Bertrand Sinclair, Big Timber (1916)

Looking for a theme song to go with this novel by Canadian writer Bertrand Sinclair, you might pick Bonnie Raitt’s “I Can’t Make You Love Me.” It’s a story set in the old growth woods of British Columbia, where a one-sided marriage of convenience leads to a good deal of heartbreak and disappointment.

Character. The central character is 22-year old Estella Benton, suddenly thrust on her own by the accidental death of a father who has left her penniless. Unprepared for the cold, unpredictable world, she is summed up by the narrator as “a young woman who had grown up quite complacently.” She has been “wholly shielded from the human maelstrom, fed, clothed, taught, an untried product of home and schools.”

As for the future, she has had no more than a vague notion of eventual marriage to a Prince Charming who would come along to sweep her off her feet—and maintain her in a life style to which she has been long accustomed.

Plan B finds her on a long train journey to remote British Columbia, on the banks of a lake north of Vancouver, where she joins her brother, Charlie, who has a start-up logging company. Obsessed with becoming wealthy, he has little regard for his sister’s personal welfare and puts her to work as camp cook, a grueling job that exhausts her and brings her to near despair.

Movie still, Wallace Reid, center, as Jack Fyfe

Romance. A rescuer and prince by almost any standard shows up in the manly form of Jack Fyfe, who has a well-run logging operation of his own. He partners with Charlie to deliver on a timber contract and befriends Estella, who discourages what she interprets as his unwelcome attention.

Any reader can see that he is filled with a gentle compassion for her and has fallen quite in love. But she will have none of this rough, handsome man of the woods. Nevermind that he has a fine intelligence and tender sensibilities. He frightens her, and for no apparent reason than her unwillingness to consider meeting him on equal terms, as a caring, considerate friend and potential life mate. For love to be true, she has to feel it as a delirious infatuation, and it’s not there.

Book: Wild West, part 2

More about Bertrand Sinclair’s 1926 novel Wild West. Today we are looking at the role of romance in the story and the portrayal of cowboy life on the open range.

Romance. Instead of male companionship, what Sinclair offers his hero Tyler is the less certain support of a romantic interest. In Raw Gold, romance was hardly a long suit for Sinclair. And in 1926 his romancing cowboy is still an uncomfortable fit with the rest of the story.

When we first meet Tyler, he has a kissing and hugging acquaintance with his boss’s daughter, Ivy. Almost from the start, it’s hard to like her. She’s a clinger (and aptly named) and also emotionally volatile, ready to fall into a jealous fit at the drop of a hat. Manipulative, she tries to play the villainous Steele against Tyler. You wonder how Tyler has the patience to put up with her. Dane Coolidge’s hero has similar female problems in Man From Wyoming. Could be that ranchers’ daughters are thin on the ground, and a working cowboy takes whatever he can get.

Sutherland’s daughter May also takes an interest in our young hero, but in a wait-and-see, almost platonic way. You like her because she’s independent and intelligent, not in a big rush to get hitched to a man. Tyler realizes that he likes her, too, but is promised to this clinger Ivy. So he’s got himself a situation with a good set of conflicting feelings going. Meanwhile, you’re looking at the options and thinking, this should be a no-brainer.

Romance in the movies, 1926

You’re not going to read this book anyway, so I won’t bother with a spoiler alert. While Tyler is off feeling miserable in Seattle, Ivy is seduced, abandoned and “in trouble” thanks to Steele. By this time, he and May have become an item. And by the end of the novel, they seem to make a good match.

But romance still seems shoe-horned into the more compelling central story. It’s nice that our hero gets to indulge a few warm feelings about a girl now and then. And he can get his back up when Steele literally steals Ivy away. But romance remains mostly window dressing in the novel. As it draws attention to itself, it seems more an intrusion than added value.

The cowboy West. I got into this whole business of reading these post-Virginian novels from an interest in the actual rather than mythical cowboy. Sinclair’s knowledge of open range ranching and being a working cowboy makes this an appealing read for me. Details drawn from first-hand experience of the cowboy West play a part in the plotting, the characterization, and the realism.

