OWEN WISTER AWARD

 

  WWA presents the Owen Wister Award  

  each year for lifelong contributions to the field

  of western literature. Recent winners include

  John Jakes, Andrew J. Fenady, Douglas C.

  Jones, David Lavender, Max Evans and

  Richard S. Wheeler (pictured left).

 

  Honor Roll of Lifetime Achievement:

  Saddleman and Wister Award Winners

  By Dale L. Walker

       

  The Saddleman Award

        Sponsored by Levi Strauss Corporation of San Francisco, the Saddleman Award made its debut at the Fort Smith, Arkansas, convention of Western Writers of America, Inc., on June 22, 1961, with the award presented to Will Henry (Henry Wilson Allen).

        The polished bronze statuette of a cowboy (in Levi’s, of course) with a saddle slung over his right shoulder, a branding iron in his left hand -- was the work of Bay Area sculptor Spero Anargyros.

        Originally, the award was given to the author of the best book of the year (from the then five Spur categories: nonfiction, historical novel, novel, juvenile, and "short material") but in 1967 was designated for "Outstanding Contributions to the American West"-- a rule, since changed, that permitted the award to be given to non-writers such as John Wayne, John Ford, and Clint Eastwood.

        Levi Strauss sponsored the Saddleman for thirty years.

 

        The Saddleman honorees are:

      

Will Henry (1961)

        An immortal among Western novelists, Henry Wilson Allen, under his pennames Will Henry--the name he preferred, personally and professionally--and Clay Fisher, produced fifty novels between 1950 (the year of his No Survivors and, as Clay Fisher, Red Blizzard) and his death in 1991.

         A native of Kansas City, Allen drifted to California in 1932, began working as a writer at MGM, and with the advent of television wrote scripts for "Zane Grey Theater" and "Tales of Wells Fargo." Among feature films made from his books are The Tall Man, Journey to Shiloh, Mackenna’s Gold, Yellowstone Kelly, and Tom Horn. His best known books, most remaining in print today, are Santa Fe Passage, Who Rides With Wyatt, Alias Butch Cassidy, From Where the Sun Now Stands (his personal favorite), The Gates of the Mountains, and Chiricahua.

      

Jeanne Williams (1962)

        Also a Kansas native (born in Elkhart in 1930), Jeanne Williams is renowned as a gifted writer and a world traveler who knows no boundaries of time, place, or theme in her work. She has written children’s books, novels of what she calls "the Western experience as it affected women," and mainstream books set in medieval Wales, in England, Ireland, Russia, Norway, Mexico, and Brazil. A Lady Bought With Rifles, A Woman Clothed in Sun, the "Arizona Saga" (The Valiant Women, Harvest of Fury, and A Mating of Hawks), No Roof But Heaven, Oh, Susanna!, Harvest of Fury, The Cave Dreamers, and The Island Harp, are among her best-loved works.

        A WWA president and four-time Spur Award winner, Williams lives in Portal, Arizona.

      

Fred Grove (1963)

        Frederick Herridge "Fred" Grove’s father was a trail driver and rancher, his mother of Osage and Sioux descent. A five-time Spur Award recipient, Grove, born in Hominy, Oklahoma, in 1913, is a journalism graduate of the University of Oklahoma where he studied under W. Foster-Harris and Walter Campbell. A newspaperman in his home state and in Texas, and a Western writer since the 1950s, Grove is acclaimed for his novels of the Apache wars, the Civil War, and quarter horse racing, with such books as No Bugles, No Glory, Warrior Road, Comanche Captives, The Buffalo Runners, Match Race, The Great Horse Race, A Far Trumpet, and Red River Stage.

        He lives with his wife Lucille (they were married in 1937) in Tucson.

      

Mari Sandoz (1964)

        A distinctive stylist in such books as Crazy Horse: The Strange Man of the Oglalas, Winter Thunder, Love Song to the Plains, and Cheyenne Autumn, Nebraskan Mari Sandoz (1896-1966) also wrote short fiction and children’s stories, deftly mixing history and fiction in all her work. Much of her fiction centers on the Niobrara River and Sandhill country of western Nebraska. She wrote often of the Sioux and Cheyenne people and her "nonfiction novel" of Crazy Horse, and her depictions of Dull Knife and Little Wolf of the Cheyenne, are especially memorable.

        Sandoz worked as a schoolteacher, proofreader, and editor while working on her first book, Old Jules (1935), the story of her father’s life as a homesteader on the Nebraska frontier.

      

Benjamin Capps (1965)       

        "Unlike most of us," the late Will Henry once wrote, "Ben Capps has never written an unimportant novel." Time has proven the accuracy of this high praise for Henry’s friend and contemporary.

        Capps (1922-2002), born in Dundee, Texas, was an Army Air Force veteran of WW2, and an English and journalism professor before his first novel, Hanging at Comanche Wells, appeared in 1962. The Trail to Ogallala--still considered one of the supreme trail drive novels--followed in 1964. Sam Chance, A Woman of the People, and The White Man’s Road, are especially prized among Capps’s novels. The author also contributed two books (The Indians, The Great Chiefs) to the Time-Life "Old West" series.

      

Alvin M. Josephy, Jr. (1966)

        Journalist-editor-historian Alvin Josephy, a New Yorker (born in 1915) and a nephew of publisher Alfred Knopf, was encouraged to pursue a writing career by a family friend, the great newspaperman and critic, H.L. Mencken.

        Josephy has been an editor and writer for American Heritage and Time, served as the first chairman of the National Museum of the American Indian at the Smithsonian Institution, and has a life-long interest in the American West and advocacy for Indian nations.

