With her compelling views of the nineteenth-century frontier, Dorothy Johnson is recognized as a distinctive voice in the male-dominated field of writers of the American West. Considered in the ranks of A. B. Guthrie, Willa Cather, Mari Sandoz, and Jack Schaefer, Johnson took the Western beyond the codified morality play of good versus evil or civilization versus wilderness to celebrate the complexities of the “ordinary people” who settled the West—often writing from the perspective of an Indian or a woman. Johnson's work, which resonates with the realism of Bret Harte and the ironic wit of Mark Twain, echoes the land that provides its setting. Her stories are told, according to Jack Schaefer in his foreword to her story collection Indian Country (1953), in “lean, stripped, strong prose . . . with a resolute economy of words.” Neither romanticizing the Indian nor glorifying the American pioneer, Johnson wrote of women, men, and...