Cow-Country

By B. M. Bower

"Cow Country" is a novel by B. M. Bower, first published in 1921. Buddy is cowboy with an intricate knowledge of the Wild West. Through his time spent on the Plains, he has learnt about cattle, rattlesnakes, horses, and storms-the only thing is he is yet to fully understand, however, is the Indians. An intriguing tale of mystery and discovery, "Cow Country" is not to be missed by lovers of Western fiction. Bertha Muzzy Sinclair or Sinclair-Cowan (1871 - 1940), more commonly known as B. M. Bower, was an American author famous for her novels, short stories, and screenplays set in the American Old West. Other notable works by this author include: "Casey Ryan", (1921), "The Long Loop" (1931), and "Chip of the Flying U" (1906). Many vintage books such as this are becoming increasingly scarce and expensive. We are republishing this volume now in an affordable, modern, high-quality edition complete with a specially commissioned new introduction and biography of the author.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Classic Western Fiction Library
• Release date: Jul 19, 2017
• ISBN: 9781473346277

Book preview

COW-COUNTRY

By

B. M. Bower

Copyright © 2016 Read Books Ltd.

This book is copyright and may not be

reproduced or copied in any way without

the express permission of the publisher in writing

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from

the British Library

Contents

B. M. Bower

The History of Western Fiction

CHAPTER ONE: AN AMBITIOUS MAN-CHILD WAS BUDDY

CHAPTER TWO: THE TRAIL HERD

CHAPTER THREE: SOME INDIAN LORE

CHAPTER FOUR: BUDDY GIVES WARNING

CHAPTER FIVE: BUDDY RUNS TRUE TO TYPE

CHAPTER SIX: THE YOUNG EAGLE MUST FLY

CHAPTER SEVEN: BUD FLIPS A COIN WITH FATE

CHAPTER EIGHT: THE MULESHOE

CHAPTER NINE: LITTLE LOST

CHAPTER TEN: BUD MEETS THE WOMAN

CHAPTER ELEVEN: GUILE AGAINST THE WILY

CHAPTER TWELVE: SPORT O’ KINGS

CHAPTER THIRTEEN: THE SINKS

CHAPTER FOURTEEN: EVEN MUSHROOMS HELP

CHAPTER FIFTEEN: WHY BUD MISSED A DANCE

CHAPTER SIXTEEN: WHILE THE GOING’S GOOD

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN: GUARDIAN ANGELS ARE RIDING POINT

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN: THE CATROCK GANG

CHAPTER NINETEEN: BUD RIDES THROUGH CATROCK AND LOSES MARIAN

CHAPTER TWENTY: PICK YOUR FOOTING!

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE: TRAILS END

B. M. Bower

Bertha Muzzy Bower was born Bertha Muzzy on 15 November 1871 in Otter Tail Country, Minnesota. In 1889, she moved with her family to a dryland homestead near Great Falls, Montana. Shortly before her eighteenth birthday, she began working as a school teacher in Milligan Valley. She worked there for one term before returning home, but used her experiences when describing school teachers in her novels.

In December 1890, she surprised her family by eloping with Clayton J Bower. The marriage was an unhappy one. After living with her family and in Great Falls, they finally settled in Big Sandy, Montana in 1898. It was living in Big Sandy that gave Bower an intimate knowledge of cowboy life and the open range. They had three children: Bertha Grace (1891), Harold Clayton (1893) and Roy Noel (1896). The family moved to a hayfield cabin, which Bower unhappily nicknamed Bleak Cabin. To afford the rent, the family took in Bill Sinclair, with whom Bower began a relationship. She lent him books and helped him with his writing, and he taught her about cowboy life and critiqued her early work.

Her first marriage deteriorated after she published Chip of the Flying U (1906). Her husband began calling her his ‘little red-headed gold mine’. The marriage ended after he returned home in a drunken rage. Using money lent to her by Sinclair and money she had earned from her writing, she moved to Tacoma, Washington to stay with her brother. The divorce was finalised in 1905, Clayton took custody of the elder children, and Bower received custody of Roy, with whom she returned to Great Falls. During this time, her career continued to blossom and she signed her first short story writing contract for Popular Magazine in January 1905.

Bower married Sinclair in August 1905 and had a daughter, Della Frances Sinclair, during a blizzard in January 1907. This same winter destroyed their breeding horse herd in eastern Valley Country and ruined their plans to move there in the spring. Instead, they moved to Santa Cruz, California. By 1911, the relationship between them had waned and they separated, Bower moving to San Jose, California. She also changed publishers and signed with the prestigious company, Little, Brown & Company.

In 1920, Bower moved to Hollywood where she married Robert ‘Bud’ Cowan, a cowboy she had met in Big Sandy. In 1921, they reopened a silver mine in Nevada and ran it until the Great Depression compelled them to move to Depoe Bay, Oregon. Their marriage lasted until Cowan’s death in 1939.