        His books, gracefully written and painstakingly researched, include The Patriot Chiefs, The Nez Perce and the Opening of the Northwest, The Civil War in the West, and most recently, A Walk Toward Oregon.

      

S. Omar Barker (1967)

        The father of cowboy poets, a fine short story writer, a president and founding member of Western Writers of America, S. (Squire) Omar Barker (1894-1985) grew up in Beulah, New Mexico. He served as an engineer in France in WWI, as a school teacher, forest ranger, state legislator, and musician, and wrote prolifically, in pulp and slick magazines (regularly appearing in the Saturday Evening Post) from 1924 until his death.

        Barker’s single novel, Little World Apart, appeared in 1966; his poetry collection, Rawhide Rhymes (1968) was a pathmarker in the cowboy poetry movement, and he wrote many children’s books under the name "Dan Scott."

      

Nelson C. Nye (1968)

        In a brotherhood that includes Max Brand, Lauran Paine, and Louis L’Amour, Chicagoan Nelson Nye (1907-1997) was among the most prolific Western writers of all time. He produced something close to 125 books from the first, Two-Fisted Cowpoke, in 1936, until he retired from writing in 1971, having, he said, "just lost the bug." He also wrote under the name Clem Colt.

        Nye had no pretense about his Westerns, recalled that he once wrote three novels in sixty days and often wrote six a year. Even so, he was a best-selling Western writer for thirty years and wrote many "serious" books (such as Long Run, which won a Spur Award in 1960), and books on raising quarter horses.

        He was the WWA founder (with Thomas Thompson), its first president, and the first editor of The Roundup.

      

Frederick D. Glidden (1969)

        In a forty-year career as Western novelist, Frederick Dilley Glidden (1908-1975), best-known by his Luke Short penname, wrote contemporaneously with Louis L’Amour and Ernest Haycox. Glidden produced fifty novels published by some of America’s finest houses, Macmillan (And the Wind Blows Free), Houghton Mifflin (High Vermilion), Doubleday (Ride the Man Down), Random House (Rimrock), and Bantam (Paper Sheriff, Debt of Honor, many others).

        Born in Kewanee, Illinois, and educated at the University of Missouri, the author worked as a journalist and trapper before his first novel, The Feud at Single Shot, appeared in 1936.

        Glidden’s brother Jonathan, writing under the name Peter Dawson, was also a prolific Western writer in the 1940-60 era.

      

John Wayne (1970)       

        Born Marion Morrison in Winterset, Iowa, in 1907, he adopted his screen name in 1930 for the Raoul Walsh film The Big Trail. ("Duke" came from an Airedale dog Wayne had as a child growing up in Glendale, California). After a long apprenticeship in low-budget Westerns, director John Ford cast Wayne in Stagecoach (1939) and launched him on a forty-year career as one of Hollywood’s brightest stars and an American icon.

        Among his most popular films are the John Ford cavalry trilogy, Fort Apache (1948), She Wore a Yellow Ribbon (1949), and Rio Grande (1950), and The Alamo (1960), True Grit (1969; Best Actor Oscar), and The Shootist (1976).

        John Wayne died in 1979.

      

Thomas Thompson (1971)

        Co-founder (with Nelson Nye) of Western Writers of America and twice its president, Thomas "Tommy" Thompson (1913-1993) was a native Californian who worked as a merchant sailor, a nightclub entertainer, and a furniture salesman before becoming a fulltime freelance writer in 1940. His first novel, Range Drifter, appeared in 1949, his last, written after a twenty-one-year hiatus from print fiction, was Outlaw Valley (1987). He worked ten years as script writer, associate producer, and consultant on the "Bonanza" TV series, and wrote for "Wagon Train," "Restless Gun," "The Rifleman," "Gunsmoke" and other television productions. He also wrote the screenplays for Saddle the Wind (1958, with Rod Serling), and Cattle King (1963).

      

John Ford (1972)

        Called "Coach" by John Wayne and "Pappy" by other associates, John Ford (born John Martin Feeney in Maine in 1895), most honored of all movie directors, began his directing career in 1917. He soon became associated with Western movies, working at Universal and Fox studios with Harry Carey, Hoot Gibson, Tom Mix, and Buck Jones. In 1939 Ford directed Henry Fonda in Drums Along the Mohawk and Young Mr. Lincoln, and John Wayne in Stagecoach, and in 1940-41 won back-to-back Oscars for The Grapes of Wrath and How Green Was My Valley. His Westerns--My Darling Clementine (1946), the Wayne "Cavalry trilogy," The Searchers (1956), The Man Who Shot Liberty Valence (1962), Cheyenne Autumn (1964) and others, are considered the prime classics of the genre. He died in California in 1973.

      

Glenn Vernam (1973)       

        A Kansan with a 7th grade schoolhouse-on-the-prairie education, Glenn Vernam’s chock-full life was that of cowhand and rancher before and after he achieved success as a writer, beginning in 1928. His best-known books are Indian Hater, Pioneer Breed, Redmen in White Moccasins, The Talking Rifle, The Power of the Gods, and a nonfiction book, Man on Horseback (1969).

        Former WWA president Paul Bailey, a contemporary of Vernam’s, said of his friend, "From mile-and-sun-loppy Stetson, to a pair of legs that time had bowed to a horse’s middle, Glenn for us was the eternal figure of the authentic westerner..."

        Vernam died in 1980 at his home on Thunderbird Ranch near Joseph, Oregon.

