Craig Johnson isn’t sure just how much the big bronze buffalo that comes with the Western Writing Association’s Owen Wister Award weighs. Or whether it will make it past airport security when the New York Times best-selling author returns with it from Amarillo, Texas, this June, where he is to receive one of the West’s highest honors.
The Owen Wister award recognizes lifetime contributions to Western literature. It comes with an all-bronze statue of a bison, named the Lord of the Plains, created by the late Texas sculptor Robert Duffie.
“I think it is a beautiful buffalo statue, but from what I understand, it weighs a lot,” Johnson said. “They give it to you at the award ceremony, but then it’s your job to get it home. So, we’ll see what happens. If I have to ship it, or if TSA Security will let me put it through to Buffalo.”
Johnson may not know how he’s getting this big award home just yet, but he is so excited, he’s already cleared a spot for it at his home in Ucross, Wyoming.
“It’s already got a place to roost — once I get it,” Johnson said. “I’ve already cleared a place for it in the dining room, on a table.”
Mysteries are what Johnson is well known for, and the mystery of how the Lord of the Plains statue will get home to Wyoming is something Johnson plans to figure out as he goes along. That’s the same sort of approach he’s taken to creating the whole Longmire universe over the last 20-some years, which has brought him this award.
Johnson doesn’t know exactly why he has already won this lifetime achievement award. In his mind, he’s only at half a lifetime’s worth of stuff. But maybe it’s just his philosophy of having as much fun as possible when he writes about the fictional Sheriff Walt Longmire of Absaroka.
Throughout the Longmire series, good old Walt gets in all sorts of trouble, but somehow manages to survive, while solving lots of mysteries, and saving lives, along the way.
Johnson could never have guessed his style of just figuring it out as he went along would one day lead to his own name being put alongside “The Virginian” author, Owen Wister, the man who is considered the father of the entire Western genre.
“Owen Wister is kind of singularly responsible for elevating the Western to a more complex medium, to where he could challenge other pieces of great American literature like Moby Dick or Mark Twain,” Johnson said. “He allowed for an awful lot of complexities to enter into the genre. And I think, in many ways, made the iconoclastic imagery of the cowboy that we see so much of today.”
Move Over John Wayne
Johnson lives just 17 miles away from the Occidental Hotel, where the Virginian ultimately got his man. That makes winning the Owen Wister award especially symbolic and meaningful.
In becoming a Wister award winner, Johnson has joined a star-studded cast of characters ranging from actors like John Wayne and Clint Eastwood to historians like Will Bagley and James A. Crutchfield, to name just a few.
All Owen Wister award winners have in common lifetime achievements that uplift the voice and culture of the West in an unparalleled way across the nation and the world.
“I’m a little surprised, because it’s like a lifetime achievement award, and I’ve only got, I guess, 21 novels, three novellas, and a collection of short stories,” Johnson said. “It’s a small amount of work, certainly not a lifetime. I think I’ve got another 20, 30 years of writing.”
Part of the credit, Johnson believes, are his loyal fans and wise readers, who help him keep his story line straight. And there are 23 experts in Wyoming — the sheriffs of each county in the state — who don’t hesitate to call Johnson up if he gets something wrong in one of his books.
“It’s been kind of handy to have that kind of hand on my shoulder, to keep me honest as I go along,” Johnson said.
Like the time the real-life sheriff of Johnson County called him up to tell him about a mistake in the very first chapter of Johnson’s first Longmire novel, “Cold Dish,” published in 2004.
Johnson was surprised when he got the call from the Johnson County sheriff, telling him he’d messed up the story in the very first chapter.
“I said, ‘Well, what’s that?’ And he says, ‘You’ve got people drinking beer out of bottles on the Powder River and it’s can-only bars on the Powder River, Craig.’”
The reason for that, Johnson learned, is that people will throw glass bottles at each other in fights, leading to injuries.
Johnson thought about that for a minute, then came back with, “Well, Larry, you can throw a full can of beer and still hurt somebody.”
