Bowdrie (Louis L'Amour's Lost Treasures)
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“Everybody seemed to like him,” Bowdrie admitted. “And I guess he was the only man standing between the Bonelli crowd and even more trouble.”
“It wasn’t only that, Tex. He’s my uncle. You see, my mother’s name was Burke, and my uncle’s name was Robert Jay Burke. He used whatever name was handy when he was on the trail of the Foxes, and when he first located here, he was known as Travis. He just kept that name.”
Amy glanced at Chick. “Are you going to accept Dad’s offer? He does need help.”
Bowdrie shook his head. “There’s too much to do back in Texas, and I’m a tumbleweed, I guess.”
“You can always come back, Tex.” Then she said, “I shouldn’t call you that, I guess. They say you are Chick Bowdrie.” Then she laughed. “However did you get a name like Chick?”
He smiled. “My name was Charles. Most times Chuck is a nickname for Charles, but there was another boy in school who was called Chuck. He was bigger than I was, so they called me Chick.” He chuckled. “I never minded.”
When he was back in the hotel, he started thinking again about Amy. Maybe if he stayed on, worked for her father, and…
WHAT IS LOUIS L’AMOUR’S LOST TREASURES?
Louis L’Amour’s Lost Treasures is a project created to release some of the author’s more unconventional manuscripts from the family archives.
Currently included in the project are Louis L’Amour’s Lost Treasures: Volume 1, published in the fall of 2017, and Volume 2, which will be published in the fall of 2019. These books contain both finished and unfinished short stories, unfinished novels, literary and motion picture treatments, notes, and outlines. They are a wide selection of the many works Louis was never able to publish during his lifetime.
In 2018 we will release No Traveller Returns, L’Amour’s never-before-seen first novel, which was written between 1938 and 1942. In the future, there may be a selection of even more L’Amour titles.
Additionally, many notes and alternate drafts to Louis’s well-known and previously published novels and short stories will now be included as “bonus feature” postscripts within the books that they relate to. For example, the Lost Treasures postscript to Last of the Breed will contain early notes on the story, the short story that was discovered to be a missing piece of the novel, the history of the novel’s inspiration and creation, and information about unproduced motion picture and comic book versions.
An even more complete description of the Lost Treasures project, along with a number of examples of what is in the books, can be found at louislamourslosttreasures.com. The website also contains a good deal of exclusive material, such as even more pieces of unknown stories that were too short or too incomplete to include in the Lost Treasures books, plus personal photos, scans of original documents, and notes on the Sackett, Chantry, and Talon family series.
All of the works that contain Lost Treasures project materials will display the Louis L’Amour’s Lost Treasures banner and logo.
POSTSCRIPT
By Beau L’Amour
Many of my father’s fans greatly enjoy his Chick Bowdrie series of Western detective stories. Dad wrote the first few during the brief time he spent with his parents in Oklahoma before moving to Los Angeles in 1946. From the start the Bowdrie character was destined to have his own series; Dad wrote two stories about him back to back and sent them both in to Popular Western magazine. Initially, there was some editorial pushback, and in April of 1984, while wrapping up work on his contribution to the coffee-table book Frontier, Louis wrote the following in his journal:
My essays will be complete this week and I shall start on a polish of the Bowdrie bk, but taking my time as I shall also be preparing the next Kerbouchard and JUBAL SACKETT. The first Bowdrie was a big success and it amuses me to recall how…[a certain editor at Popular Publications]…tried to talk me out of doing them. He did not believe in series characters and did not like Bowdrie. Well, every man to his taste. Due to the pub. demands…I never got the chance to develop the character as I wished, hard to do now for such work needs to be woven into the fabric of the story, not tacked on.
Luckily, the editor mentioned above was overruled by Popular Western’s editor in chief, Leo Margulies. Margulies’ magazines were still buying Louis’s Turk Madden adventure series, which had started before the war, and they had recently begun to pick up his Kilkenny Westerns as well. The Bowdrie stories didn’t have to be delivered on any particular schedule, but the editor may have been concerned either in Dad’s ability to produce or that he might get ambitious and start demanding more money.
Dad called the first story he sent Margulies “No Rest for a Ranger,” but like many it was retitled by the magazine staff, and became “A Job for a Ranger.” In the next eight months, before any of the Bowdrie stories appeared in print, Louis pumped out five more. Confronted with this flood of creativity, Leo asked Louis to go back and write the Bowdrie origin story. “McNelly Knows a Ranger” was rushed into print ahead of all but the already published “A Job for a Ranger.” From then on Dad wrote a few a year, all the way up until 1952.
Oddly, I have a note that says the short story “The Passing of Rope Nose”—published in both West of Dodge and The Collected Short Stories of Louis L’Amour, Volume 2—started out as a Bowdrie story. Partway through, however, Dad started feeling that his hero did not seem mature enough and so renamed him Johnny Sutton.
