B. M. Bower, The Phantom Herd (1916)

Novels about the early days of western movies are few and far between. B. M. Bower more than makes up for that in this story of a Hollywood filmmaker, much like William S. Hart (see this week’s BITS review of his Wagon Tracks).

In Bower’s novel, director Luck Lindsay wants to make a film about the real West of the open range days, not the shoot-em-up “bunk” currently being released to the public. As Luck explains:

            For film purposes, the West consists of one part beautiful maiden in distress, three parts bandit, and two parts hero. Mix these to taste with plenty of swift action and gun-smoke, and serve with bandits all dead or handcuffed and beautiful maiden and hero in lover’s embrace on top. That’s your West, boys – And how well I know it!

Scenes, he complains, are shot on cheaply built sets and in scenery no grander than nearby Griffith Park.

Plot. Luck has a script for a feature-length film about real cowboys herding cattle and invites the cowhands from the Flying U ranch in Montana to be his cast, but the studio turns down his script and puts them all to work on another western instead, which they trash by making a farce of it. Thoroughly enjoyed by the usually jaded viewers in the studio screening room, there’s little doubt it will be a moneymaker with the public.

Women writers and the early western

Patti Abbott once asked on her blog whether readers could tell a difference between the fiction of men and women writers. As with many topics raised there, this one generated a long discussion. I don’t remember much of a consensus being reached, except that women writers tend to take greater note of domestic concerns, like preparing meals.

Fiction set in the American West divided along gender lines pretty much from the beginning. Men wrote action adventures with plenty of muscle. Women writers did other things. Living at a time before they had the vote, and a Victorian morality kept them at home and minding children, women used writing as a way to flex another kind of muscle—the brain. As if to prove that women could think, their novels are full of ideas.

As writers, both share a similar interest in the frontier. They recognize and explore the freedom from Eastern social norms that is to be found there. For men, it’s an opportunity to confront villainy by a display of character, courage, and gunplay, and as in Wister’s The Virginian (1902) their novels often question assumptions about class differences. For women, it’s an opportunity to question what a male-dominated social order assumes to be true about both genders.

B. M. Bower’s first novel Chip of the Flying U (1906) is a good example (reviewed here earlier). There she opposes a top-hand cowboy and a lady doctor, Della, in an even match of wills. In the story, there’s a replay of the scenes in The Virginian, where Molly the schoolmarm plays nursemaid to her own injured cowboy.

The difference in Bower’s novel is that Chip resents becoming an invalid after an accident on the ranch. And his relationship with his caretaker doctor draws sparks as often as sweetness and light. Bower, a sharp observer of male ego, gives a believable account of male-female relations, where each has achieved a different kind of independence.

Bower’s novel is a comic romance, and any elements of action-adventure are outside its main interests. Most of the story takes place indoors and around the ranch. A memorable indoor scene occurs in the bunkhouse, where Chip is surprised to discover the doctor. Her curiosity has led her to this male-only province, and Bower’s eye for domestic detail provides us there with a picture of cowhand living conditions.

Though out of place in the bunkhouse, Della doesn’t beat a retreat. She learns that Chip has come for his gun to shoot his injured horse. Sensing his dismay at the loss of a favorite animal, she asks to let her try to nurse it back to health.

Their meetings in the barn (another male province) as the horse slowly mends give Bower an opportunity to let this friendship between unequals develop. And they are doubly unequal, Chip assuming superiority by virtue of his gender while she is superior in her intelligence and training as a doctor.

Uncowboy-like, Chip has a gift that she values more than he does. He is a natural with a paintbrush, and she helps win him recognition as an artist. This is a far different outcome from The Virginian, which ends with the killing of a villain. What has to die in Bower’s novel is Chip’s narrow understanding of himself—and of women.

I mention Bower, because she was the first woman writer of cowboy westerns that I read. Before her, as I’ve come to learn, there were already women writers publishing novels set in the West. A partial list includes Mary Hallock Foote’s novel about mining, The Led-Horse Claim (1883); Helen Hunt Jackson’s well-known Ramona (1884); and Mary Austin’s story of Old California, Isidro (1905).

Lesser known today was Maria Amparo Ruiz de Burton’s novel about the fate of a California land grant ranch, The Squatter and the Don (1885); Patience Stapleton’s novel about an independent girl in a mining camp, Babe Murphy (1890); and Mollie Davis’ novel about the barb-wire wars in Texas, The Wire-Cutters (1899).

I’m currently reading an early western by Marah Ellis Ryan, Told in the Hills (1890), which got me thinking about all this. It’s another prime example of how women writers took to the West. Ryan’s particular take grew from what became a life-long interest in Native Americans.

Her young heroine, Rachel, fetches up in the mountains of western Montana as a “dude” from Kentucky. Riding on horseback on a two-week pack into the mountains, she learns enough Chinook to converse with the local natives. Meanwhile, she and two of the women riding with her develop a fascination for the subject of squaw men—white men who take Indian women as “wives.”

One of the women finds the idea repulsive. In her eyes, Indian women are dirty, lazy, and ugly. The offspring of such unions are regarded with even greater disgust. As in other western novels of the time, it’s believed that no good comes from mixing races. Rachel, described as being an independent thinker, reserves judgment. Maybe, she thinks, marriage to a white man would help Indian women learn to “improve.”

The scout on the trip, Jack, is a mysterious man who has lived in the West for many years. His manners are “western,” but Rachel senses there’s a great deal more to him. He seems to have much bottled up inside about a past he finds shameful. By the middle of the novel, Rachel learns that a half-breed woman lives with him. Unshocked, her response is one of “to know all is to forgive all.”

