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Shelton Johnson is a ranger with the National Park Service, assigned to Yosemite National Park as of 2010. As of that year, he had worked in Yosemite for 16 years of his 23 year career. He began his career in Yellowstone National Park in 1987. He appeared in the Ken Burns documentary film America's Best Idea broadcast on PBS starting September 17, 2009. Johnson attended a preview of the film at the White House that day, where he discussed the documentary with President Barack Obama.

Johnson was born in Detroit in 1958, and graduated from the University of Michigan in 1981. His degree is in English literature. He then served with the Peace Corps as an English teacher in Liberia. He then returned to the University of Michigan to do graduate study in poetry before going to work for the Park Service.

Johnson is known for his research and publications on the history of Buffalo Soldiers, the afro-american regiments of the segregated US-Army. He concentrated mostly on the assignments of the 24th infantry and the 9th cavalry to the protection of the new National Parks in the Calfornian Sierra Nevada. Johnson created a website called Shadow Soldiers around a fictive letter to the Buffalo Soldiers at the parks and wrote and maintains the section on the Buffalo Soldiers on Yosemite National Park's official website He wrote and performs a living history performance called Yosemite Through the Eyes of a Buffalo Soldier, 1904, which is presented as an interpretative program at the park and at locations around the country. In 2009 he received the Freeman Tilden Award as the best interpreting ranger in the National Park Service for his work with Ken Burns and Dayton Duncan on their national park film.

He is the author of the novel Gloryland, published by Sierra Club Books in 2009. It's the fictional memoir of a Black Indian from South Carolina who becomes a Buffalo Soldier assigned to patrol in Yosemite in 1903.

This author page uses material from the Wikipedia article "Shelton Johnson", which is released under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share-Alike License 3.0