      

W. Foster-Harris (1974)

        Teacher and mentor to such distinguished Western writers (and fellow Saddlemen and women) as Jeanne Williams, Bill Gulick, and Fred Grove, W. Foster-Harris (1903?-1978) was an Oklahoman, an educator, oilman, editor, and author. His fiction, most of it Western but with a mixture of oilfield stories, humor, and adventure tales, appeared in such pulp and slick magazines in the 1928-1950 era as Argosy, Short Stories, All Western, Walt Coburn’s Western Magazine, and Ace-High Western.

        Foster-Harris wrote few books but his The Look of the Old West (1955), a lively, illustrated description of the weapons, tack, wagons, clothing, and gear of the Western frontier, remains a classic standard work as does his The Basic Formulas of Fiction (1944).

      

Nellie Snyder Yost (1975)

        Although 4' 8" in height Nellie Yost was a person to look up to. She was born in 1905 in a sod house in the Nebraska Sandhills and published her first book, Pinnacle Jake, in 1951. Her biography of William F. Cody, Buffalo Bill: His Family, Friends, Fame, Failures, and Fortune (1979) remains a standard book on Cody, and such other titles as Boss Cowman, Medicine Lodge, and A Man as Big as the West, earned her awards from WWA and the Nebraska State Historical Society. She served as the first woman president of the latter organization and held the office for twenty years.

        Yost died in North Platte in 1992.

      

Dorothy M. Johnson (1976)

        An Iowan educated at the University of Montana, Missoula, Dorothy Marie Johnson (1905-1984), in addition to her many other accomplishments, wrote four stories ("The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance," "Lost Sister," "A Man Called Horse," and "The Hanging Tree") that are regarded as among the finest in the Western genre (as are the films made from three of them) and appear regularly in anthologies.

        Johnson was a book, magazine, and newspaper editor, a journalism professor, a novelist (Buffalo Woman, All the Buffalo Returning), author of such nonfiction books as Famous Lawmen of the Old West and The Bloody Bozeman, as well as short stories and young adult books.

      

Elmer Kelton (1977)       

        No Western writer, not even Zane Grey or Louis L’Amour, has better defined the genre, or been more respected and honored for his work than Elmer Kelton. A native Texan (born in Andrews County in 1926) who writes of Texas and Texans, Kelton is recipient of a record seven Spur Awards, several Western Heritage Awards, and three of his books--The Day the Cowboys Quit, The Time it Never Rained, and The Good Old Boys, are regarded as among the best Western novels ever written. The ultimate accolade from WWA was the vote by his WWA peers naming him the Best Western Writer of All Time.

        Kelton is author of fifty novels--the first, Hot Iron in 1956--several nonfiction books, and many short stories. He makes his home with his wife Ann in San Angelo, Texas.

      

A. B. Guthrie, Jr. (1978)

        Author of the masterpieces of Western fiction The Big Sky (1947), The Way West (Pulitzer Prize, 1950), These Thousand Hills (1956), and Fair Land, Fair Land (1982), Alfred Bertram Guthrie, Jr. (1901-1991) was a Indianan and another distinguished graduate of the University of Montana at Missoula. His twenty-year career as newspaperman and editor in Montana and Kentucky ended when he turned to fiction writing and college teaching in the mid-1940s. Guthrie also wrote screenplays (notably "Shane," for which he won an Academy Award, and "The Kentuckian"), mysteries, short stories, a book of animal fables for children (Once Upon a Pond), and a remarkable autobiography, The Blue Hen’s Chick (1965).

      

Lewis B. Patten (1979)

        A Denver native, Lewis Byford Patten (1915-1981) was a Navy veteran, a one-time auditor for the Colorado Department of Revenue, and a cattle rancher, whose writing career began in 1950 when he began selling stories to Mammoth Western and Zane Grey’s Western Magazine. In the thirty years that followed he wrote ninety Western novels for such publishers as Ace, Fawcett, Avon, Dell, Berkley, NAL, and Doubleday. His first novel was Massacre at White River (1952), his last, Track of the Hunter (1981). His Red Sabbath (1968), and A Killing in Kiowa (1972), earned Spur Awards and in 1989 The Best Western Stories of Lewis B. Patten, was published by Southern Illinois University Press.

      

C. L. Sonnichsen (1980)

        Born in Fonda, Iowa, Charles Leland Sonnichsen (1901-1991), earned a Ph.D. degree in English literature at Harvard and came to El Paso, Texas, in 1936 to teach at the Texas College of Mines and Metallurgy. He intended to stay briefly, then return to an Ivy League school to make a career. He remained at the "Mines" (later the University of Texas at El Paso) forty-one years, rose to become Dean of Liberal Arts, and fell in love with the Southwest and its history. His first book, Billy King’s Tombstone (1942) was followed by twenty-six others, including Roy Bean (1943), I’ll Die Before I’ll Run (1951), Tularosa (1960), Pass of the North (1968), Tucson (1982), and Pilgrim in the Sun (1988).

      

Louis L’Amour (1981)

        One of the most recognizable names among Western writers, perhaps the most recognizable, Louis Dearborn L’Amour (1908-1988) of Jamestown, North Dakota, wrote well over 100 novels in a career that began in 1950 and became the bestselling Western writer of all time. His Hondo (1953, based on the screenplay of his story, "The Gift of Cochise") and the John Wayne film made from it, secured his career. Among his many excellent novels are Sitka (1957), Shalako (1962), Down the Long Hills (1968), Where the Long Grass Blows (1976), The Shadow Riders (1982), and the sixteen books of the Sackett Saga.

        L’Amour was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1984.

