Dorothy M. Johnson
1905 – 1984

Inducted June 15, 1991

Dorothy Marie Johnson was born in McGregor, Iowa, Dec. 19, 1905. Her family moved to Montana when she was quite young and she honored Whitefish as her “hometown” in a collection of essays, “When You and I Were Young, Whitefish,” published in 1982.

While she was a senior at Whitefish High School, class of ’22, she began her professional writing career, serving as a stringer for The Kalispell Daily Inter Lake. (She later confessed that she was a “poor reporter,” as she was timid about asking questions of people she didn’t know.)

Johnson left Whitefish after high school to attend first Montana State College (now Montana State University), where she majored in pre-med until she discovered that her course of study would require her to dissect a cat, and then the University of Montana, where she majored in English and was fortunate enough to receive direction and encouragement from Professor H.G. Merriam.

Her first post-high school publications were poems that appeared in The Frontier, a campus literary magazine Merriam had founded. She continued to write throughout her college years, although her focus shifted from poetry to prose. Following graduation, she held jobs in Washington state and Wisconsin before she was hired by the Gregg Publishing Co., where she worked for nine years.

In 1944 Johnson joined the staff of The Woman magazine as managing editor – and frequent contributor under pseudonyms. No matter what her “day job” was, Johnson continued writing fiction. Her first sale to a major market had come in 1930 when The Saturday Evening Post paid her $400 for “Bonnie George Campbell.”

“I thought my future as a writer was assured,” she said. It was 11 years before she sold another story.

In 1950 she resigned her editorial position with The Woman to return to Whitefish as a reporter-photographer for The Whitefish Pilot. Johnson’s years as secretary-manager of the Montana Press Association (1953 – 1967) were marked by continued personal success as an author. During those 14 years, she also taught for her alma mater as an assistant professor of journalism.

For members of the Association, Johnson’s years as manager were probably most memorable for her monthly editorial comments on the Fourth Estate. She was a prolific writer of short stories set in the frontier West, and she also wrote novels and non-fiction books and articles. Her story, “Lost Sister,” won the 1956 Spur Award given by Western Writers of America as “Best Short Story” of the year.

Three of her stories were made into films: “The Hanging Tree,” which starred fellow-Montanan Gary Cooper; “The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance,” the first movie to team James Stewart and John Wayne; and “A Man Called Horse,” which was so successful that several sequels were made.

Johnson was well-known for her painstaking research on the period and place she most frequently portrayed in her work – the West up to 1890. She often said she preferred the 19th century to the 20th, mainly “because we knew how it came out.” In her novels of Plains Indian life, “Buffalo Woman” (1977) and “All the Buffalo Returning” (1979), she captured the changes of both landscape and lifestyle that resulted from white settlement of the western United States.

Before her death on Nov. 11, 1984, Johnson had received a number of honors and awards, including an honorary Doctor of Letters from the University of Montana, the Western Heritage Wrangle Award from the Cowboy Hall of Fame, and the Golden Saddleman Award of Western Writers of America.

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