An Interview with John Clayton

By Jenny Shank, 6-08-07

In his new book, The Cowboy Girl: The Life of Caroline Lockhart, the Montana-based writer John Clayton delves into the long life of Caroline Lockhart, a journalist, novelist, publisher, and rancher who is as fascinating a Westerner as I’ve ever read about.  (I reviewed the book for NewWest here.) Clayton is currently on a book tour and in the coming week he’ll be doing signings and readings in Bozeman, Missoula, Hamilton, and Kalispell (see his website for details).  In an email interview, Clayton recently answered some questions about his research process, Lockhart’s use and embodiment of Western myths, and the more difficult aspects of her personality.

New West: In your Author’s Note, you write that you first heard about Caroline Lockhart when you came across her ranch in the Pryor Mountains.  How did your interest in her life evolve to wanting to write a book about her?

John Clayton: At first I was just trying to satisfy my curiosity. A bestselling novelist had lived on a gorgeous ranch near my home, and I’d never heard of her. Why?  Well, I thought, maybe she was a bad novelist. But then I read her books, and I really liked them! So I thought maybe she hadn’t really achieved all those other accomplishments, maybe she was more of a self-promoter than a do-er. But I found some ways in which she actually did more than she took credit for. So I thought maybe she was just not a nice person. But then I came across an archive, not available to previous researchers, of her early newspaper and magazine work. And that material was so warm and funny that I wanted to get to know her better.

NW: Had you been planning to write a biography one day before you discovered Lockhart as a subject?

JC: No, I wasn’t looking to write a biography at all. What I was looking for was a compelling narrative. I wanted to tell a nonfiction story that had the sweep and drive of great fiction. I wanted a hero who fought continual setbacks in trying to achieve a grand ambition. And as I learned about Lockhart, I realized that she had this lifelong dream of living like an old-time cowboy. Through her fiction, through her civic involvements in Cody, Wyoming, and then finally on her ranch, she was trying to live out the Old West despite the progress of the 20th century. It was the epic I was looking for, and only later did I realize the book would get shelved under Biography.

NW: Lockhart was interested in mythologizing the Old West and romanticizing her own background growing up on the Kansas frontier.  But on the other hand, she lived in the West and ran a ranch and saw it as it actually was--more full of neighbors squabbling over water rights than virtuous cowboys.  Do you think she knew that she was rendering the West mythic in her writing, or did she actually perceive the world inaccurately?

JC: To me that’s one of the fundamental questions behind the book. And if I don’t come out with a definitive answer for Lockhart, that’s because I believe this is a paradox that applies to any individual. Are we shaping myths or being shaped by them? When people today participate in gunfight reenactments, or “monkeywrenching,” or telemark skiing, or wearing a cowboy hat indoors, or any number of other “western” activities, including a whole bunch that I myself engage in--are we perceiving the world accurately? Or are we swayed by a mythology--one that we end up also contributing to and enhancing through our activities?

NW: Lockhart seems to have slipped through the cracks of history.  Can you account for why this happened?  Is it simply because her writing wasn’t of the same quality as some of her peers?

JC: Plenty of bad writers have achieved relative immortality because they caught the character of a time or a region--or what we would nostalgically prefer to remember as that character. Ever since their publication, the quality of Lockhart’s novels has been favorably compared to Zane Grey, B.M. Bower, and even Owen Wister. But where Grey and Wister summarized a nostalgic view of the Old West that we wish were true--and where Bower has been of use to feminists opposing that view--Lockhart is far more difficult to pin down.

Lockhart devoted a book each to sheepherding, dude ranching, dam building, and corporate mining. So it wasn’t all cattle tending. She had strong female characters, but wasn’t a traditional feminist. Like H.L. Mencken and Sinclair Lewis, she railed against the conformity of small-town thought, but after the 1920s that wasn’t much of an issue. So her work has not yet represented an ideology that someone has wanted to champion.

