Johnson County, WY: Books Inspired by America’s Premier Western Literary Destination
If you know Walt Longmire, you already know Johnson County, Wyoming — you just may not realize it yet. Craig Johnson’s beloved neo-Western Longmire mystery series, which became a hit Netflix drama, is rooted in the real landscape, people, and spirit of Buffalo, Wyoming, and the surrounding county.
Johnson is only the latest in a long line of writers captivated by this corner of the American West. More than a century before, Owen Wister spent time in Buffalo, filling notebooks at the Occidental Hotel, befriending local cowboys, and witnessing history unfold — research that would produce The Virginian (1902), the novel that invented the Western genre as we know it.
A few decades after that, Ernest Hemingway spent time in Johnson County before finishing A Farewell to Arms.
Today, visitors to Johnson County can walk the same Main Street and stay in the same historic hotel, stepping directly into scenes from both Wister’s and Johnson’s pages. This is Buffalo Wyoming literary tourism at its most immersive: come for the stories, stay for the scenery.
Craig Johnson’s Longmire: Modern Western Literary Legacy
In 2004, Penguin Publishing Group published the first novel by Craig Johnson about the sheriff of the least-populated county in the least-populated state. Although the world of Walt Longmire is set in the fictional town of Durant in fictional Absaroka County in northern Wyoming, the inspiration is known to be Buffalo and Johnson County.
Johnson’s novels make many references to actual locations such as the Busy Bee Cafe and the Bighorn Mountains. He also blends some elements from the real world — the Historic Occidental Hotel & Saloon and the county’s Basque culture — into fictional Longmire settings such as the Euskadi Hotel.
The series’ popularity reached new heights in 2012, when the Longmire television series debuted on A&E. It was the highest-rated original drama series on the network but was not renewed after three seasons. Netflix picked up the series and aired it for three more seasons.
While the TV series is inactive, Johnson continues to produce novels and short stories in the book series. The 29th Longmire publication and 22nd novel, The Brothers McKay, was released in May of 2026.
Johnson has received plenty of recognition for his writing over the years. Two of his books have won Spur Awards from the Western Writers of America and another was the Mountain & Plains Book of the Year. He also has earned Publishers Weekly Best Book of the Year and Library Journal’s Best Mystery of the Year.
In 20025, he received the Owen Wister Award for Lifetime Contributions to Western Literature from the Western Writers of America — a fitting honor linking two authors separated by more than a century but united by the same piece of Wyoming earth.
Johnson’s 22nd novel, The Brothers McKay, was released in May 2026, and the longmire craig johnson book series shows no sign of slowing.
Real-Life Places in the Longmire Series
The genius of Craig Johnson’s Absaroka County in the Longmire series is that it feels real — because it largely is. Literary tourists who visit Buffalo, Wyoming will discover that many of the settings Walt Longmire patrols on the page and screen have real-world counterparts waiting to be explored. The Netflix adaptation brought these Buffalo Wyoming literary locations to a worldwide audience; visiting them in person makes the fictional world tangible in ways no screen can replicate.
Absaroka County Courthouse & Downtown Buffalo
The Johnson County Courthouse in downtown Buffalo serves as the architectural inspiration for Walt Longmire’s fictional Absaroka County seat. Johnson wove real Buffalo buildings — their brick facades, their Western-frontier scale — into the authentic backdrops of his law-enforcement procedurals, making Longmire’s Absaroka County feel like a place you could explore rather than simply read about.
Longmire’s office in the old Carnegie Library building would be the current location of the Jim Gatchell Memorial Museum next to the county courthouse.
Occidental Row in Longmire
While Longmire readers will be very familiar with the Busy Bee as a favorite dining spot of the sheriff, the Occidental Hotel & Saloon appears in his books as the Basque-named Euskadi Hotel.
Johnson has said he didn’t name Buffalo directly so he could take some creative liberties with the settings.
Sheridan and Regional Johnson County Landmarks
Johnson extends his fictional Absaroka County across the broader region, drawing on landmarks throughout Johnson County and the Bighorn Mountains. The rhythm of small-town Wyoming life gives Johnson’s setting its unmistakable authenticity and has made real-world road trips through the area a popular pursuit among devoted readers.
Literary Institutions & Longmire Days Festival
The annual Longmire Days festival draws fans from across the country, transforming the small city into a gathering point for lovers of place-rooted fiction. The four-day event features a number of opportunities to interact with Johnson and the actors from the show in the settings that inspired the stories.
Owen Wister’s 1880s Buffalo Research & “The Virginian”
Before Craig Johnson gave the world Walt Longmire, another Eastern writer arrived in Johnson County and was transformed by what he found.
Owen Wister made his first trip to Wyoming in 1885, and over the following decade he returned repeatedly to the West, filling notebooks with observations of cowboy life, range justice, and the raw drama of the frontier. His base of operations was the Occidental Hotel, where he cultivated friendships with local ranchers and hands — including a cowboy named Everett Johnson, who would inspire his protagonist. The shadow of the 1892 Johnson County War — a violent clash between large cattle barons and small ranchers — hung over everything Wister witnessed and gave his eventual novel its moral complexity and tension.
