Life at the Flying U Ranch in the Bear Paw country of Montana was pleasant-until thousands of sheep invaded the coulee. B. M. Bower casts the ancient enmity between cattlemen and sheepmen in her own robust and slyly humorous style. Flying U Ranch brings back the Happy Family of cowboys introduced in Chip of the Flying U. Bertha Muzzy Bower, a Montanan herself, understood the joshing, boasting, and thoroughly decent young hands who worked at the Flying U-Andy, Pink, Slim, Big Medicine, Happy Jack, and the other members of the Happy Family. Here they must confront defiant sheepherders just when...

The boisterous and bow-legged Happy Family of Montana rides high in this sequel to Chip of the Flying U. Originally published in 1910, The Happy Family is, like Chip, cinematic in its fast action, unusual in its emphasis on human relationships, unique in its warmth and humor. Here are the cowpokes who endeared themselves to generations of readers-Andy, Weary, Irish, Pink, Happy Jack, Big Medicine, and the rest. They were so popular that their creator devoted a series of novels to their wrangling on the rangeland and in the ranchhouse. These stories play out in the badlands, on the edge of the...

Valeria had come to Montana to marry a cowboy named Manley, expecting a future full of companionship and bracing freedom, lodges with great fireplaces and bearskin rugs, manageable cattle and sleek horses, and dazzling sunrises. If Val had known what was really waiting for her, she simply wouldn't have gotten off the train. Oh, the country was impressive, but it could be cruel in winter and lonesome for a woman stuck on a ranch miles from the nearest neighbor. Val is cast into circumstances that test her temper, strength, and sanity. Married to an alcoholic, she is forced to revise her...

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...

Bertha Muzzy Sinclair best known by her pseudonym B. M. Bower, was an American author who wrote novels and fictional short stories about the Old West. She wrote 57 western novels some of which became movies. Ways in the West was changing just as a man changes as he grows old. The change can be fast or slow, but no matter what the change must come. "It began to look, then, as though J. G. Whitmore was cunningly besting the situation, and was going to hold out indefinitely against the encroachments of civilization upon the old order of things on the range. And it had begun to look as though he...

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Bertha Muzzy Sinclair best known by her pseudonym B. M. Bower, was an American author who wrote novels and fictional short stories about the Old West. She wrote 57 western novels some of which became movies. Ways in the west were changing just as a man changes as he grows old. The change can be fast or slow, but no matter what the change must come. Bower writes historical reminiscences of pioneers among the sage and bush, clearing the way for a new America. This story beings, "In hot mid-afternoon when the acrid, gray dust cloud kicked up by the listless plodding of eight thousand cloven...

Since Life is no more than a series of achievements and failures, this story is going to begin exactly where the teller of tales usually stops. It is going to begin with Johnny Jewel an accepted lover and with one of his dearest ambitions realized. It is going to begin there because Johnny himself was just beginning to climb, and the top of his desires was still a long way off, and the higher you go the harder is the climbing. Even love does not rest at peace with the slipping on of the engagement ring. I leave it to Life, the supreme judge, to bear me out in the statement that Love must...

Daffodils were selling at two bits a dozen in the flower stand beside the New Era Drug Store. Therefore Peter Stevenson knew that winter was over, and that the weather would probably "settle." There would be the spring fogs, of course-and fog did not agree with Helen May since that last spell of grippe. Peter decided that he would stop and see the doctor again, and ask him what he thought of a bungalow out against the hills behind Hollywood; something cheap, of course-and within the five-cent limit on the street cars; something with a sleeping porch that opened upon a pleasanter outlook than...

Before I die, I'll ride the sky; I'll part the clouds like foam. I'll brand each star with the Rolling R, And lead the Great Bear home. I'll circle Mars to beat the cars, On Venus I will call. If she greets me fair as I ride the air, To meet her I will stall. I'll circle high-as if passing by- Then volplane, bank, and land. Then if she'll smile I'll stop awhile, And kiss her snow-white hand. To toast her health and wish her wealth I'll drink the Dipper dry. Then say, "Hop in, and we'll take a spin, For I'm a rider of the sky."