Lonesome Land
Authors: B. M. Bower
As he raced over the uneven prairie he fumbled with the saddle string
B. M. BOWER
I
llustrated by
S
tanley
L. W
ood
I
ntroduction by
L
aura
G
ruber
G
odfrey
Introduction and Suggested Reading
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ISBN: 978-1-4114-3831-6
C
ONTENTS
L
IST OF
I
LLUSTRATIONS
AS HE RACED OVER THE UNEVEN PRAIRIE HE FUMBLED WITH THE SADDLE STRING
HE WAS JEERED UNMERCIFULLY BY FRED DE GARMO AND HIS CREW
“LITTLE WOMAN, LISTEN HERE,” HE SAID. “YOU’RE PLAYING HARD LUCK, AND I KNOW IT”
TO DRAW THE RED HOT SPUR ACROSS THE FRESH VP DID NOT TAKE LONG
I
NTRODUCTION
E
VER SINCE
E
UROPEANS FIRST BEGAN MOVING WESTWARD ON THE
North American continent, they encountered two very different Wests: the
one was a romanticized landscape—the “West of the imagination”—while the other was the American West of actuality. Author B. M. Bower was acutely aware of both. Her novel
Lonesome Land
, published in 1912, is notable for its careful depiction of the contradictions between the romantic, iconic American West and the real West that could be (and often was) a
place full of loneliness, anxiety, and hardship for the men and women who lived there.
Lonesome Land
is built on a paradoxical reversal of situation. When Valeria Peyson first arrives in the
northern Montana town called, ironically, Hope, she is naïve, timid, and unable to see Manley Fleetwood—the man she is to marry—for the drunken failure he really is. Cowboy Kent
Burnett tries to shield Val from the knowledge of Manley’s bad nature as he also attempts to mask his growing affection for her, serving as her guide and friend when she needs help the most.
As Val slowly learns to navigate her way in this remote frontier environment, her fantasies about western life (“Out here one could think and grow and really live,” she gushes to
another passenger on the train as she first arrives in town) are stripped away by her exposure to the grim realities of the frontier. Bower matches Val’s romanticized expectations about the
West with the bleakness and hardship of life on Manley’s broken-down ranch, but in the end it is Val who emerges the stronger figure. B. M. Bower’s groundbreaking depictions of marriage
and divorce on the American frontier will appeal to contemporary readers, as will her strikingly detailed, accurate accounts of Montana ranch life and cowboy culture. In
Lonesome Land
, Bower
manages both to write a satisfying western—one that includes the typical elements of suspense, open landscape, and romance—and also to write a novel that often critiques the largely
misleading romantic notions about the American West.
Bower once mentioned that she could “personally vouch” for the realities of the American pioneer experience, and she spoke the truth. B. M. (short for Bertha Muzzy) Bower was born
into a pioneering family in a Minnesota log cabin on November 15, 1871. Not much is known about her Minnesota years, other than the fact that it was the settling of the Sioux Indians nearby that
caused her family to move farther westward when Bower was a teenager. Shortly after moving with her family to a ranch in Big Sandy, Montana, in 1889, Bertha Muzzy married Clayton J. Bower, who
would be the first of her three husbands. Many critics of
Lonesome Land
have commented on its brave and refreshingly honest depictions of Valeria’s crumbling marriage, and although
Bower herself guarded her privacy fiercely, one gets the clear sense from reading this text that she had a solid understanding of the dynamics of failing—and failed—relationships. Her
granddaughter, Kate Baird Anderson, wrote of Bower’s first marriage that “[i]t took three children and ten years of living with an ill-tempered man with a taste for liquor to motivate
Bert in her search for a workable way out. Writing ‘little romances,’ as she called them later, was worth a try.”
1
Over
the course of her life and subsequent marriages to Bertrand Sinclair and “Bud” Cowan, B. M. Bower lived in several different western states, including Montana, Idaho, Nevada, Oregon,
and California, and her existence was largely nomadic; her daughter Dele commented to biographer Orrin Engen that Bower never lived in the same home for more than seven years. She loved the open,
wild spaces of the American West, and in fact the initial draft for
Lonesome Land
was begun in a remote, rugged camp in the Monterey Mountains of California, many miles from the nearest
town. Those who knew Bower described her as a warm, witty, intelligent and self-sufficient woman; her writing career gave her a financial independence relatively rare for women in her day, and she
often spent her money as quickly as she made it. She was close friends with well-known western artist Charles M. Russell, whose illustrations appeared in many of her works, and her own writing was
admired by authors like Willa Cather and was made into successful Hollywood films. (
Chip of the Flying U
, her first and most popular novel, was actually made into a film four separate
times.) B. M. Bower died of cancer in Los Angeles on July 22, 1940, shortly after uttering her often-quoted, infamous final piece of advice to her daughter: “Don’t ever be
pious.”
