Victoria Lamont is a professor of English at the University of Waterloo. She is the author of Westerns: A Women’s History (Nebraska, 2016) and coauthor of Judith Merril: A Critical Study. Her most recent book is The Bower Atmosphere: A Biography of B. M. Bower which was published by Bison Books last month.

B. M. Bower was the first author to make a living writing popular westerns, creating more than sixty novels and hundreds of short stories that were read by millions of Americans. Bower’s were among the first westerns adapted to film, and the exploits of her cowboys at the fictional Flying U ranch established a tradition that flourishes to this day.

Discouraged by her editors from publicizing her identity as a woman, Bower’s important contribution to American mass culture faded from cultural memory after her death in 1940. Based on extensive research in Bower’s personal archives and publishers’ records, as well as interviews with some of her descendants, The Bower Atmosphere recounts the remarkable twists and turns of Bower’s life, from her beginnings on a Montana cattle ranch to her success as a writer of serial westerns, all the while contending with the conflicting pressures of editors, husbands, children, and her own creative aspirations.

Preface

Bertha Muzzy Bower was the first writer to make a living writing popular westerns. Today’s reader might think her an unlikely author of such a masculine genre; a Montana mother of three, she began writing short stories in 1900, desperate for money that would allow her to leave an unhappy marriage. That same marriage—to a cowboy employed by the McNamara and Marlow cattle company—gave her access to material for which eastern magazine editors were particularly keen: stories about ranch life and cowboys. After four years of typing stories in the tiny cabin she shared with her husband and three children, Bower’s first novel, Chip of the Flying U (1904), became an instant hit, the first of over sixty novels and hundreds of short stories that would entertain millions of Americans for many decades to follow.

Bower’s biography is worth reading not simply because of her role in founding a beloved American cultural tradition but also because of its inherent richness and drama. Indeed her life story resembles and anticipates later notable women writers of the American West, including
Judy Blunt, Annie Proulx, and Joan Didion—to name a few—making her a foundational figure in a tradition of women’s western writing that continues to thrive. Like Blunt, Bower wrote about ranch life in order to escape it, yet she also honored it in her fiction through exacting
attention to realism and strenuous resistance to the sensationalism that quickly overcame the genre she helped to establish. Also like her successors, Bower’s biography demonstrates the drama to be found in the everyday life of a western woman. Never staying in one place for more than a few years, Bower moved from place to place either in flight from personal or financial crises or in pursuit of opportunity. Embracing all things new and modern, Bower funded an aviation school for her favorite son, who had been captivated by the Wright brothers’ first flight. When an old friend tracked her down with stories about a lost Mexican silver mine, Bower founded a mining company, hoping for a bonanza that never materialized. She built—or paid others to build—a retreat near Quincy, California, where she could both write and entertain her movie industry friends. Like Annie Proulx’s Bird Cloud, the Pocket ranch failed to proceed as planned; guests overstayed their welcome, and Bower was left jaded and in debt.

Through all of these daily dramas, Bower wrote. She could always count on her writing to see her through periods of setbacks, finance a new business venture, or cover some unexpected expense. Not only her own survival but that of her extended family depended on it. Bower’s
writing saw them all through periods of family breakdown, medical and mental health crises, and job loss. Writing was also an endless labor. Bower spent most of her life on a writing treadmill, churning out novel after novel to keep herself afloat through both unwise expenditures and unforeseen economic turmoil, including the 1929 stock market crash that left millions of Americans destitute—Bower among them.

Among Bower’s daily battles were frequent sparring matches with her risk-averse publishers. Fearing a reader backlash should her gender be publicized, they kept Bower’s identity under wraps and urged her to churn out as many Flying U stories as they could print. Bower had other ideas: she wanted more public exposure and, when she became bored with westerns, took on subjects as various as bootlegging, mining, filmmaking, and deep-sea trolling. More often than not, her publishers discouraged these experiments.

In Bower’s time, conditions weren’t favorable for writing about her own experiences. She didn’t have time for more than terse diary entries, and the market didn’t value the felt daily life of a western woman, however remarkable her exploits and achievements. Both her daughter and granddaughter made attempts at biographies—in the 1960s and 2000s, respectively—but faced both personal and socioeconomic obstacles to their completion and publication. Since these attempts, however, certain orthodoxies about western writing have shifted. Judy Blunt, Joan Didion, and Annie Proulx have written powerfully about their experiences as women and writers in the American West. Reconstructing Bower’s felt daily life as it is documented in her diaries, letters, and family papers, this biography claims B. M. Bower as their progenitor: a woman, writer, and western maverick whose daily life proved as dramatic as her fiction.