Part of Series
B. M. (Bertha Muzzy) Bower was the first woman to make a career of writing popular westerns. And what a career it was—more than sixty novels published from 1904 to 1940, the year of her death, and still more posthumously. In the western orbit, Bower was—and still is—a star. Her first, Chip of the Flying U, lays out a ranch in Montana and introduces the Happy Family, the bunkhouse gang that reappears in her later books. Chip is the typical woman-shy cowboy, but he is also a gifted artist (reputedly, Bower based the character on Charles M. Russell, who illustrated Chip ). Della, a doctor, is the young woman who disrupts his solitary life. The result as a quality ranch romance. Chip of the Flying U was a great success that led to several movie versions, one of them casting Hoot Gibson as Chip. Today’s readers who grew up watching westerns on television will appreciate Bower’s cinematic style. After living much of her life in Chouteau County, Montana, she moved to Los Angeles, close to the movie industry that increasingly fascinated her.
Author
Bertha Muzzy Sinclair or Sinclair-Cowan, née Muzzy, best known by her pseudonym B. M. Bower, was an American author who wrote novels, fictional short stories, and screenplays about the American Old West. Her works, featuring cowboys and cows of the Flying R Ranch in Montana, reflected "an interest in ranch life, the use of working cowboys as main characters (even in romantic plots), the occasional appearance of eastern types for the sake of contrast, a sense of western geography as simultaneously harsh and grand, and a good deal of factual attention to such matters as cattle branding and bronc busting. Born Bertha Muzzy in Otter Tail County, MN and living her early years in Big Sandy, Montana, she was married three times: to Clayton Bower, in 1890; to Bertrand William Sinclair,(also a Western author) in 1912; and to Robert Elsworth Cowan, in 1921. Bower's 1912 novel Lonesome Land was praised in The Bookman magazine for its characterization. She wrote 57 Western novels, several of which were turned into films.