When The Virginian was published in 1902, it crystallized the language, archetypes, and moral code of the American West into a single narrative, becoming the template for all Western literature based in Wyoming and beyond. The dedication read, in part, to his friend Theodore Roosevelt; but it was Johnson County War that gave it its soul. The novel remains one of the most influential works in Western literature.
Real-Life Places in “The Virginian”
Owen Wister’s fictional setting for the climax of the Virginian is Johnson County in everything but name. The landscapes, the social dynamics, even the specific buildings Wister encountered during his research visits all left their mark on the novel’s setting. Readers familiar with the Virginian owen wister will recognize Johnson County immediately when they arrive in Buffalo today — the same mountain backdrops, the same wide main street, the same historic hotel.
There lay the town in the splendor of Wyoming space. Around it spread the watered fields, westward for a little way, eastward to a great distance, making squares of green and yellow crops; and the town was but a poor rag in the midst of this quilted harvest. After the fields to the east, the tawny plain began; and with one faint furrow of river lining its undulations, it stretched beyond sight. But west of the town rose the Bow Leg Mountains, cool with their still unmelted snows and their dull blue gulfs of pine. From three canyons flowed three clear forks which began the river. Their confluence was above the town a good two miles; it looked but a few paces from up here, while each side the river straggled the margin cottonwoods, like thin borders along a garden walk. Over all this map hung silence like a harmony, tremendous yet serene. “How beautiful! how I love it!” whispered the girl. “But, oh, how big it is!” – THE VIRGINIAN
The Occidental Hotel: Wister’s Literary Research Center
The Occidental Hotel & Saloon in Buffalo Wyoming is where The Virginian took shape. Wister lodged here during his research visits. The hotel serves as the climactic setting of The Virginian itself — its rooms and saloon the backdrop for the novel’s most dramatic confrontations. Today, the restored Owen Wister Suite invites guests to sleep where the author slept and, perhaps, understand something of what drew him back to this place again and again.
Everett Johnson: The Real Man Behind “The Virginian”
Wister’s friendships with Wyoming residents breathed life into his fictional characters, and none more so than Everett Johnson — the cowboy whose bearing, wit, and code of honor inspired the novel’s protagonist. Wister honored this debt directly, inscribing a copy of the book to Johnson with the words “To the hero from the author,” a gesture that underscores how deeply the Johnson County War era and its people shaped Western literature at its very foundation.
The 1892 Johnson County War: Literary Inspiration & Context
The Johnson County War — a brutal range conflict between powerful cattle barons and small homesteaders — gave Wister the moral gravity his novel required. The tension between institutional power and individual honor, between frontier justice and Eastern law, runs throughout The Virginian.
Remarkably, that same historical conflict echoes through Craig Johnson’s Longmire novels, demonstrating how deeply this single episode of Western history has shaped the county’s ongoing literary DNA.
Hemingway’s Connection to Johnson County
Between Wister’s pioneering visits and Craig Johnson’s contemporary novels, another titan of American literature found his way to Johnson County — and left part of himself here.
Ernest Hemingway traveled to Wyoming in the late 1920s, drawn by the fly fishing, the hunting, and the particular quality of mountain solitude that the Bighorn Range offered.
His time in Johnson County was not incidental; it was productive. Hemingway stayed at what is now the Spear-O-Wigwam guest ranch in the Bighorns, where he worked on A Farewell to Arms, one of the defining novels of the twentieth century. He also passed through the Occidental Hotel in Buffalo, adding his name to the long roster of literary figures who found inspiration under that roof. That Hemingway connection places Buffalo in rare company — few small American towns can claim to have hosted both the father of the Western novel and one of the great modernist writers within a single generation.
Real-Life Places in Hemingway’s Johnson County Visits
The places Hemingway inhabited during his Johnson County visits are still accessible to travelers today. Both the Spear-O-Wigwam area in the Bighorn Mountains and the Occidental Hotel in Buffalo preserve the physical context in which he lived and wrote — connecting twenty-first-century visitors to three successive generations of great American writers, from Wister to Hemingway to Craig Johnson, all shaped by the same high-country landscape.
Spear-O-Wigwam Cabin: Where Hemingway Wrote “A Farewell to Arms”
Nestled in the Bighorn Mountains, the secluded Spear-O-Wigwam guest ranch is where Hemingway retreated to write in 1928 during a summer in Wyoming. Amid the pines and clear mountain air, he worked on drafts of A Farewell to Arms — one of the great war novels in the English language. The setting that inspired those pages remains a place of striking beauty, accessible to visitors who want to experience the landscape that shaped the prose.
A cabin at Spear-O-Wigwam is marked as the place where Hemingway stayed.
Hemingway’s Occidental Hotel Visits
During his time in the region, Hemingway stayed at the Occidental Hotel in Buffalo — the same establishment where Owen Wister had lodged decades before. That overlap is no coincidence; the Occidental and Johnson County represents the level of hospitality that pulls writers and readers into the same storied spaces across more than a century.