Bower claimed she began writing to survive her first marriage and to gain financial independence. Her first novel, published locally, was Strike of the Deadpan Brigade (1901), and her first short story published nationally was Ghost in the Red Shirt (1904). Later that year her first Western novel, Chip of the Flying U, was published as a serial in Popular Magazine. It depicted life on Flying U Ranch and the relationship between the cowboy, Chip, and Dr Della Whitmore. The book was so successful that in 1906, it was republished in hardcover with three watercolour illustrations by Charlie Russell. The book made her famous and she went on to write a series set within the Flying U Ranch.

Bower wrote 57 Western novels. The titles included: Cow Country (1921), The Lonesome Trail (1909), and Pirates of the Ranch (1937). Her novels accurately portrayed cowboy life and she wrote factually, using her first-hand knowledge. Her novels were light-hearted, humorous and contained little violence. Due to their popularity, some of her novels were adapted in Hollywood. Chip of the Flying U was adapted four times and each adaptation changed her narrative. She also collaborated with director, Colin Campbell, writing short stories and screenplays under the name Bertha Muzzy Sinclair. She used her experiences working in studios as a source for several of her novels, including Jean of the Lonely A (1915) and The Phantom Herd (1915).

Bower died on 23 July 1940 in Los Angeles, California at age 68. By the time of her death, she had sold more than two million copies of her novels, not including her short stories or articles.

The History of Western Fiction

Western fiction is a genre which focuses on life in the American Old West. It was popularised through novels, films, magazines, radio, and television and included many staple characters, such as the cowboy, the gunslinger, the outlaw, the lawman and the damsel in distress. The genre’s popularity peaked in the early twentieth century due to dime novels and Hollywood adaptations of Western tales, such as The Virginian, The Great Moon Rider and The Great K.A. Train Robbery. Western novels remained popular through the 1960s, however readership began to dwindle during the 1970s.

The term the American Old West (the Wild West) usually refers to the land west of the Mississippi River and the Frontier between the settled and civilised and the open, lawless lands that resulted as the United States expanded to the Pacific Ocean. This area was largely unknown and little populated until the period between the 1860s and the 1890s when, after the American Civil War, settlement and the frontier moved west.

The Western novel was a relatively new genre which developed from the adventure and exploration novels that had appeared before it. Two predecessors of popular Western fiction writers were Meriweather Lewis (1774-1809) and William Clarke (1770-1838). Both men were explorers and were the first to make travel and the frontier a central theme of their work. Perhaps the most popular predecessor of Western fiction was James Fenimore Cooper (1789-1851). His west was idealised and romantic and his popular Leatherstockings series depicted the fight between the citizens of the frontier and the harsh wilderness that surrounded them. His titles included: The Last of the Mohicans (1826), The Pathfinder (1840) and The Deerslayer (1841). His tales were often set on the American frontier, then in the Appalachian Mountains and in the land to the west of that. His protagonists lived off the land, were loyal, free, skilled with weapons, and avoided civilised society as best they could. His most famous novel, The Last of the Mohicans, also idealised the Native American.

During the 1860s and 1870s, a new generation of Western writers appeared, such as Mark Twain (1835-1910) Roughing It (1872) and Bret Harte (1836-1902) The Luck of Roaring Camp (1868). Both writers had spent time living in the west and continued to promote its appeal through their literature. Harte is often credited with developing many of the cult Western’s stock characters, such as the honest and beautiful dance hall girl, the suave conman and the honourable outlaw. These characters went on to be firm favourites in popular, mass produced Western fiction. At the end of the nineteenth century, thousands of people were undergoing the treacherous journey to the west to make a new life for themselves and the fictional stories and legends of heroes and villains who had survived in this wild landscape captured the imagination of the public.

Western novels became popular in England and throughout America through ‘Penny Dreadfuls’ and Dime Novels. These appeared in the late 1800s and were texts that could be bought cheaply (for either a penny or a dime – ten cents) as they were often cheaply printed on a large scale by publishers such as Irwin P. Beadle. Malaeska; the Indian Wife of the White Hunter (1860) by Ann S Stephens (1810-1886) is considered by many critics to be the first dime novel. These sensationalist dime and penny novels capitalised on stories of outlaws, lawmen, cowboys, and mountain men taming the western frontier. Many were fictional, but some were based on real heroes of the west such as Buffalo Bill (the scout, bison hunter and performer), Jesse James (the American outlaw, robber, gang leader and murderer) and Billy the Kid (the American gunfighter). By 1877, these Western characters were a recurring feature of the dime novel. The hero was often a man of action who saved damsels in distress and righted the wrongs of the villains that he faced. For this hero, honour was the most important thing and it was something that the dime heroes never relinquished.