While the story of Rachel and Jack's friendship is told with considerable tenderness and emotion, Ryan is putting a lot on the table for discussion about race and race relations. Without having to say it in so many words, she’s also talking about sex. Creating a strong, thinking heroine, she’s insisting that, “queer” though it may seem, women can think and act as independently as men—if not more so.

As is often the case with outsiders, Rachel has a sharp eye for details of behavior. For a male reader, Ryan offers the experience of being seen through the eyes of a woman. While Jack stoically refuses to reveal anything of his private life, Rachel reads him like a detective at a crime scene. Like Bower, you can tell that Ryan has observed men closely.

And she’s also good at domestic detail, the sort of thing male writers seldom focused on. At one point in the novel, she lists the entire contents of the larder in a deserted cabin. Then she puts together a meal out of what she finds.

Which brings us back to that discussion at Patti Abbott’s blog. As feminist critics would put it, the early western novel is “genderized,” meaning that what’s going on in the fiction by men and women generally falls on either side of a fairly clear line. The stories of male writers take place largely outdoors; women writers tend to focus on what goes on indoors.

That, of course, would begin to change. But maybe not all that much.

Image at top of page: Anna Brassey (1839-1887), English traveler and writer; Wikimedia Commons

Coming up: Patience Stapleton, Babe Murphy (1890)

Book: Chip of the Flying U, part 2

Here’s more about B. M. Bower and her first novel, Chip of the Flying U:

B. M. Bower. Among writers who seem to emerge from nowhere, Bower has a remarkable story. Her parents had come as homesteaders to the Montana frontier in 1889, when she was still a teenager. She quickly married another young homesteader, Clayton Bower. They lived often hand to mouth in and around Great Falls, then moved with their three children in 1898 to Big Sandy, 80 miles northeast of Great Falls.

This was cowboy country, and Big Sandy was a cowtown with a regular population of about 100 people. It has been described at the turn of the century as a settlement with several saloons, a couple of hotels, a general store, barbershop, livery stables, schoolhouse, warehouses, stockyards, a stop on the railroad, and a red light district.

Bower drew the attention of a young Canadian cowboy, nine years younger, who was a top hand and horsebreaker but had aspirations beyond cowpunching. Like her, he wanted to be a writer. His name was Bill Sinclair. She encouraged him in his writing, lending him her books, and he read her draft of Chip of the Flying U to get the details of ranch work right.

In 1904, the Bowers’ marriage fell apart, but with the proceeds from the sale of her novel to Popular Magazine, she left Big Sandy. Sinclair followed, and they were married in 1905. Her novel was published in 1906, reportedly rivaling The Virginian in sales.

The Sinclairs lived in Great Falls, with plans for a horse ranch, but after a killing winter, they resettled in Santa Cruz, California. In 1908, Sinclair published his first novel, Raw Gold. (There’s another one for my reading list.) In 1912, they divorced, and Sinclair went on to be a successful novelist living in Canada.

Bower began getting writing credits for films of her novels and stories in 1914. Chip of the Flying U first came to the screen that same year, with Tom Mix as Chip (at left, in an early film). It was remade in 1926 with Hoot Gibson and again in 1939 with Johnny Mack Brown. Not surprisingly Bower eventually settled in Los Angeles.

She wasn’t done with real-life cowboys, however. In 1920 she married again, this time another top hand from her days in Great Falls. Robert “Bud” Cowan was also a talented musician, who might have walked out of the pages of The Virginian, having once married the local schoolmarm.

Though she left Montana, it remained a source of her creative spirit. Thirty-eight of her sixty-six hardcover novels are set there, many of them about the cowboys of the Flying U ranch.

Book: Chip of the Flying U

B. M. (Bertha Muzzy) Bower (1874-1940) is a pistol. Her first novel, Chip of the Flying U (1906) is craftily written, with one eye on her own authentic experience and the other on Owen Wister’s flights of romantic fantasy in The Virginian.

You can tell that she knew ranching and cowpunchers from first-hand experience, living in Montana. The level of specifics is at least a couple degrees more closely observed than Clarence E. Mulford (Bar-20), who had to rely on the books he’d read and his imagination, writing at long distance from New York.

In an opening scene around the table where a half dozen cowboys are eating and talking, you know that Bower has seen and heard scenes like this maybe many times. How the men interact as they express their fears and prejudices about women is sketched in with broad strokes but accurately understood.

She has a great eye for details. When a man indulges his love of syrup poured over biscuits or pinches out the flame of a match after lighting a cigarette, her scenes leap to life. Likewise in the first pages, when a rider’s horse shies at the sight of a letter being waved in the air by another man.

And then there’s her description of the bunkhouse, from the misstep her heroine takes coming through the door to her realization that the men don’t sleep in bunks and do read magazines. These moments aren’t there to show off her writer’s credentials. They are almost throwaways, and you know there’s a whole lot more where they came from.

Later on, her main character Chip pitches a magazine across the room when the western story he’s reading gets the details wrong. “I’d put a bounty,” he says, “on all the darn fools that think they can write cowboy stories just because they rode past a round-up once, on a fast train” (pp. 198-199).

Unlike Mulford, whose cowboys are almost indistinguishable from each other, her men are drawn in clear profile. Yes, they are almost caricatures, but you realize that this is the way they see each other, as stereotypes. Bower understands that working men don’t care to know each other any more personally than that.