Cornelius Cole Smith, Jr. (July 18, 1913 – April 27, 2004) was an American author, multi-media artist, military historian and illustrator. He was born at Fort Huachuca in Arizona on July 18, 1913. A survivor of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, he was an officer during World War II in the United States Marines and retired at the rank of Colonel. After leaving military service in 1947, he held a number of important positions including employment as an architect for the Arabian-American Oil Company and a museum curator for the Scripps Institution of Oceanography. After receiving his MA and Ph.D. degrees in history at Claremont Graduate School, he spent the 1950s as chief of the Historical Division for the 15th Air Force, Strategic Air Command.

He began his writing career relatively late in life, at age 57, and was a prolific author of books on military history and the American frontier of the Southwestern United States. Smith began contributing to various historical publications, such as Montana: The Magazine of Western History, in the early-1960s and wrote his first book, Recuerdos de San Antonio: Four Memorable Days in the City of the Alamo, in 1964. He became a full-time author and illustrator three years later, publishing a biography on his great-grandfather William Sanders Oury in William Sanders Oury: History-Maker of the Southwest (1967).His book A Southwestern Vocabulary: The Words They Used (1984) detailed over 500 terms of slang of the American Southwest and Northern Mexico and is widely cited by historians of the "Old West". 

In his retirement years, 'Corney' Smith became known in the local community where he lived in Riverside, California as a modern-day "renaissance man", and had numerous one-man shows of his paintings and wood carvings.Two of his last books were related to his art and poetry, Full Circle: Poems & Drawings (1998) and Impressions ... of Places and Things (1999). Smith worked in watercolor, producing animated and colorful genre scenes in a representational style displaying classic characteristics of the American Scene and Regionalism. His wood carvings were similarly styled and included miniature tableaux depictions of historical Arizona genre scenes. 

Smith died of natural causes at his Riverside home on April 27, 2004, at the age of 90. A military service was held for him at Evergreen Memorial Park, in Riverside, where he was interred.