For most of his career, readers believed Will James had been born in a covered wagon in Montana and raised by a French-Canadian trapper after his parents died. It made a good story, and he told it in his 1930 autobiography, “Lone Cowboy.” It was not true.
He was born Joseph Ernest Nephtali Dufault in 1892 in Quebec, and he left home as a teenager to become a cowboy in western Canada and the American West. He took the name Will James, worked on ranches in several states, spent time in a Nevada prison for cattle rustling and broke horses for a living. His drawing, which he had done since childhood, became his way out.
Smoky
James published his first stories and drawings in national magazines in the early 1920s. In 1926 came “Smoky the Cowhorse,” the story of a mouse-colored horse told with James’ own illustrations. It won the Newbery Medal in 1927 and has been adapted for film three times. He went on to write and illustrate more than 20 books.
With his earnings, he bought land near Pryor, south of Billings, and established the Rocking R Ranch in the late 1920s. Montana became the home he had invented for himself in print.
His later life was hard. Alcoholism, the strain of keeping up his invented past and money troubles wore him down, and he died in Hollywood in 1942 at age 50. At his request, his ashes were scattered over the hills near Billings.
The Yellowstone Art Museum in Billings holds a major collection of his work and has kept his name in front of new generations of readers who still find the books, and the horses in them, worth the trip.