“Craig, nobody on the Powder River ever threw a full can of beer,” the sheriff told him.
Johnson could just hear the sheriff shaking his head over the phone.
These days, Johnson doesn’t hesitate to call up Wyoming sheriffs to talk to them about the novels he is working on, and make sure he’s getting the details exactly so.
“A lot of times I’m writing stuff from newspapers,” Johnson said. “It’s an actual case that they’ve worked on, things they’ve dealt with.”
Their input not only helps Johnson avoid making mistakes, but ensures his novels have a touch of realism that just can’t be obtained any other way.
The Everyman Hero
Another reason he believes the Longmire series has resonated with so many and attracted so many awards is Walt Longmire himself.
“He’s one of those guys you’d want to sit down and have a beer with,” Johnson said. “Like, I don’t want him after me if I did something wrong. But I’d definitely like to sit down and drink a Rainier (beer) with him, no two ways about it.”
While most of the characters in the Longmire series are drawn from people Johnson knows, Longmire isn’t a particular person.
“My wife has the best response to that,” Johnson said. “She says Walt Longmire is who Craig would like to be in 10 years. He’s just off to an incredibly slow start.”
In creating Longmire, Johnson decided he didn’t want some superman or James Bond type. Bond can kill a man with a pencil in the blink of an eye then race away in a fancy sports tech car, with still-perfect hair, in the flying wind.
What Johnson wanted was someone real, someone down to earth. Someone anyone could relate to. Someone with flaws, like the rest of us.
Longmire has that in plenty. He’s overweight, he’s depressed, and he’s getting older every day. But he’s still crawling out of bed every day to fight the good fight, just like millions of Americans every day, and when he gets knocked down in the arena of life, he stands back up to go at it again.
“I’m really kind of proud of Walt,” Johnson said. “He exemplifies an awful lot of the traits and character that I think we as Western Americans feel really strongly about. This award, I assume is somewhat for that, so that makes me feel pretty good.
Cue The Owen Wister Episode
Now that Johnson has won the Owen Wister award, he knows he needs to start thinking about a suitable literary reference for a future book. He can readily do that because of another of Walt’s endearing qualities. He’s a reader.
“So, I love constantly having the literary references in the course of the books,” Johnson said. “And obviously I’m gonna have to do something with Owen Wister now.”
Literary references are just another part of Johnson’s secret formula, to have as much fun as possible with his books.
Take the book he’s writing now, which he’s given the working title, “The Brothers McCay.”
“It was time for me to do something of a Gothic, kind of a red-meat mystery novel,” Johnson said. “So, I got started on that and then, at the same time, I was reading Dostoyevsky’s Brothers of Karamazov, and I thought, you know, it would be interesting to have this kind of like follow a bit of ‘The Brothers Karamazov.’”
Johnson doesn’t know if “The Brothers McKay” working title will survive the publishing process. Working titles are, after all, just that. They’re something to help build cohesion while a writer is creating something of his ideas. The final title, though, is selected to best market and sell a finished work.
Regardless of what the ultimate title is, though, rest assured that Johnson is definitely having fun writing his latest book.
“’The Brothers Karamazov” is one of the great works of literature in the world, but it’s also one of the worst mysteries ever written,” Johnson said. “Because if you read the book and you don’t know who killed the old man in the first two chapters, you’re a moron. Like you really need to go back and look at your cred on reading mystery novels.”
But some historians have discovered information suggesting that Dostoyevsky’s book was to have been a trilogy, and so, perhaps, things were not as obvious as they seemed.
“He died before he got the chance to write the other two books,” Johnson said. “And so, the person that is put forward as the possible murderer might not be the murderer. I’m kind of playing with that one now.”
Johnson’s fans can hardly wait to learn more, and it’s the perfect example of what makes up a modern-day Western voice that fits right in with the Owen Wister award.
Renée Jean can be reached at renee@cowboystatedaily.com.