      

Eve Ball (1982)

        Eve Ball (1890-1984), born Katherine Evelyn Ball in Clarksville, Tennessee, earned degrees in Kansas universities, taught in public schools in Kansas and Oklahoma, and taught English and Apache Culture at the college level. Her interest in the Apache people, and deep research into their culture, included nearly thirty years interviewing Apache elders and ranchers in southern New Mexico near the Mescalero Apache Reservation. Among her books, all of them important and influential, are Ma’am Jones of the Pecos (1969), In the Days of Victorio (1970), and Indeh: An Apache Odyssey (1980).

        Ball moved to Ruidoso, New Mexico, in 1949 and died there, beloved and much honored, on Christmas Eve, 1984.

      

Bill Gulick (1983)

        Grover C. "Bill" Gulick’s work has ranged from children’s books and novels, to outdoor dramas, screenplays and such nonfiction classics as Snake River Country and Chief Joseph Country: Land of the Nez Perce. At the University of Oklahoma in the mid-1930s Gulick studied under Walter S. Campbell (Stanley Vestal) and W. Foster-Harris, and wrote pulp fiction, later graduating to the supreme "slick" magazine of the 1940s and 50s, The Saturday Evening Post. His The Man From Texas serial was filmed, as was his Bend of the Snake (1952) and The Hallelujah Trail (1963).

        Born in Kansas City in 1916 and a long-time resident of Walla Walla, Washington, Gulick’s historical novels, such as The Land Beyond, They Came to a Valley, and the Northwest Destiny trilogy, are considered among the finest in Western literature.

        He makes his home in Walla Walla, Washington.

      

Dee Brown (1984)

        Author of some of the most celebrated nonfiction books of all Western literature--The Gentle Tamers: Women of the Old Wild West, The Galvanized Yankees, The Year of the Century, 1876, and Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee (1971), Dee Alexander Brown’s career has also included honored historical fiction. Beginning in 1942 with publication of his David Crockett novel, Wave High the Banner, he is author of Creek Mary’s Blood, Kildeer Mountain, Conspiracy of Knaves, and many others.

        Born in Louisiana in 1908, Brown was a WWII era Army veteran and served as an agriculture librarian at the University of Illinois. He resided in Little Rock, Arkansas, until his death on December 12, 2002.

      

Leon C. Metz (1985)

        Southwestern historian and biographer Leon Claire Metz, born in 1930 in Parkersburg, West Virginia, came to Texas as an Air Force staff sergeant, settling in El Paso in 1954. He worked at Standard Oil, and as a police officer and university library archivist while researching what became the first of his sixteen books, John Selman, Texas Gunfighter (1966). Metz is author of such histories as Fort Bliss and Border and his fascination with Western outlaws and lawmen, encouraged by his mentor, C. L. Sonnichsen, has continued to the present day. His books on these subjects are Pat Garrett, the Story of a Western Lawman, The Shooters, John Wesley Hardin, Dark Angel of Texas, and An Encyclopedia of Gunfighters, Outlaws, and Lawmen.

        Leon and his wife Cheryl live in El Paso, Texas.

      

Jack Schaefer (1986)

        Forever associated with his short story-into-short novel Shane (1954), Jack Warner Schaefer (1907-1991) was a native of Cleveland, Ohio, and a graduate of Oberlin College. He was a career newspaperman and editor with United Press International, the New Haven, Connecticut Journal Courier, the Baltimore Sun, Norfolk, Virginia Pilot, and other news and magazine outlets. He regularly wrote short fiction for Collier’s, Holiday, The Saturday Evening Post, and similar prestigious magazines.

        Among Schaefer’s novels are The Canyon (1953; the author’s own favorite), The Pioneers, Company of Cowards, The Old Ramon, and Monte Walsh. Eight collections of his short stories have been published, and nine nonfiction books, several for young readers.

      

Clint Eastwood (1987)

        Clint Eastwood, born in San Francisco in 1930, drifted to Hollywood in 1955, played bit parts in Universal films, and earned first recognition as the character Rowdy Yates in the "Rawhide" TV series (1959-66). Following the end of the series, he appeared as “The Man With No Name" in three of Sergio Leone’s enormously popular "spaghetti Westerns," and returned from Italy as a marketable star. Celebrated as "Dirty Harry" Callahan and smiled at for "Paint Your Wagon" (1969), Eastwood is a versatile actor-director. His Western movies include Two Mules for Sister Sara (1970), High Plains Drifter (1973), The Outlaw Josie Wales (1976), Pale Rider (1985), and The Unforgiven (1992).

      

Don Worcester (1988)

        Historian-novelist Donald E. Worcester, born in Tempe, Arizona, in 1915, spent his youth as a cowboy in the desert country until 1936 when he took his professor-mother’s advice to get an education. He graduated from Bard College, then, in 1947 earned a Ph.D. at the University of California and began his career as history professor at the University of Florida and later at Texas Christian University.

        Worcester’s historical books, all greatly respected, include The Apaches: Eagles of the Southwest, The Chisholm Trail, The Spanish Mustang, and The Texas Longhorns. Among his novels: The War in the Nueces Strip, Brazos Scout, and Gone to Texas.

      

Wayne D. Overholser (1989)

        A member of an elite group of Western writers with 100 or more books to their credit (Max Brand, Louis L’Amour, Nelson Nye, Lauran Paine, and a few others), Washington-born Wayne D. Overholser (1906-1996), began writing for pulp magazines in 1936, and rose to eminence in the field after publication of his first novel, Buckaroo’s Code (1947).