In the 1900s, Pulp magazines helped relay these tales over to Europe where non-Americans also picked up the genre, such as the German writer, Karl May (1842-1912). Pulp magazines were a descendent of the dime novel and their content was largely aimed at a mass market. As their popularity grew, they were able to specialise and there were Pulp magazines devoted specifically to Westerns, such as Cowboy Stories, Ranch Romances, and Star Western. The popularity for these magazines and for Western films in the 1920s made the genre a popular phenomenon.

The status of the genre in the early twentieth century was also enhanced by particular novels by different writers. One of the most influential Western novels was The Virginians (1902) by Owen Wister (1860-1938) which was considered to be a ground breaking literary Western. Wister dismissed the traditional idea of the solitary pioneer conquering new lands and making a new life for himself, and replaced this traditional character with the cowboy. The cowboy was a mix of cultural ideals, such as southern chivalry, western primitivism and stout independence. These were characteristics that many Americans cherished. Wister contrasted the lawlessness of the West to the order and civilisation of the East. He introduced new characters, such as savages and bandits who attacked the more civilised Eastern characters. His cowboy heroes shared many features with the medieval knights – they rode horses, carried weapons, fought duals and valued their honour above all other attributes. Zane Grey’s (1872-1939) Riders of the Purple Sage (1912) was also a popular Western novel. Grey was a prolific writer and wrote over ninety books which helped shape Western fiction. He changed Wister’s cowboy into a gunslinger who was feared by criminals and held in awe by other civilians. Other popular Western writers in this period include Andy Adams (1859-1935) whose titles include The Outlet (1905) and A Texas Matchmaker (1904), Edward S Ellis (1840-1916) who wrote Seth Jones, or The Captives of the Frontier (1860) and The Steam Man of the Prairies (1868), and Bertha Muzzy Bower (1871-1940) who wrote Chip of the Flying U (1906) and The Dry Ridge Gang (1935).

The Western hero lived in an environment where climate, natives and the terrain could be his enemies, and it was his job to tame the wilderness around him, but in doing so he determined his own extinction. In bringing forward civilisation and settlement, they brought about their own demise and their reason for existing. Western heroes could only exist on the frontier. Rebels were popular heroes in the Western novel and these heroes were often compassionate to those less fortunate than themselves and fought for the downtrodden. They were loyal, idealistic, independent, and knew the difference between right and wrong. They fought for the good and made personal sacrifices in order that good would triumph. The hostile setting of the Wild West transformed the characters into survivors as they were forced to alter themselves in order to live in this new setting. The Old Wild West captured the attention of many as it exemplified the spirit of freedom, individualism, adventure and unspoiled nature. It depicted a world that was separate from organised, urban society and showed the life of the wilderness, frontier and its inhabitants. The Western romanticised American history and the treacherous, mysterious and otherworldly Old West.

CHAPTER ONE:

AN AMBITIOUS MAN-CHILD WAS BUDDY

In hot mid afternoon when the acrid, gray dust cloud kicked up by the listless plodding of eight thousand cloven hoofs formed the only blot on the hard blue above the Staked Plains, an ox stumbled and fell awkwardly under his yoke, and refused to scramble up when his negro driver shouted and prodded him with the end of a willow gad.

Call your master, Ezra, directed a quiet woman voice gone weary and toneless with the heat and two restless children. Don’t beat the poor brute. He can’t go any farther and carry the yoke, much less pull the wagon.

Ezra dropped the gad and stepped upon the wagon tongue where he might squint into the dust cloud and decide which gray, plodding horseman alongside the herd was Robert Birnie. Far across the sluggish river of grimy backs, a horse threw up its head with a peculiar sidelong motion, and Ezra’s eyes lightened with recognition. That was the colt, Rattler, chafing against the slow pace he must keep. Hands cupped around big, chocolate-colored lips and big, yellow-white teeth, Ezra whoo-ee-ed the signal that called the nearest riders to the wagon that held the boss’s family.

Bob Birnie and another man turned and came trotting back, and at the call a scrambling youngster peered over his mother’s shoulder in the forward opening of the prairie schooner.

O-oh, Dulcie! We gonna git a wile cow agin!

Dulcie was asleep and did not answer, and the woman in the slat sun-bonnet pushed back with her elbow the eager, squirming body of her eldest. Stay in the wagon, Buddy. Mustn’t get down amongst the oxen. One might kick you. Lie down and take a nap with sister. When you waken it will be nice and cool again.

Not s’eepy! objected Buddy for the twentieth time in the past two hours. But he crawled back, and his mother, relieved of his restless presence, leaned forward to watch the approach of her husband and the cowboy. This was the second time in the past two days that an ox had fallen exhausted, and her eyes showed a trace of anxiety. With the feed so poor and the water so scarce, it seemed as though the heavy wagon, loaded with a few household idols too dear to leave behind, a camp outfit and the necessary clothing and bedding for a woman and two children, was going to be a real handicap on the drive.

