|
 Chilton Williamson, Jr. was born in New York City
and raised there and on the family farm near South Windham, Vermont
where he acquired a lifelong love of nature and of the outdoors,
horses, fishing, and hunting.
At Columbia College, he majored in European History
and studied voice privately for some years, training to become an
operatic tenor. Having given up a musical career, Williamson did four
years of graduate work in American history at Columbia before becoming
History Editor for St. Martin's Press in New York. During his three
years with St. Martin's, he contributed numerous essays and book
reviews to many publications, including Harper's, The New Republic,
National Review, Commonweal, and The Nation.
In 1976 Williamson became Literary Editor (later
Senior Editor) for National Review. The following year he moved
to Block Island, Rhode Island, where he spent an isolated winter,
gathering material for his first book (Saltbound: A Block Island
Winter: Methuen, 1980) and commuting every other week to the
magazine offices in New York. In Saltbound, Williamson
interwines the history of the island from colonial days down to the
present with a narrative account of his own experiences and adventures
to depict an isolated traditional community transformed over three
centuries by the forces of modernization and "progress."
 Williamson moved to Kemmerer, Wyoming in the summer
of 1979 to begin work on what he originally planned as the Western
equivalent of Saltbound. Still on the payroll of National
Review, commuting bi-monthly to his office in New York for four
days at a time, he went to work with a crew on a drilling rig in the
famous Overthrust Belt, in those days the symbol of the Energy Boom,
the Sagebrush Rebellion, and the New West. From his lodgings in the
Regency Apartments in Kemmerer, Williamson edited his reviews section,
wrote his columns, worked long hours as a rigger and afterward at his
desk making notes of all he had seen and heard that day, and completed
his education as an outdoorsman begun years before in Vermont. By
paying close attention to experienced people who had something to
teach him, he learned to shoot a rifle fast and
with accuracy, to navigate and survive in the backcountry, to break
his own horses and train them to the mountain trails, load a
packhorse, and butcher and pack big game. The literary result of his
first year in the Rocky Mountain West is Roughnecking It: Or, Life
in the Overthrust (Simon & Schuster, 1982): a thoroughly
reprehensible work that has been described as a "kickass" book.
Inspired by Mark Twain's classic, Roughing It, the book's theme
is how the New West was foreshadowed by the Old, and how the Old West
lingers on in the New. Roughnecking It was excellently
reviewed, and is said to have found its way into the syllabus of a
University of Wyoming course devoted to the study of social problems
in Wyoming. Best of all, from the author's point of view, it won
acceptance in the West as a kind of Oilriggers' Bible. Though
presently out of print, it is still in demand by oilpatch veterans
twenty-four years after its publication.
 Williamson made his permanent residence in Kemmerer
after arranging with National Review to become a long-distance
editor and contributor, working from his home. In 1989 he left NR
for a similar position at Chronicles: A Magazine of American
Culture, published by the Rockford Institute in Rockford,
Illinois. Early in 1994, Williamson inaugurated a regular
Chronicles column, "The Hundredth Meridian," that continues today.
Here he has recorded, for more than a decade now, espisodes from his
life and adventures as a Westerner-hunting, fishing, horsepacking,
backpacking, pushing cattle, breaking horses-and his travels
throughout the West, in particular the southwest and northern Mexico
and including the great Indian reservations where he has many friends
and acquaintances. (The first twenty-two columns, deliberately planned
as a serial book, have recently been published by Chronicles Press as
The Hundredth Meridian.)
 Williamson's first two novels, Desert Light
(St. Martin's, 1987) and The Homestead (Grove Weidenfeld),
are both set in southwestern Wyoming. However, the setting
of his subsequent novels and short fiction (appearing from time to
time in "The Hundredth Meridian"), is the American Southwest and
Mexico, reflecting Williamson's fascination with the region for its
stark desert scenery and its intermixture of Latin, Indian, and
"Anglo" cultures. (An aficionado of the corrida, or
bullfight, Williamson has witnessed many such fights at the Plaza
Monumental in Ciudad Juárez, Mexico.) In 1997, he moved from Kemmerer
to Las Cruces, New Mexico, where he lived for two years gathering
impressions and material for The Last Westerner, Mexico Way,
A Place You've Never Been, The Prince of Juárez, and his latest
work, The White Indian an historical novel inspired by a
regionally famous incident concerning the kidnapping of a six-year-old
white boy by an Apache raiding party after the raiders had killed his
parents on the road between Silver City and Lordsburg, New Mexico, in
1883.
 In 1999, Williamson moved back to Wyoming, settling
this time in Laramie, on the opposite side of the state from Kemmerer.
In Laramie, he remet and married an old acquaintance from his New York
days: Maureen McCaffrey, of
a wellknown publishing family. He has
recently completed a children's book, The Greatest Lion, and is
currently at work on a new novel, The Education of Héctor Villa, inspired by his
familiarity with, and affection for, the border region and its people.
Williamson also alternates "The Hundreth Meridian" with another
column, "What's Wrong With the World." Several times a year, he
escapes Wyoming to make a backpack trip in the Grand Canyon or the
Lake Powell region of southeastern Utah, or take his horse camping
with him in the slickrock country near Canyonlands. |