Charles Russell, Men of the Open Range, 1923

He describes the little town of Big Sandy, “a huddle of unpainted buildings” in a “great, gray stretch of sagebrush” (p. 29). He notes how as the autumn weather turns colder, cowboys “grumble and wipe the hoar frost from the seats of their saddles before mounting” (p. 78).

A dance held in a schoolhouse brings together cowboys and local rangefolk. Even as the plot moves forward, Sinclair takes time to fully set this scene. We know the fiddler is OK, but not great. Starved for this kind of social gathering, nobody seems to mind. Cowboys compete for the attention of the available dance partners. The women put together a meal of sandwiches and coffee, and the music stops for a while as everyone takes supper.

Outside in the summer night, there are buggies, spring wagons, and horses waiting for the return trip home. Beyond them in the shadows men are sipping from bottles of alcohol. There might be a fistfight, and as the night wears on, some of the women may leave as cowboys get drunker and rowdier. It is dawn before the dance is over. All this has the vividness of lives once lived.

Book: Wild West

At some point a while back these blog entries began to look more and more like book chapters. As the saying goes, if I had more time I’d have written them shorter.

I wrote last week about Canadian novelist Bertrand Sinclair, who burst on the scene in 1908 with Raw Gold. Resembling Wister’s The Virginian (1902) in maybe a few too many ways, it was a little wobbly in places. I was curious how a later Sinclair novel would compare and picked his Wild West, published in 1926.

Before he turned to writing, Sinclair had been a working cowboy around Big Sandy in north central Montana. This novel draws from that experience. His central character is a young cowboy, Robin Tyler, working for a small ranch owner, north of the Missouri River and within sight of the Bear Paws and the Little Rockies. In chapter one, he discovers by chance that the wagon boss of a neighboring rancher is rustling cattle. So the plot is quickly set in motion.

Shining Mark Steele has an MO that takes a while to be unraveled by our hero. Steele, with the help of a partner, is killing mama cows with unbranded calves and then putting his own brand on the calves. In winter they round them up and move them south across the frozen Missouri River to roam free and fatten there, far from their home range.

The brand, meanwhile, is registered to a saloon-keeper in Helena. So there’s no suspicion that Steele is really building a herd for himself from the cattle of his employer and other ranchers. Tyler pieces the whole scheme together. But with only circumstantial evidence, there’s no way to bring charges against Steele. It takes the length of the novel to get the truth out into the open.

Charles Russell, Worked Over, 1925

While the cattle-rustling plot is common in the pulp and B-western, Sinclair gives it some twists. His villain, Steele, is a smooth operator. As the wagon boss of the biggest rancher in the area, he’s at the top of the local pecking order, and he enjoys his privileges. He’s both contemptuous and contemptible. Animosity between Tyler and Steele builds quickly.

Tyler starts out as a mild-mannered guy who doesn’t carry a gun. But before long he’s acquired a .45 and is practicing his fast draw, with plans to use it on Steele when he’s got a fighting chance. By this time, a partner of Tyler’s is killed as the two men go sleuthing in the Bad Lands, and Steele has moved in on Tyler’s girlfriend.

At the mid-point of the novel there comes a sudden turn when the two men meet in an isolated line camp. In a struggle over a revolver, Steele gets shot. Tyler leaves him for dead and flees by train to Seattle, suddenly a fugitive.

Seattle doesn’t work out. He hates the weather. He hates city life. And instead of trying sunnier Los Angeles, where he might have wound up working as an extra or doing stunts in western movies (I’m making that part up), he decides to go back to Montana and face the music.

The story plays out from there in surprising ways that keep you turning pages. I haven’t yet read enough early western novels to compare this one to, but I found Sinclair’s particular spin on the cattle-rustling plot unpredictable and original.

Book: Raw Gold, part 2

Didn’t mean to get so long-winded, but here’s more about Bertrand Sinclair’s novel, Raw God (1908). Like I say, I read old books so you don’t have to. Illustrations today are by Clarence H. Rowe, from the first edition.

