Word has reached us that Oklahoma’s National Cowboy & Western Heritage Museum will bestow its prestigious Western Heritage Award for nonfiction book on the 2012 blockbuster Geronimo (Yale University Press) by Robert M. Utley.
The Western Heritage Awards—also known as the Wrangler awards—will be conferred April 20 in a gala event at the Oklahoma City-based institution. Other winners in the literary category include Jim Logan’s magazine article “The Other Trail,” published in Oklahoma Today’s March/April 2012 edition. Logan tells the story of 19th-century cowboys who drove countless herds to new markets hungry for beef. The honor for Outstanding Western Novel will go to D.B. Jackson for Unbroke Horses (Goldminds Publishing). Jackson’s tale involves the kidnapping of a young boy by three Civil War deserters—a degenerate band of misfits—who try to conscript the boy into their malevolent ways. The Wrangler for Outstanding Photography Book will go to National Geographic’s impressive work Greatest Photographs of the American West, edited by Rich Clarkson and James C. McNutt.
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In our next issue, I’ll bring you coverage of the Western Writers of America’s Spur Awards. I hope to see some of you—well, the scribes in our midst, anyway—at the organization’s annual convention, slated this year for June 24-29 at the Riviera Hotel in Las Vegas, Nevada. The convention will feature panels on the Victorian West, songwriting, cowboys, Great Basin history and more.
—Jesse Mullins
