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.
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