C.J. Box’s Joe Pickett Series & Saddlestring
The tradition of setting crime fiction in authentic Wyoming landscapes finds one of its most successful modern expressions in C.J. Box’s Joe Pickett series. Box follows in the footsteps of Owen Wister and Craig Johnson by anchoring his fiction in real Johnson County geography: the fictional Saddlestring Wyoming draws on similarities to Buffalo while taking the name from a very small community in northern Johnson County.
Like his predecessors, Box uses place as more than backdrop for the game warden Joe Pickett. The open sagebrush, the forest-service land, the wildlife-management tensions of the real region infuse the C.J. Box’s novels with the kind of authenticity that keeps readers returning. The result is a literary tourism opportunity sometimes called the Joe Pickett Loop, a counterpart to the popular Longmire Loop that lets readers trace their favorite game warden’s footsteps across real Johnson County terrain.
Real-Life Places in the Joe Pickett Series
Saddlestring: Real Town, Fictional Setting
Saddlestring, Wyoming — Box’s chosen Wyoming setting for Joe Pickett’s jurisdiction — is a real community in Johnson County. It’s best known as the home of the HF Bar Ranch. Box uses its authentic landscape and proximity to the Bighorns along Buffalo’s small-town character as the genuine foundation for his fictional game-warden’s world.
C.J. Box on Buffalo as Literary Inspiration
Box has acknowledged that Buffalo and the broader Johnson County region (along with Sheridan and Saratoga) inspired the Saddlestring Wyoming community at the center of his Joe Pickett series. In doing so, he joins a lineage of authors — Wister, Hemingway, Craig Johnson — who recognized that this particular corner of Wyoming offers something that cannot be manufactured: a landscape and a community that make fiction feel true.
The Joe Pickett Literary Loop
Just as Longmire fans follow a Longmire Loop through Buffalo and Johnson County, Joe Pickett readers can chart their own Wyoming literary itinerary — visiting the real-world locations that inspired Joe Pickett’s territory, tracing game-warden country from the town square to the forest service roads that wind up into the Bighorns.
Johnson County’s Living Literary Community: FAQ
Johnson County is not merely a museum of past literary greatness. Contemporary authors including Steve Rzasa, T.K. Conklin, David Romtvedt, and Gene Gagliano live and work in the county today, contributing to the legacy that continues to attract writers who understand the creative power of place. The region remains an active, ongoing literary hub — one where the next great Western novel may already be taking shape.
Romtvedt served as the poet laureate of the state of Wyoming from 2003 to 2011. He currently serves as an emeritus professor of creative writing at the University of Wyoming where he taught in the MFA program. He has published No Way: An American Tao Te Ching, The Tree of Gernika, Dilemmas of the Angels, A Flower Whose Name I Do Not Know and much more, including fiction and non-fiction books.
Gagliano has written poetry, fiction and children’s books. His book Dee and the Mammoth, illustrated by Zachary Pullen, won the 2010-2011 Wyoming State Historical Society Award for Best Fiction.
Rzasa, former director of the Johnson County Library, writes science fiction.
Conklin is the pseudonym for a Wyoming author who writes Western romances, set during the 19th century in Wyoming.
Other authors with ties to Johnson County include:
Dolly Iberlin, Lois Slater, Karlon Knudson, Nolcha Fox, Mary Tass, Fred Gray, Nancy Tabb, Neltje, Robert Twing, Louise Anderson, Jefferson Glass (https://jeffersonglassauthor.com/), Verna Burger Davis, Tom Wall, Mike Moon, Tom Spence, Daniel Miller, Raymond Plank, Edward Burnett, E.C. Saulness, Jessica Zimmerschied, and Margaret Brock Hanson.
Q: Why do contemporary authors choose to live in Johnson County?
A: Johnson County offers the rare combination of dramatic landscape, authentic Western community, and a deep literary tradition that stretches back to Owen Wister. For writers of Western fiction, mysteries, and literary nonfiction, living here means drawing on the same source material — real geography, real history, real people — that produced The Virginian and the Longmire series. The creative environment is as compelling today as it was in the 1880s.
Q: Which genres do Johnson County authors write in?
A: The county’s literary output spans the full range of Western literature traditions: classic Western fiction, neo-Western mysteries, poetry, literary fiction, and narrative nonfiction. The region’s history — including the Johnson County War — provides material that crosses genre boundaries.
Q: How can visitors connect with Johnson County’s literary community?
A: Longmire Days, held annually in Buffalo, is the premier event for connecting with both Craig Johnson and the broader community of readers and writers inspired by the county’s literary heritage. Johnson also is known for his Christmas story readings each December in the lobby of the Occidental Hotel & Saloon. Local bookshops and the Johnson County Library also host author events throughout the year.
Q: Where can I find Johnson County authors’ books and events?
A: The Johnson County Library in Buffalo stocks works by local and regionally connected authors. The annual Longmire Days festival features signings, panels, and tours of filming locations.