        With degrees from the universities of Montana and Oregon, Overholser became a public school teacher and principal in Oregon in the years 1926-1945, thereafter and until his death working as a professional freelance writer. In a writing life of sixty years he also produced upwards of 400 short stories under his own and such pennames as Dan J. Stevens, Joseph Wayne, John S. Daniels, and Lee Leighton.

      

Max Evans (1990)

        Cowboy, rancher, trapper, prospector, artist, and for over forty years an eminent figure in Southwestern letters, Max Evans was born in Ropes, Texas, in 1925. He served in the infantry in Europe in WWII and published his first book, Long John Dunn of Taos, in 1959. Evans’s The Rounders (1965) and the film made from it, introduced him to Hollywood and associations with such directors as Sam Peckinpah, about whom Evans has written two seminal books. The author’s The Hi-Lo Country, 1961, also became a beautifully rendered movie in 1998.

        Evans is also author of The Mountain of Gold (1965), Bobby Jack Smith, You Dirty Coward! (1974), Bluefeather Fellini (1993), Faraway Blue (1999), and most recently Madam Millie (2002), a no-holds-barred biography of a Silver City, New Mexico, bordello keeper. He is co-editor of a book of short stories written by ranchwomen and cowboys, Hot Biscuits, (2002) that he worked for twenty years to collect.

        Max Evans lives with his wife Pat in Albuquerque, New Mexico.

       

The Owen Wister Award

       

        With Levi Strauss’ decision to retire the Saddleman Award after the 1990 WWA convention, a committee chaired by novelist Win Blevins originated plans for a new award for "Lifetime Achievement" in Western history and literature. Named for the "father" (1860-1938) of the Western story and author of The Virginian (1902), the Owen Wister Award was adopted by the Executive Board of Western Writers in time for the Oklahoma City convention in 1991. Glendon Swarthout was a popular choice to be first recipient of the new Award.

        The first four recipients of the Wister received a stylized engraved bronze figure of a cowboy until, at the Billings, Montana, convention in 1994, Texas sculptor Robert H. Duffie was commissioned to design an original bronze work to be given each past and future Wister awardee. His magnificent buffalo design continues to symbolize WWA’s highest honor.

        No award was given in 1998.

        The Owen Wister honorees are:

      

Glendon Swarthout (1991)

        A literary stylist of the first order, Glendon Fred Swarthout (1918-1992), born in Pinckney, Michigan, earned a doctorate at Michigan State University and served as a professor there and at the University of Maryland after combat service in WWII. His first Western novel, They Came to Cordura (1958) was adapted for a memorable film starring Gary Cooper. Following, between non-Western novels and children’s books in collaboration with his wife Kathryn, were such novels as The Cadillac Cowboys, Bless the Beasts and Children, The Tin Lizzie Troop, The Shootist (1975, John Wayne’s last film), The Old Colts, and The Homesman.

        Kathryn Swarthout and the couple’s son, Miles Hood Swarthout, are active members of WWA.

      

Tom Lea (1992)

        Son of a mayor of El Paso, Texas, Tom Lea (1907-2001) earned success as a Southwestern artist before turning to fiction. He attended the Chicago Art Institute and worked as an art teacher there before becoming a combat correspondent for Life in WWII Pacific campaigns. After returning to his hometown he wrote and illustrated his first novel, The Brave Bulls (1949). The Wonderful Country followed in 1952 (adapted into a film starring Robert Mitchum), The Primal Yoke in 1960 and The Hands of Cantú in 1964.

        Lea’s two-volume history of The King Ranch (1957) remains the standard work, and his war books, Grizzly from the Coral Sea and Peleliu Landing, are prized collector’s items.

        A sumptuous collection of his paintings, The Art of Tom Lea, was published in 1989.

      

Douglas C. Jones (1993)

        Like Max Evans and Tom Lea, Douglas Clyde Jones, born in 1924 in Winslow, Arkansas, was a gifted artist in paint and print, and in common with the others, served in combat in WWII. Jones, in fact, made a career of the Army (1943-1968) before turning to fiction in 1976 with publication of his The Court-Martial of George Armstrong Custer. This best-seller, based on the premise that Custer survived the Little Bighorn battle, was followed by such memorable novels as Arrest Sitting Bull, A Creek Called Wounded Knee, Winding Stair, Elkhorn Tavern, Gone the Dream and Dancing, Come Winter, and others.

        Jones’s single nonfiction book was The Treaty of Medicine Lodge (1966). He died in 1998.

      

Robert M. Utley (1994)

        Among the greatest of Western historians, Robert M. Utley (born in Arkansas in 1929) is a graduate of Purdue with an M.A. from Indiana University and served twenty-five years with the National Park Service. A world authority on the Plains Indians, the Lincoln County War and its participants, and the Army of the West, he is author of a dozen celebrated books and countless magazine and journal studies. His works include The Last Days of the Sioux Nation, Frontiersmen in Blue, High Noon in Lincoln, Cavalier in Buckskin, Billy the Kid: A Short and Violent Life, The Lance and the Shield, A Life Wild and Perilous: Mountain Men and the Paths to the Pacific, and a history of the first century of the Texas Rangers, Lone Star Justice.

        Robert Utley and his wife Melody Webb live in Georgetown, Texas.

      

Gordon D. Shirreffs (1995)

        A ground-breaker in Western fiction, Gordon Donald Shirreffs (1914-1996) began writing for pulp magazines while stationed at Fort Bliss, Texas, in 1940. A Chicago native, and an infantry captain in WWII, even his early stories were inbued with realistic sexuality and treatment of violence. He wrote often of Apaches, Mexico, and the Mexican border country--Rio Bravo, Massacre Creek, The Border Guidon, Judas Gun, and Showdown in Sonora, among many others. His masterwork is his Quint Kershaw trilogy: The Untamed Breed (1981), Bold Legend (1982), and Glorieta Pass (1984), the first of the three acclaimed as among the finest of mountain man novels, comparable to those by Vardis Fisher, Bill Gulick, and A. B. Guthrie.

