Dorothy Johnson

Dorothy Marie Johnson (McGregor, Iowa December 19, 1905– November 11, 1984) was an American author best known for her Western fiction.
Though born in Iowa, her family moved to Whitefish, Montana when she was quite young, and she would always think of it as home.
She began her professional writing career as a stringer for The Kalispell Daily Inter Lake while still a senior at Whitefish High School. She majored in English at the University of Montana, where she continued writing –producing poems about the Frontier in a campus literary magazine founded by her mentor, Professor H.G. Merriam. After graduation, she held jobs in Washington state and Wisconsin before landing a job at Gregg Publishing Co. where she worked for nine years.
She made her first sale to a major market in 1930, when her story “Bonnie George Campbell” was published by the Saturday Evening Post, for which she was paid $400. “I thought my futre as a writer was assured,” she later said, though it was 11 years before she sold another story.
Johnson joined the staff of The Woman magazine in 1944, both as a managing editor, and as a contributor (using pseudonyms). She resigned that position in 1950 to return to Whitefish and a job as reporter-photographer for the Whitefish Pilot. All the while, she continued to write fiction.
Between 1953 and 1967,Johnson was secretary-manager of the Montana Press Association. These were years of continued personal success as an author. During that time, she also taught for her alma mater as an assistant professor of journalism.
She was a prolific writer – continually creating short stories set in the frontier West, as well as novels, 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.
She is best remembered for three of her short stories that were made into films: “The Hanging Tree,” which starred Gary Cooper; “The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance,” the first movie to team James Stewart and John Wayne; and “A Man Called Horse,” with Richard Harris.
Johnson was famous for painstakingly researching the details on the period and place she frequently portrayed in her work – the American West of the 19th century. She claimed that she preferred the 19th century to the 20th, mainly “because we knew how it came out.” She brilliantly captured the changes of both landscape and lifestyle that resulted from white settlement of the western United States.
Johnson received numerous awards and honors over the years, 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.
She left instructions that the inscription on her grave marker should read, “Paid.” ''God and I know what it means, and nobody else needs to know,'' she said