Dorothy Johnson inducted into Cowboy Hall of Fame
Whitefish author Dorothy Johnson has been named to the Montana Cowboy Hall of Fame. She is one of 37 people, places and things named to the sixth class of inductees.
Johnson, who worked as a reporter for the Daily Inter Lake as a teenager and for the Whitefish Pilot after returning from work in New York, gained national recognition for Westerns she wrote that were made into blockbuster Hollywood movies.
“The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance,” 1949, starred Jimmy Stewart and John Wayne. “A Man Called Horse,” 1950, was followed by “The Return of the Man Called Horse,” 1976, and “Triumphs of a Man Called Horse,” 1983, each starring Richard Harris. And “The Hanging Tree,” 1957, based on a true story from Montana’s gold mining days, starred Gary Cooper and George C. Scott.
Johnson was born in 1905 in Iowa and came to Whitefish in 1913. Rachel Toors remarked in “Montana Magazine” that Johnson “was raised by her widowed mother, was married for about 15 minutes to a creep, and spent most of her life as a character.”
Johnson described her early days in Whitefish in her 1982 book, “When You and I Were Young, Whitefish.” The city of Whitefish gave her the key to the city and named her an honorary police chief in 1959. She spent years paying off her ex-husband’s gambling debts, which is memorialized on her grave stone in the Whitefish Cemetery — “PAID.”
Johnson also nominated Hungry Horse News founder and editor Mel Ruder for the Pulitzer Prize, which he won in 1965.
Other written works included two Western novels, two juvenile novels, five short story collections and numerous non-fiction works. She worked in the New York City publishing industry for 15 years, but was homesick and found herself learning about the West in the New York Public Library.
Male editors at big city, East Coast magazines loved her work but couldn’t acknowledge that the author was a woman. Her bylines were simply “D.M. Johnson” until she gained fame with her Hollywood movies. The Blackfeet Tribe adopted her in 1959 with the name Kills Both Places.
Johnson worked as a secretary-manager for the Montana Newspaper Association in the 1950s and taught creative writing at the University of Montana-Missoula from 1956 through 1960. The Western Writers of America awarded her their highest honor in 1957, and she was awarded the Levi Strauss Golden Saddleman Award in 1976.
A total of 174 people, places and things have been inducted into the Montana Cowboy Hall of Fame since 2008. Each of the Hall of Fame’s 12 trustee districts choose one living inductee and two legacy inductees. For more information, visit online at www.montanacowboyfame.org.