      

David Lavender (1996)

        When David Lavender (born in Telluride, Colorado, in 1910) graduated from Princeton in 1931, he intended following a law career. Then, after a year at Stanford, he decided to prospect for gold in Ouray, Colorado, soon after took over his family’s ranch during the Depression, and when it failed, moved to Ojai, California, to make a living as a writer and teacher.

        His first book, the autobiographical One Man’s West appeared in 1943, to be followed by The Big Divide, Bent’s Fort (1954--the first nonfiction book to receive a Spur Award), Land of Giants, The Fist in the Wilderness, beyond argument the best book on the Lewis and Clark expedition, The Way to the Western Sea, and Let Me Be Free: The Nez Perce Tragedy (1992).

      

José Cisneros (1997)

        John O. West, José Cisneros’s biographer, once wrote that the life of this "gentle giant" "makes Horatio Alger look like an underachiever." Born in Durango, Mexico, in 1910, the year of the Great Revolution, Cisneros and his family emigrated to Cuidad Juárez and later to its sister city, El Paso, Texas, where José became a naturalized citizen. His artistic gift was evident even as a teenager, and his works--in particular his pen-and-inks of horses and horsemen--have appeared in hundreds of books and magazines.

        Long associated with the master book designer Carl Hertzog, and with such authors as J. Frank Dobie, C. L. Sonnichsen, J. Evetts Haley, and Carlos Castañeda, Cisneros is himself author of such illustrated books as Riders of the Border, Faces of the Borderlands, and Riders Across the Centuries.

      

Norman Zollinger (1999)

        Fifty-seven years old when his first novel (Riders to Cibola) appeared in 1978, Norman Zollinger (1921-2000) rose quickly to a mastery of the historical novel. All his books are critically hailed as works of literature: Corey Lane, Passage to Quivera, A Rage in Chapadera, Not of War Only, Chapultepec, Meridian: A Novel of Kit Carson’s West, and his last, posthumously published, The Road to Santa Fe.

        Born of Swiss parentage in the east Chicago suburbs, Zollinger attended college in Iowa, joined the Air Force in WWII and flew fifty-one combat bombardment missions over Germany, Austria, Romania, Hungary, and Czechoslovakia--five to the oil fields at Ploesti. He was a plastics company executive before moving to New Mexico in the early 1970s.

      

Dale L. Walker (2000)

        Born in Decatur, Illinois, in 1935, the son of a career Army sergeant, Dale Lee Walker moved to El Paso, Texas, in 1959 after four years in the Navy, and in 1962 graduated from the University of Texas at El Paso with a journalism degree.

        He is or has been a newspaper book page editor, book and magazine writer, director of a university press, magazine editor, book reviewer, book columnist, anthologist, and consulting editor for Tor/Forge Books of New York.

        He is author of seventeen biographies, literary studies (several on Jack London’s life and work) and Western historical works, most recently: Legends and Lies (1997), The Boys of ’98 (1998), Bear Flag Rising (1999), Pacific Destiny (2000), and Eldorado: The California Gold Rush (2003).

        Dale L. Walker and his wife Alice live in El Paso, Texas.

      

Richard S. Wheeler (2001)

        Master of the Western historical novel and four-time Spur Award winner, Richard Shaw Wheeler spent a decade as a newspaperman in the West, and many years as a Western book editor before his first novel, Bushwack, was published in 1978. His fifty-one books include several successful series (the "Barnaby Skye" novels number thirteen titles since 1989). He is author of such historicals as The Buffalo Commons, Aftershocks, and The Fields of Eden; the biographical novels Masterson, Eclipse (Lewis and Clark), and Exile (Thomas Francis Meagher); novels set in gold and silver mine camps: Cashbox, Goldfield, Sierra, Second Lives, and Sun Mountain, and the non-traditional Westerns Richard Lamb, Dodging Red Cloud, Winter Grass, and Where the River Runs.

        Born in Milwaukee in 1935, Wheeler makes his home in Livingston, Montana.

      

David Dary (2002)

        Television news editor and director, journalism teacher and administrator, and historian, David Dary (born in Manhattan, Kansas, in 1934) won acclaim for his The Buffalo Book (1974) and the acclaim has sustained for each Dary book, each a model of clarity and style, that has followed: three books on Kansas history, Cowboy Culture, Entrepreneurs of the Old West, Seeking Pleasure in the Old West, Red Blood and Black Ink, and The Santa Fe Trail.

        Dary has worked as an editor for CBS and NBC, served as journalism professor at the University of Kansas for twenty years, and as director of the H. H. Herbert School of Journalism at the University of Oklahoma for the ten years before his retirement from academic life in 2000.

            He lives with his wife Sue in Norman, Oklahoma.

 

Don Coldsmith (2003)

        Don Coldsmith was born in Iola, Kansas in 1926, grew up near the Oklahoma border, in Coffeyville, and is descended from true pioneers.  He has written historical novels, Tallgrass and South Wind, which expand the documented history of his Kansas home, and he has also delved deep into the prehistory and archaeology of his native plains and state in his monumental Spanish Bit Saga.

