Books: Campfire Girl

THE HANGING TREE (272 pp.)—Dorothy Johnson—Ballantine ($3.50).

Dorothy Johnson, a 51-year-old assistant professor* who looks as if she may have just talked to the ladies at the opening of a church bazaar, writes with authentic familiarity about the men who opened the American West. When the dude reader is informed by the publisher that “there is something about a Colt .44 beside the typewriter that inspires me,” or that Miss Johnson won a spur from that loose-lipped but hard-writing outfit called the Western Writers of America, Inc., he may well suspect that he is in for a good fat slice from the gun-smoked hams of cowboy fiction—Zane Grey, William MacLeod Raine, or Clarence E. (Hopalong Cassidy) Mulford.

The dude reader will be wrong. Dorothy Johnson pays her respects to the strict conventions of western fiction (by now as stylized as a Flathead bluejay dance), but the best of these ten tales of a lost frontier echo Bret Harte or Mark Twain in the West. There is the sentimentality and pawky humor by which all oldtimers of all frontiers recall the brave days. Storyteller Johnson’s memories are authentic; she grew up in Whitefish, Mont. with wide ears for tall tales. Her characters are primitive and romantic, as they probably were in life, and she has a surprising quality of humor. One of her best stories, I Woke Up Wicked, is the tale of an unheroic cowboy who inadvertently becomes a member of a gang of badmen called the Rough String. Up to the last line, “I went home to Pennsylvania and took up plowing,” she sustains perfectly the self-derisory note of the campfire raconteur. Her shorter stories are her best, and in tales of Indian, settler, miner and badman, she subtly suggests the tragedy of collision between aborigine and invader, and sometimes the more complicated tragedy of their collusion. Such a story is Lost Sister, a tale of a captured white child who became a squaw and sacrificed her life to save her half-Indian son from the U.S. Cavalry. Only in the one long story of the collection, The Hanging Tree, does the anticipatory whir of film cameras rise above the true sounds of prairie and frontier town.

There is a day in most men’s lives when they give up reading cowboy stories because they cannot believe them any more. Dorothy Johnson’s tales offer a chance to turn back the calendar with a good conscience.

* Of journalism at Montana State University.