The New Old West
The final chapter in my book Notes From Boomerang Creek is entitled “The New Old West” and begins with an essay on the American cowboy. There are also three essays that tell the story of Longmire Days—an annual July event in Buffalo, WY that I attended twice with Kit and a third time with my sister Kim. Fans of western mystery writer Craig Johnson’s award-winning Walt Longmire mystery series attend the event every year.
This week the 12th annual Longmire Days is in full swing from July 18-21, 2024. The multi-day festival is full of fun events where fans have an opportunity to meet the author of the New York Times best selling Walt Longmire Mysteries, Craig Johnson, as well as the cast of the beloved Netflix Series Longmire. My sidekick Kit and I aren’t going to make it this weekend, but I wanted to share the back story behind our first road trip to Buffalo almost a decade ago.
Longmire Days: July 2015
Wyoming’s Office of Tourism loves to share maps and travel information about their beautiful state. One advertisement features buffalo grazing in grassy fields with Yellowstone’s Old Faithful in the background and this message: Come.Behold. Roam Free. There is no telling how Wyoming will affect you. Just know that it will. Just back from an eight-day road trip from Boomerang Creek to Buffalo WY, I can say with absolute certainty, boy howdy, will it ever!
A few years ago, my longtime Wyoming gal pal Pat Fennell called from Los Angeles and said, “You’ve got to read western mystery writer Craig Johnson’s Longmire books.” My response was that mystery detective novels were just not my genre. But when A&E cable network began filming the Longmire series set in the small western town of Durant, Absaroka Country, WY (actually Buffalo in Johnson County), Kit and I began watching the show. Filmed in sites around northern New Mexico and intelligently scripted, we were hooked before the end of the first episode.
While watching Longmire during seasons two and three, we read all of Craig Johnson’s novels to date, starting with The Cold Dish—the first of his Longmire mysteries—and found ourselves captured by compelling human dramas, storms blowing down the Big Horn Mountains and a cast of characters that have become as real as family. The storylines are dynamite, filled with Johnson’s natural cowboy wisdom and writ large with his gift for intelligent, contemporary storytelling.
“To be a good writer,” Johnson tells his devoted international fans, “you must be a reader.” He avidly supports libraries and bookstores big and small across Wyoming and in cities that he visits on his wildly popular U.S. and European book tours. Just before we headed for our first Longmire Days, Johnson shared with his fans the news that the Longmire books as a series were up for the 2015 Will Rogers Medallion Award for Western Fiction. He went on to say that the nomination “truly tickles me in that ol’ Will has long been a great hero of mine, celebrating humor, intelligence and westerns in media.”
Johnson’s fans are not surprised by the nomination. When A&E made the incredibly wrong-headed decision to drop the Longmire TV series after three seasons, incredulous fans formed support posses in every state, Canada, Australia, and in Europe. Using social media, thousands of Longmire supporters went on Facebook and Tweeted their irritation with A&E’s decision. After four months of weekly stampedes of support for the series, Netflix came to the rescue and began filming season four.
After playing a role in the social media “#LongLiveLongmire” effort, Boomerang Creek’s Saltmire posse began making plans for a July road trip west to the fourth annual Longmire Days in Buffalo. Seconds after author Craig Johnson posted the event dates, I called the Buffalo Chamber of Commerce and began following the schedule of events taking shape. Four nights were secured at a Buffalo inn and a table reserved at the historic 1880 Occidental Hotel’s restaurant named after writer Owen Wister’s western classic, The Virginian—written while he was a guest at the hotel.
As our July 14 departure grew near, we packed our best western boots, hats, and jeans, as well as a boomerang for the TV actors and author to autograph and an audio recording of Johnson’s Longmire mystery Dry Bones. With the voice of Sheriff Walt Longmire and his friend Henry Standing Bear to keep us company, our 1,059-mile forever west road trip to Buffalo at last got underway.
A writer, like a sheriff, is the embodiment of a group of people and without their support both are in a tight spot.
- Craig Johnson, Another Man’s Moccasins
[Visit my blog next Friday for more on our adventures in Buffalo during Longmire Days past or read about them in Notes from Boomerang Creek. In the meantime, I’m reading Craig’s 20th Longmire mystery First Frost aloud to Kit every night at the Lodge. Boy howdy!]