        The Trail of the Spanish Bit, the first novel of Don’s most popular series, originated when he discovered an old bit in a bin in an Oklahoma antique shop.  The Spanish Bit Saga encompasses tales of numerous tribes, real and fictional: Pawnee, Comanche, Osage, Kaw or Cenzas, Lakota, Head Splitters, Horn People, and forest and mountain bands.  It begins with the coming of the white man and covers centuries of struggle against white pressures, Spanish, French, Mexican, Texan, and United States.  Other titles are Walks in the Sun, Bride of the Morning Star, Moon Thunder, Buffalo Medicine, Medicine Hat, and Track of the Bear. 

      In addition to writing, he has been grain inspector, disc jockey, clergyman, taxidermist, mail-order gunsmith, baritone in a barbershop quartet, family practice physician, rancher, lecturer, columnist, and college professor.  In 1958, Don received his doctorate in medicine in surgery from the University of Kansas Medical Center.  He and his wife, Edna, make their home in Emporia, Kansas, where he practiced family medicine for thirty years.

       

Matt Braun (2004)

      Matt Braun has been honored with the National Festival of the West Cowboy Spirit Award and a Spur Award for The Kincaids and Dakota.  His novel, Black Fox, was adapted for a six-hour CBS mini-series.  Sam Elliott and Katherine Ross starred in the adaptation of Matt’s One Last Town, which TNT renamed You Know My Name. 

        Matt Braun resides today in the hills of western Connecticut with his wife, Bettiane, far from the open spaces of Oklahoma and Texas.

       

Judy Alter (2005)

        Judy Alter is a past president of Western Writers of America, former secretary-treasurer of the Texas Institute of Letters and has been director of TCU Press since 1987. Her 1987 novel, Mattie (Doubleday), the story of an early-day Nebraska woman doctor, won a Spur Award from WWA, Luke and the Van Zandt County War, was named Best Juvenile Novel of 1984 by the Texas Institute of Letters, and two short stories, "Fool Girl" and “Sue Ellen Learns to Dance” have won Western Heritage Wrangler Awards from the National Cowboy and Western Heritage Museum “Sue Ellen Learns to Dance” also won a Spur Award from Western Writers of America.

        She writes novels for adults including Sundance, Butch and Me, Cherokee Rose, Jessie, based on the life of Jessie Benton Frémont, wife of explorer/soldier/statesman John Charles Frémont, and her book, Libbie, which reconstructs the life of Elizabeth Bacon Custer, wife of General George Armstrong Custer. She also writes for young adult readers including such titles as Sam Houston Is My Hero, Callie Shaw, Stableboy, Maggie and a Horse Named Devildust, Maggie and the Search for Devildust, Maggie and Devildust--Ridin' High, After Pa Was Shot, and Katie and the Recluse, is the author of a critical biography of Texas novelist Elmer Kelton (published by the University of North Texas Press, 1989) and has written several nonfiction "first books" for children.

        Judy makes her home in Fort Worth, Texas.

       

Andrew J. Fenady (2006)

      Andrew J. Fenady, is an extraordinary Western novelist, motion picture screenwriter and producer, song lyricist, stage play writer, and creator of network television “Movie of the Week” features and TV series, including the classic “The Rebel.”

        He created “The Rebel,” produced Branded, and wrote screenplays, including John Wayne's Chisum, plus Broken Sabre and Ride Beyond Vengeance. Fenady has written thirteen novels, including Claws of the Eagle: A Novel of Tom Horn and the Apache Kid (Walker & Company), Runaways (Walker & Company and Putnam Berkley), Summer of Jack London (Walker & Company and Berkley) and There Came a Stranger (Tor-Forge).   Dorchester Publishing (Leisure Books) has published Double Eagle, Riders To Moon Rock, a reprint of The Rebel: Johnny Yuma, and Big Ike.

        He also wrote the lyrics to several theme songs, including “Johnny Yuma Was a Rebel” for the television show, “You Can’t Ever Go Home Again” for Ride Beyond Vengeance and “The Ballad of John Chisum” for Chisum, and “See the Man With Bogart’s Face” and “Looking At You” for The Man With Bogart’s Face.

        Fenady lives in Los Angeles, California, with his wife Mary Ann.

       

John Jakes (2007)

    “Reading’s the means by which the lowest man can lift himself from a state of ignorance,” a London printer informs Phillipe Charboneau in The Bastard. “You see how popular my little loan library up front has become. The masses are hungry for words and more words.”

    In 1974, the masses hungered for the words of John Jakes. Three decades later, that hunger hasn’t been appeased although he has written some sixty books and 200 short stories.

    When Pyramid Books commissioned Jakes to write a five-volume saga of an American family, christened The American Bicentennial Series, no one could foresee its impact on publishing, historical fiction, or Jake’s career. Yet The Bastard, the first book in a series that grew to eight volumes and became known as The Kent Family Chronicles, became a phenomenal bestseller. A syndicated TV movie followed, and when the next three installments (The Rebels, The Seekers, and The Furies) were published in 1975, Jakes became the first writer to score three books on The New York Times bestseller list in one year. The Kent Family Chronicles have seen more than 55 million copies in print, while Jakes’ follow-up series, the North and South trilogy--North and South, the first book in the series, came out in 1982, introducing readers to the Mains of South Carolina and the Hazards of Pennsylvania. The novel streaked to No. 1, as did the next two installments, Love and War in 1984 and Heaven and Hell in 1987--sold 10 million copies, and ABC scored top ratings for the miniseries version of those three bestsellers.