Robert, if we had another wagon, I could drive it and make the load less for these four oxen, she suggested when her husband came up. A lighter wagon, perhaps with one team of strong horses, or even with a yoke of oxen, I could drive well enough, and relieve these poor brutes. She pushed back her sun-bonnet and with it a mass of red-brown hair that curled damply on her forehead, and smiled disarmingly. Buddy would be the happiest baby boy alive if I could let him drive now and then! she added humorously.

Can’t make a wagon and an extra yoke of oxen out of this cactus patch, Bob Birnie grinned good humoredly. Not even to tickle Buddy. I’ll see what I can do when we reach Olathe. But you won’t have to take a man’s place and drive, Lassie. He took the cup of water she drew from a keg and proffered-water was precious on the Staked Plains, that season-and his eyes dwelt on her fondly while he drank. Then, giving her hand a squeeze when he returned the cup, he rode back to scan the herd for an animal big enough and well-conditioned enough to supplant the worn-out ox.

Aren’t you thirsty, Frank Davis? I think a cup of water will do you good, she called out to the cowboy, who had dismounted to tighten his forward cinch in expectation of having to use his rope.

The cowboy dropped stirrup from saddle horn and came forward stiff-leggedly, leading his horse. His sun-baked face, grimed with the dust of the herd, was aglow with heat, and his eyes showed gratitude. A cup of water from the hand of the boss’s wife was worth a gallon from the barrel slip-slopping along in the lurching chuck-wagon.

How’s the kids makin’ out, Mis’ Birnie? Frank inquired politely when he had swallowed the last drop and had wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. It’s right warm and dusty t’day.

They’re asleep at last, thank goodness, she answered, glancing back at a huddle of pink calico that showed just over the crest of a pile of crumpled quilts. Buddy has a hard time of it. He’s all man in his disposition, and all baby in size. He’s been teasing to walk with the niggers and help drive the drag. Is my husband calling?

Her husband was, and Frank rode away at a leisurely trot. Haste had little to do with trailing a herd, where eight miles was called a good day’s journey and six an average achievement. The fallen ox was unyoked by the mellow-voiced but exasperated Ezra, and since he would not rise, the three remaining oxen, urged by the gad and Ezra’s upbraiding, swung the wagon to one side and moved it a little farther after the slow-moving herd, so that the exhausted animal could rest, and the raw recruit be yoked in where he could do the least harm and would the speediest learn a new lesson in discomfort. Mrs. Birnie glanced again at the huddle of pink in the nest of quilts behind a beloved chest of drawers in the wagon, and sighed with relief because Buddy slept.

An ambitious man-child already was Buddy, accustomed to certain phrases that, since he could toddle, had formed inevitable accompaniment to his investigative footsteps. L’k-out-dah! he had for a long time believed to be his name among the black folk of his world. White folk had varied it slightly. He knew that Run-to-mother-now meant that something he would delight in but must not watch was going to take place. Spankings more or less official and not often painful signified that big folks did not understand him and his activities, or were cross about something. Now, mother did not want him to watch the wild cow run and jump at the end of a rope until finally forced to submit to the ox-yoke and help pull the wagon. Buddy loved to watch them, but he understood that mother was afraid the wild cow might step on him. Why she should want him to sleep when he was not sleepy he had not yet discovered, and so disdained to give it serious consideration.

Not s’eepy, Buddy stated again emphatically as a sort of mental dismissal of the command, and crawled carefully past Sister and lifted a flap of the canvas cover. A button—the last button—popped off his pink apron and the sleeves rumpled down over his hands. It felt all loose and useless, so Buddy stopped long enough to pull the apron off and throw it beside Sister before he crawled under the canvas flap and walked down the spokes of a rear wheel. He did not mean to get in the way of the wild cow, but he did want action for his restless legs. He thought that if he went away from the wagon and the herd and played while they were catching the wild cow, it would be just the same as if he took a nap. Mother hadn’t thought of it, or she might have suggested it.

So Buddy went away from the wagon and down into a shallow dry wash where the wild cow would not come, and played. The first thing he saw was a scorpion-nasty old bug that will bite hard-and he threw rocks at it until it scuttled under a ledge out of sight. The next thing he saw that interested him at all was a horned toad; a hawn-toe, he called it, after Ezra’s manner of speaking. Ezra had caught a hawntoe for him a few days ago, but it had mysteriously disappeared out of the wagon. Buddy did not connect his mother’s lack of enthusiasm with the disappearance. Her sympathy with his loss had seemed to him real, and he wanted another, fully believing that in this also mother would be pleased. So he took