The late Dorothy M. Johnson, a Whitefish author known for her wit and grit, is among this year’s inductees into the Montana Cowboy Hall of Fame and Western Heritage Center.

Johnson was chosen for the organization’s Legacy Award from a field of candidates who have made a notable contributions to the history and culture of Montana. Winners were selected on a regional basis by the local trustees of the heritage center.

Johnson wrote 17 books and more than 100 short stories in a life that spanned 78 years, most of them in Montana. In 2005 she was inducted into the Gallery of Outstanding Montanans at the State Capitol.

She’s best remembered for three of her works of Western fiction that were turned into motion pictures: “The Hanging Tree,” “The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance” and “A Man Called Horse.” Films based on her books featured Gary Cooper, John Wayne and Jimmy Stewart, among other movie stars.

Johnson was born in McGregor, Iowa, but moved to Whitefish with her family in 1913. Growing up in Whitefish and not being a Montana native didn’t sit well with her. She made a point of it in her popular book, “When You and I Were Young, Whitefish.”

“It has long embarrassed me that I was born in Iowa,” she confided in her book. “That’s a perfectly good place to come from; my mother was born there, too, but for a person living in Montana, having old roots in the state carries prestige. I am expected to have been born here, instead of a little town called McGregor on the Mississippi River.”

Johnson was 7 when her family moved to Whitefish. Her father died a couple of years later, leaving her widowed mother to raise her. Johnson graduated from Whitefish High School in 1922.

In 1935 Johnson moved to New York and began a career in advertising and journalism, including a six-year stint as editor of “The Woman” magazine.

Johnson sold her first short story to The Saturday Evening Post in 1930 for $400. Other magazines snubbed her for years, but she was persistent and worked to refine her style.

She came back to Montana in 1950 and became news editor of the Whitefish Pilot. Her sense of humor and no-nonsense prose made for some interesting front-page stories, such as the June 22, 1951, edition that declared: “City Hall Has Birds in Belfry Again,” a spirited account of city officials trying to rid City Hall of pigeons.

By 1953 she had joined the journalism faculty at the University of Montana. In her teaching she emphasized “persistence, detail and precision.”

Parkinson’s disease and other illnesses slowed her writing later in life, but she was a frequent “letters to the editor” contributor to the Missoulian, and on her death in 1984, one observer called her letters “a smile from a stranger on a gray day.”

For more information about the Montana Cowboy Hall of Fame & Western Heritage Center, or for more details on the Montana Cowboy Hall of Fame inductees,  contact Christy Stensland by calling (406) 653-3800, emailing cstensland@montanacowboyfame.com, or visiting www.montanacowboyfame.org.

Features editor Lynnette Hintze may be reached at 758-4421 or by email at lhintze@dailyinterlake.com.