      He wrote for the pulps: Ranch Romances, Max Brand’s Western, .44 Western and 10-Story Western — and sold his first Western novel to Ace Books, which published Wear A Fast Gun in 1956. Other historical novels followed: Homeland, American Dreams, On Secret Service, Charleston, Savannah: Or, A Gift For Mr. Lincoln, and, The Gods of Newport. Short Western fiction also appeared: “Little Phil and the Daughter of Joy” (under the pseudonym John Lee Gray), “Shootout at White Pass,” “Dutchman,” “Carolina Warpath” and, in 1994, a gem of a tale called “Manitow and Ironhand.”

      John Jakes currently divides his time between homes in South Carolina and Florida.

 

Tony Hillerman (2008)

Tony Hillerman retired from the University of New Mexico in 1987 and kept writing successful, best-selling mysteries: Talking God, Coyote Waits, Sacred Clowns, The Fallen Man, The First Eagle, Hunting Badger, The Wailing Wind, The Sinister Pig, Skeleton Man. Mystery Writers of America presented him the Grand Master Award in 1991, and Hillerman took his second Spur in 2007 for The Shape Shifter.

“Growing up with Indians in Oklahoma, I knew how they are,” he says. “In the first place, you don’t want them thinking you think they’re absurd or odd. You let them know you’re really interested, as I really was, and before long, I could ask them about taboos, holy people. I got acquainted with a couple of archaeologists, and the basement of the [university] library had rows and rows of papers of sociologists, anthropologists, writings about all sorts of stuff, describing sweat lodges, various types of initiations, taboos, and inhibitions. I spent many a night and many hours reading those, and then I’d ask the Navajos about it.

“I got called on mistakes in my novels, like when I’d mention a guy getting off interstate so-and-so and turning right to go to Gallup when he should have turned left, stuff like that, but the religious stuff, I was very careful with that and the Hopis, too, and the Zunis, and anybody else I ran across.”

He doesn’t write from an outline, “except in my mind,” he says, but comes up with a basic idea — including a crime, of course — and then begins an intensive research phase, talking to Navajos, archaeologists, anthropologists, reading, reading, and reading more.

His favorite part of writing?

“It’s when you’ve worked your way through a problem and you turn on the computer and start writing and the words just flow out, and, sure enough, you know it’s going to work. I like that.”

And he offers this advice for any writer just starting out.

“I did a book-signing years back in California with (Elmore Leonard), and he owed his success to cutting out all the stuff nobody reads. But me? That’s what I write, so I think it’s great to set your story in some spectacular country where, when there’s not much happening with your characters or plot, you can always write about what your characters are seeing.”

In between The Blessing Way and The Shape Shifter, he has written essays, articles, introductions, even a children’s book (The Boy Who Made Dragonfly: A Zuni Myth) and a memoir (Seldom Disappointed), not to mention a non-Southwestern mystery, Finding Moon. A collection of his nonfiction, The Great Taos Bank Robber, was first published in 1973. He has seen his works brought to the screen, such as on PBS’ Mystery! series, still consistently hits the best-seller lists, and is toying with a few nonfiction assignments and maybe another Leaphorn-Chee mystery.

All in all, the past eighty-two years have been a wonderful run.

“They’ve been far better than anyone deserves,” he writes in his memoir, “two thirds of them brightened with Marie ... notable for fortunate outcomes and rare disappointments.”

Written by Johnny D. Boggs

 

Elmore Leonard (2009)

Of his writing habits, Leonard says, “I write every day when I’m writing a novel.  Some weekends, a few hours every day.  I want to stay with the story.  If I miss a day or two, it’s difficult to get the rhythm of it.  I’m lucky to get four clean pages a day.  They’re clean until the next day.  I don’t look at this as work.  It’s not a test of any kind, any kind of proof of what I can do.  I have a good time.”

            He prefers to write in third person as opposed to first person. “I don’t want to be stuck with one character’s viewpoint because there are too many viewpoints.  And, of course, the bad guys’ viewpoints are a lot more fun.” 

            In 1982 Leonard published “The Tonto Woman,” a Western short story in Roundup--An anthology of Great Stories by the Western Writers of America, edited by Stephen Overholser. 

The story revolves around a white woman who was kidnapped from her home by Apaches, then traded to Mojave Indians.  She is found by her husband after eleven years, but he decides she is not fit to mix with society, so he keeps her in a shack in the desert.  She is befriended by a Mexican, and ultimately learns she has control over her own life. 

            “The Tonto Woman” was made into a short film in 2008.  It was directed by Daniel Barber, and the screenplay was written by Joe Shrapnel.  The film was nominated for an Oscar in the short film category, and is Elmore Leonard’s most recent Western to grace the movie screen.

            Asked what keeps him going after over fifty years of writing professionally, Leonard says, “It’s [writing] the most satisfying thing I can imagine doing, and I’m still trying to make it better.”

            His crime novels have defined an era.  Works in crime fiction, such as Get Shorty, Jackie Brown, and Out of Sight, have made Elmore Leonard a household name.  But his Westerns are the foundation of an amazing career. They have helped shape a generation and preserve a genre.  That is a legacy of which any writer could be proud.

             Written by Larry D. Sweazy

---

        For their help in ferreting out information for these brief sketches, special thanks to Steven Law, the late Richard C. House, Jeanne Williams, Richard Wheeler, James Crutchfield, Judy Alter, Cotton Smith, Rita M. Cleary, Johnny D. Boggs, and Candy Moulton, and on the web, Internet Movie Database, Inc., www.abe.com, and www.amazon.com.

Dale L. Walker, himself a Wister Award winner, is  past president of Western Writers of America, the author of hundreds of newspaper and magazine articles and numerous books including such histories as Legends & Lies, The Boys of ’98, Bear Flag Rising, Pacific Destiny, Eldorado, and the WWA Anthology Westward, all published by Forge.