Chip, Of The Flying U:
B.M. Bower
Paperback
(CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform, May 27, 2016)
Bertha Muzzy Sinclair or Sinclair-Cowan, née Muzzy (November 15, 1871 – July 23, 1940), 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 U 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." She was married three times: to Clayton Bower in 1890, to Bertrand William Sinclair (also a Western author) in 1905, and to Robert Elsworth Cowan in 1921. However, she chose to publish under the name Bower Bower's novels have been praised for their accurate portrayal of cowboy life. She wrote factually about such things as cattle branding and bronc busting, having witnessed these events firsthand. Bower's West is a place of change in which characters embrace new technologies from barbed wire to Kodak cameras. She infused her novels with humor. Her cowboys lightheartedly josh each other, and readers are invited to laugh at the ironic situations in which her characters are entangled. There is little violence in Bower's writing. In Chip of the Flying U, the eponymous character does not even carry a six-shooter. Instead, Bower's writing is characterized by a lighthearted, pleasant mood. For example, in describing a ranch kitchen, she imagines a tea kettle "singing placidly to itself and puffing steam with an air of lazy comfort, as if it were smoking a cigarette."