One of the most striking elements of
Lonesome Land
, and indeed of all Bower’s writing, is in her convincing depictions of masculinity on the American frontier (her contemporary
readers in large part assumed that she was a man). Bower’s stories and novels often depict masculine frontier community units—groups of diverse male characters bound together by the
tacit codes and the laconic humor of the American West. Cowboy characters like
Lonesome Land
’s Kent Burnett are tough, loyal, and brave, and in the novel he serves as heroic
centerpiece of the masculine community, a loose band of characters also made up of heroine Valeria Peyson’s alcoholic, cattle rustler husband Manley Fleetwood, and local crotchety town
gossip, Polycarp Jenks. Female characters play important roles in Bower’s work, but often the women in her fiction are Eastern outsiders, as Val is in this novel, who must learn to adapt to
the male rituals of the frontier. This ritualistic induction into the masculine world of Hope, Montana, comes for
Lonesome Land’s
Val when she learns of the “shivaree,” or
charivari
, that the local cowboys have planned for Manley following his wedding. Val, hearing of their wild plans, comments “Indeed, I don’t think I would mind—it would
give me a glimpse of the real West; and, perhaps, if they grew too boisterous, and I spoke to them and asked them not to be quite so rough—and, really, they only mean it as a sort of welcome,
in their crude way. We could invite some of the nicest in to have cake and coffee. . . .” Readers are well aware, at this point, of just how at odds Val’s Eastern, temperate
sensibilities are with the tough masculine world she has entered. Val’s ideas about femininity and gentility are systematically broken by her constant exposure to the realities of living in
this remote, male-dominated environment; history shows us that such experiences were commonplace for women on the American frontier.
Running throughout the novel is, as well, Bower’s explicit criticism of the mythological American West. The character Val becomes Bower’s conduit for expressing the ignorance and
naiveté inherent in believing that the West is a space of pure freedom, sublime beauty, or other such fictions. Manley Fleetwood observes that Val’s “romantic viewpoint—a
viewpoint gained chiefly from current fiction and the stage . . . contrasted rather brutally with the reality” of living in a frontier town. Indeed, Bower deliberately opens the novel with a
sharp contrast between mythological artifice and reality when she drops naïve Valeria off at the train station in Hope, Montana, a town that “[t]o the passengers on the through trains
which watered at the red tank near the creek . . . looked crudely picturesque—interesting, so long as one was not compelled to live there and could retain a perfectly impersonal viewpoint.
After five or ten minutes spent in watching curiously the one little street . . . many of them imagined that they understood the West and sympathized with it, and appreciated its bigness and its
freedom from conventions.” Valeria’s expectations about the town, about Manley, and about her ranch house at Cold Spring Coulee are constantly disappointed as the novel progresses, a
pattern that seems almost to serve as a didactic reminder to readers, on Bower’s part, not to make the same mistakes in imagining the American West. Bower spends an extensive amount of
narrative unraveling, in particular, Val’s ideals about her waiting ranch house. Manley and Val travel over miles upon miles of empty country to arrive, “in the glare of a July
sun” at the homestead, and upon seeing the bare shack surrounded by weeds, Val “shut[s] her eyes mentally to something she could not quite bring herself to face.” Clearly Val is a
woman who never predicted that her western life would involve verbal (and eventually physical) abuse, the constant threat of prairie fires, and a marriage to a carousing, alcoholic cattle
rustler.
This is not to say, however, that Bower’s vision of the American West is unfailingly bleak. On the contrary, the mythological West also plays a role in
Lonesome Land
, as it does in
all of Bower’s fiction. Bower was both a participant in and an ardent admirer of cowboy culture; one gets the clear sense that Bower’s feelings for the “West of the
imagination” are as real as those of her protagonist when, in
Lonesome Land
, she writes that “for the first time in her life Valeria heard the soft, whispering creak of saddle
leather, the faint clank of spur chains, and the whir of a horse mouthing the ‘cricket’ in his bit. Even in her anger, she was conscious of an answering tingle of blood, because this
was life in the raw—life such as she had dreamed of in the tight swaddlings of a smug civilization, and had longed for intensely.” Bower has been described by many critics as a writer
who was greatly nostalgic for what she saw as a simpler frontier past. She did not believe pioneers were bested by the challenges of living on the frontier, and she did not think they were made
weak or worn down by their efforts to carve out an existence in the West. She admitted this when she once wrote that American pioneers, in her mind, “had to be made of good stuff. They had to
think for themselves—and think quickly. A weary, weazened, hopeless and forlorn type could not have existed under the conditions they would have to meet. That would be a psychological
impossibility.”
2
Bower’s view was that the open, lonely land of the American West could, and did, pose enormous challenges to
the people who attempted to settle there, but that if you were made of the “good stuff,” you would rise to the occasion. Clearly, in
Lonesome Land,
Val and Kent are made of that
“good stuff,” while Manley Fleetwood is not. The western landscape is thus a sort of proving ground in this novel, a space on which characters test their mettle.