NW: Do you think Lockhart could have developed more as an artist if she hadn’t gotten sidetracked with her ranch, newspaper publishing, and her many lovers?

JC: She certainly believed so. Her diaries frequently used that very word, “sidetracked.” I guess I myself am less inclined to tie it up so neatly. There are plenty of great artists who also have consuming sidetracks, and plenty of very focused people who make bad art.

I guess I do think that with better guidance as well as more focus, she could have been more popular, more enduring, and probably even more satisfied as a novelist. But I also like to think that we are not defined only by our novels or paintings or arias. We are defined by the full arc of our lives, and Lockhart had a particularly fascinating one.

New West: Has there been any interest in getting more of Lockhart’s books back into print?

JC:“The Lady Doc” has already been reissued by a small publisher in Cody, Wordsworth Publishing. There’s also some growing attention to Lockhart in the academic community. Liza Nicholas, from Bozeman, has a chapter in Becoming Western on Lockhart’s role in the Buffalo Bill statue, and Victoria Lamont, in Canada, is doing some interesting analytic work on the novels. It would seem to me that as interest grows and costs decline, we might see more reissues--but I don’t know enough about the economics of publishing to say for sure.

New West: Given that Lockhart once hired a hit man to eliminate a neighbor, do you think she was mentally ill, or an irredeemably selfish or mean-spirited person?  You mentioned that it seemed like one of Lockhart’s previous biographers couldn’t forgive her for this.  How do you feel about Lockhart as a person?

JC: Lucille Patrick, a wonderful local historian in Cody, first encountered Lockhart by transcribing her diaries back in the 1970s. So Patrick knew Lockhart primarily through a heaping dose of self-pity in really bad handwriting, and a revelation about an attempted murder contract--so yeah, I don’t think she ever got over it. That colored her view of Lockhart’s entire life.

I was fortunate to first encounter Lockhart through her best novel, “The Fighting Shepherdess.” I also had this wonderful window into her early, bubbly journalism. And I first encountered the murder contract in Patrick’s book, which was such a prejudiced view that to be honest I didn’t really believe it. I was done researching and well into the writing when I went to double-check the source material on the murder contract and found that it was true.

The episode comes late enough in the book that I felt comfortable laying out the facts and letting the reader decide how to interpret them. And response varies--which I think is a good thing, because people always varied in their responses to Lockhart’s actions. In the case of the murder contract, you’re exactly right, some people attribute it to meanness, and others to a loosening grip on reality.

But I’d also like to raise another possibility, not to criticize your question, but to show how many important issues Lockhart’s story brings up. I look to the Old West itself--the very spirit and character and society that Lockhart so craved. What we love about frontier literature, frontier mythology, is that it reveals character through stories of people living beyond the reach of law enforcement, who have to figure out for themselves how to handle, for example, a rustler. (And this neighbor was indeed stealing her livestock.)

When a man encounters a rustler, the western mythology applauds the way he takes justice into his own hands. Clint Eastwood made several million dollars on this principle. When a woman does the same thing… do we have to call her mentally ill?

New West: You have recently been traveling around Wyoming and Montana on a book tour.  Have you met any people who remember Lockhart, had heard about her, or have read her books?  What has people’s response to this woman been like?

JC: I had a wonderful time in Cody, where I met several people who had known Lockhart, but whom I hadn’t had a chance to interview during my research. Two examples really show the gamut. One man had been her paperboy, and his bonus every quarter depended on having no complaints from the people he delivered to. But every quarter, Lockhart complained. No matter what he did, she complained--and never to him, always to the boss. He never got a bonus, and he’s still somewhat bitter about it.

On the other hand, one very elderly woman remembered her quite fondly. When Lockhart went to the hospital, on what turned out to be the last night of life, this woman snuck a bottle of homemade chokecherry wine into her room. And the two ladies sat there, drinking their illegal booze and telling stories of characters and horses they’d known. It’s a wonderful image, and a remarkably fitting way for this cowboy girl to have closed out her life.