Dorothy M. Johnson

It started with my finding that this month, Netflix was offering The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance.  Naturally, I had to watch it again, despite having seen it enough times to be able to recite the lines with the actors.  How can you not like a John Ford movie with Jimmy Stewart and John Wayne?  

Without a doubt, this is my favorite western, not only because it’s a great movie, but because one of the closing scenes speaks a great truth about history.  In one of the last scenes of the movie, Senator Stoddard (Jimmy Stewart) finally clears up a common misconception by telling the true story about the death of Liberty Valance.  The editor of the newspaper rips up the notes on the story and, deciding not to print, the truth says, “This is the West, sir. When the legend becomes fact, print the legend.”

We are all shaped by our history, but as the movie illustrates, we are also defined by what we think is our history.  

In any case, rewatching the movie got me to wondering about the source of the movie and about whether the book the movie was taken from was as good as the movie.  I can think of a couple of dozen great books that were turned into horrible movies, so I was hoping that this movie might lead me to a great book.

The movie comes from a story with the same name by the Montana author, Dorothy M. Johnson—someone I knew very little about, having only heard the name in passing because she was a prolific western author.  I checked out as many of her books as I could find from the Enema U library, purchasing the remainder from Abebooks.  

Dorothy Johnson turns out to be a very interesting author.  Originally from Iowa, she moved to Montana at the age of six when her father’s health would no longer allow him to farm.  The family moved to Rainbow Dam in Montana, then a tiny town so remote that drinking water had to be trucked in and so small that there was no school.  As Johnson later wrote about her life there:

“At six, you’re still close to the ground.  You can be fascinated by white pebbles the rain has washed and by the tumbling growth of prickly pear…. Trains went by our front window.”

 As soon as I read that, I was hooked—I had to read everything the woman had written.  Her editors never seemed to use that line to sell her books, but they should have.  Dorothy Johnson turned out to be a writer with a vivid imagination and a gift for description, I’ve enjoyed everything I’ve read and am currently trying to track down a couple of her more obscure works.

While Johnson graduated from the Montana State, a major influence on her writing came from living and working in New York City.  One of her books that I’d like to read is an unpublished manuscript titled “Unbombed”, an account of her life as a New York City air warden during World War II.  It is hard to pin down her writing style exactly, but many of her works remind me of the writing of Craig Johnson who writes the Longmire series.  

What was really surprising about her writing, however, is that the short stories bear almost no resemblance to any of the famous movies made from them.  In one slim volume, you can find The Hanging Tree, A Man Called Horse, and The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, all stories that were made into blockbuster western movies.

Take the story about Liberty Valance, for example.  It’s a good story, but it’s very short—less than two dozen pages that contain very little in common with John Ford’s masterpiece.  In the story, there is no Dutton Peabody, the crusading editor of the Shinbone Star.  For that matter, the town of Shinbone isn’t there either.  Neither are Link Appleyard, the inept sheriff, the struggle for statehood, a stagecoach, or the scene mentioned above.  And almost all of characters have different names, with the lone exception of Liberty Valance.  

The only name change that makes sense is that Tom Doniphon, played by John Wayne in the movie, was originally called Bert Barricune.  Somehow, I just can’t picture The Duke playing a character named Bert.

Similarly, in the short story titled A Man Called Horse, you won’t find much of the story made famous by Richard Harris.  That a short story barely twenty pages long was turned into a two-hour movie with two sequels tells us more about the imagination of the script writers than the quality of the original story.  Similarly, in the original short story called The Hanging Tree, you won’t find much of the role made famous by Gary Cooper.

That the movies are dramatically different from the Johnson’s stories is perfectly all right…I’m just a little shocked.  After seeing countless great books turned into cinematic garbage, it is a little surprising to see that talented script writers could take an acorn of a great story and nurture it into a mighty oak of a movie.  Both Johnson and the writers who produced the scripts should be commended.

There is at least one story by Dorothy Johnson that has not yet been made into a movie—and it should be.  Buffalo Woman is the story of a Sioux woman, from her childhood to her days as a grandmother joining her tribe’s dangerous winter trek into Canada in search of a refuge.  Of all of her stories, I think it is the best by far and probably would have already been made into a movie if the title role had been written for a man.

Dorothy Johnson lived long enough to see the movies made from her stories.  She returned to Missoula, Montana to teach creative writing in the same university where she had graduated.  Always proud of her independence, she left instructions that her gravestone should simply read, “Paid in Full”.  Someone decided she needed an editor, today the marble slab simply reads, “Paid”.