Lyn pleads with MacRae

Sinclair and Bower. We know that Sinclair read B. M. Bower’s Chip of the Flying U as she wrote it. It’s hard to say what he learned from it. There’s nothing resembling a ranch romance in the almost perfunctory relationship MacRae has with his girlfriend, Lyn. In a brief back-story, we learn that they were once engaged to be married, but they have since drifted apart.

Sinclair keeps it that way. There’s one scene of potential intimacy, but it takes place out of sight and hearing of the narrator. So we learn nothing. At best, the former girlfriend’s main reason for being in the plot is to get kidnapped and rescued.

One time that Lyn appears, she plays the stereotypical role of women in westerns – the one that tries to speak reason in the face of violence. She pleads with MacRae to give up chasing the villains: “There’s been too much blood shed over that wretched gold already. Let them have it. I know something dreadful will happen if you follow it up” (p. 212).

MacRae, of course, stubbornly insists that a man does what he has to do, and she relents. Bower’s heroine wouldn’t have given up so easily.

By contrast with Bower, this story takes place almost completely out of doors. Sinclair’s appreciation of heat and wet and cold and sleeping rough, sometimes without meals, seems to be genuine. His characters don’t drink, but they smoke endlessly. He’s also familiar with horses – how many hours of riding are in one, when it needs rest, what and when it eats or gets fed. Sinclair would have known all this from experience, and the details add to the realism.

Book: Raw Gold

Central Los Angeles Public Library

I have this funny habit when I hold an old library book. I wonder how long it’s been sitting on the shelf in the stacks untouched, then of the different hands that have turned its pages over the years. Then how often it’s been taken home and read and by why sorts of readers.

This particular 102-year-old copy of Bertrand Sinclair’s Raw Gold came from the LA Public Library downtown (above), and I picked it up at my local branch (below). The book looks and feels pretty good for its age. It has been rebound in a stiff yellow binding, now scuffed and smudged. The author’s last name and the book’s title have been stamped in black capital letters on the spine. The pages themselves are soft with much handling, many of the corners creased from being folded over. The  old check-out punch card is still in its pocket inside the front cover.

My local branch - Westwood

There’s also the evidence of previous ownership. On the first page of chapter 1, the words BOOK LOVERS LOAN LIBRARY LOS ANGELES have been embossed into the paper. The date NOV 25 1977 has been stamped at the bottom of the title page. On the back of that page is another stamp: “University of Southern California” and in the gutter on the facing page yet another stamp: “Gift of James and Vernon Pleukharp”. And so on.

It occurs to me that no one is going to have these thoughts about an ebook a hundred years from now.

Anyway, about Bertrand Sinclair (1881-1972), who was born in Scotland and came to North America in 1889. He was a young cowpuncher living in Montana when he wrote this novel. He had befriended and later married novelist B. M. Bower, who encouraged him in his writing. (I wrote about Bower here earlier.)

Raw Gold (meaning gold nuggets and dust) was published in 1908 after publication the previous year by Street and Smith. When I picked up this book, I expected maybe a male writer’s version of the kind of story Bower writes in Chip of the Flying U, a lightly humorous adventure based on real, everyday knowledge of working cowboys.

Not quite.

The story. For a first novel, Raw Gold has a lot going for it. We get the wide-open frontier of the 1870s with outlaws and lawmen and what was to become a staple of western adventure, the innocent fugitive wrongly accused of a crime. There’s stolen money, stolen gold, and more stolen money, as well as an imperiled young woman who needs rescuing. All is resolved at the end after a confrontation with the outlaws in an isolated canyon.

Fort Walsh, 1878

Sinclair puts his stamp on this material by setting the story “north of the border” in the southern corners of what is now Alberta and Saskatchewan. The time is shortly after the arrival of the Northwest Mounted Police, and the entire story takes place within one or two days’ riding of Fort Walsh (shown here) in the Cypress Hills. A key scene takes place in Writing-on-Stone, a section of the Milk River where the cliffs are inscribed with Native American petroglyphs.