Ms. Lowry, her step-granddaughter, Ms. Jiles is survived by her younger sister, Sunny Jiles-Holtmann; a stepson, James Johnson Jr.; a step-grandson; and a step-great-granddaughter.

While Ms. Jiles was best known for her historical fiction, she fluctuated among genres, including poetry, memoir and even dystopian fiction: Her 2013 thriller, “Lighthouse Island,” follows an orphaned girl and a paraplegic meteorologist as they flee a totalitarian government in a distant future.

Her other books include “North Spirit” (1995), a memoir about her time spent with Indigenous communities in Canada; “Enemy Women” (2002), the first novel to bring her widespread critical acclaim; and “Simon the Fiddler” (2020), which follows a character who had appeared in “News of the World.”

In a remembrance in Texas Monthly after Ms. Jiles’s death, the poet Naomi Shihab Nye described her as “brilliant and driven and, sometimes, prickly” with interviewers.

In one interview she gave, to The San Antonio Express-News in 2002 after the publication of “Enemy Women,” Ms. Jiles expressed a desire to keep her quiet, secluded day-to-day existence.

“I just hope my life continues to be dull and plodding,” she said. “It’s the best thing for me.”