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James Orin Oliphant was born on March 23, 1894, in the Whitman County town of Elberton, Washington, not far from the Palouse River. In 1913 he graduated from the State Normal School in Cheney. Three years later he received his A.B. degree from the University of Washington in Seattle. He returned to Cheney for two years to teach high school, then joined the Normal School faculty in 1921. From 1921 to 1924 he taught as a member of the Department of History and Social Science and served as executive secretary to President Noah Showalter. During these years he used several leaves of absence to continue his work in history under the direction of Edward Meaney at the University of Washington. In 1923- 1924 he was a Denny fellow and in 1924 he received his A.M. He then returned to teaching history and social science at Cheney Normal School. In 1929 he took a leave of absence and went east to Harvard University as an Austin Scholar and in 1930 received his Ph.D from Harvard. His dissertation was on The Range-Cattle Industry in the Oregon Country to 1890. Rather than returning to the Washington State Normal School at Cheney, Oliphant joined the faculty of Antioch College in Ohio as an associate professor of history. In 1933 he moved to Bucknell University in Lewisburg, Pennsylvania, where he progressed through the ranks of the professoriate and in 1964 retired as professor emeritus of history. From 1936 to 1944 and again from 1957 to 1962 he served as chairman of the department of history. From 1949 until 1954 he edited Bucknell University Studies. His professional memberships included the American Historical Association and the Agricultural History Society. Upon his retirement Oliphant and his wife May returned to the Pacific Northwest and lived in Salem, Oregon, until his death in 1979.

Biographical sketch of J. Orin Oliphant from the Ye Galleon Press reprint of William Emsley Jackson's Diary of a Cattle Drive from LaGrande, Oregon, to Cheyenne, Wyoming, published in 1983.