All in all the nineteen Chick Bowdrie stories were a successful run for Dad. In a 1947 letter to novelist and professor Walter S. Campbell (aka Stanley Vestal), whom Dad had known for many years, Louis affectionately referred to the character as “this gun slinging Ranger who works for me.”
I was lucky to discover an unpublished Bowdrie story, “Strawhouse Trail,” after my father’s death and was able to include it in the 1998 short-story collection Monument Rock. Below is a fragment of yet another Bowdrie mystery; these two rough-draft pages are all that exist:
The heroes of tragedy, it has been said, were noble men with some imperfection, often an inconspicuous little trait. Such a one was Curly Lustig.
Now Curly was blonde and he was handsome. He was also gay and debonair. A lion among men, he was a veritable devil among women, but a lobo wolf on the trail. Yet Curly Lustig had his own imperfections and behind the glittering facade lay a mind that was a composite of cunning and cruelty, and with it all a penchant for relieving people of their hard earned cash, and for shooting them if they objected.
Yet the legend that had already grown about him kept him in the ranks of a Robin Hood character. Several times he had tossed coins or bills to needy people and these times had been magnified by telling until it seemed that all his ill gotten coin went in the same way.
In over a half dozen states Curly was known and admired, and the ratio of admiration grew in respect to distance from him. His easy going, carefree appearance drew people to him, and those who had never seen him in one of his murderous rages had no idea what the man could be like.
Shrewd as he was, he could make mistakes, and fleeing a Colorado posse into Indian territory he crossed the Texas Panhandle, and in crossing stopped to recruit horses from a small ranch on the plains east of Adobe Walls. The rancher, an old man named Barrow, objected to losing his best horses in exchange for the broken down horses that Lustig was leaving him, and Curly Lustig shot the man down in cold blood and then rode his horse over the body five or six times.
Riding past the window of the cabin he then shot the rancher’s wife, and they rode on their way into the haven of security of Indian Territory. Lustig thought his murderous trail was well covered, but behind him he left a boy of fifteen who immediately headed south on one of Lustig’s broken down mustangs. When he reached Headquarters his description of Curly Lustig and his four outlaw companions was accurate and concise.
NcNelly called Chick Bowdrie to his hotel room. “It’s Lustig,” he sa
id, explaining the crime, “and no question about it. That’s the first time he’s ever been in Texas that we know of. See that it doesn’t happen again.”
Bowdrie nodded, building a careful smoke. He waited, knowing there would be something more. It came.
“This is the hardest job I’ve ever given you,” McNelly said quietly, “even many honest people admire Lustig. They don’t know the man. He’s as cruel as an Apache, with an insane lust for killing and torture, and coupled with it, he’s deadly with guns and absolutely fearless.”
“Who’s with him?”
“Four men, usually, Lonny Rickert is from Kentucky. He’s wanted for robbery and murder in four states. The others are Locard, Carey and Howe. All are wanted men, all are vicious, all are in the Ranger’s Bible.”
On a high headed Palouse gelding, Chick Bowdrie headed west. Curly Lustig was in Oklahoma, but Bowdrie’s route took him out of Texas and into northern New Mexico.
Along the grapevine there were rumors and more rumors, and he wanted none of them to connect him with the pursuit of Lustig. He knew, also, that in northern New Mexico were some favorite hideouts of the blonde and handsome outlaw. It was toward those outlaw towns he now headed
The final phase in the life of Chick Bowdrie was an attempted spin-off of the popular Desilu Productions television series The Texan, which ran for two years beginning in 1958. It is sometimes forgotten that Desi Arnaz and Lucille Ball were far more of a Hollywood power couple than the roles of Lucy and Ricky Ricardo might suggest. Desi was a groundbreaking producer who, with his technical and legal acumen, was able to realize both the concept of the TV rerun and how to get rich off it. Lucy was often involved in the creative side of things, and even after her divorce from Desi, and his departure, Desilu continued to develop some of the most interesting shows on television, including The Untouchables, Mission: Impossible, and Star Trek.
Desilu’s The Texan starred Rory Calhoun, who had previously appeared in three Louis L’Amour features: Four Guns to the Border (1954), which was based on the short story “In Victorio’s Country” and later became the novel High Lonesome; Utah Blaine (1957); and Apache Territory (1958), based on Dad’s novel Last Stand at Papago Wells. Calhoun had been a partner in the company that had produced Apache Territory, and that same entity, Rorvic Productions, produced The Texan. Early on they’d picked up Dad’s short story “The Marshal of Yellow Jacket” as the plot for a single episode, but soon they were discussing how to bring in Chick Bowdrie as a character and then give him his own series.
The answer was the episode “No Place to Stop,” which Louis himself adapted from “McNelly Knows a Ranger.” It aired on April 27, 1959, with Chuck Wassil playing Chick Bowdrie. The pilot, suffering the fate of so many others, failed to evolve into a series, but if you ever wondered what a Chick Bowdrie TV series might have looked like, the answer is: “A lot like The Texan.”
The Chick Bowdrie stories saw my father through some desperate times in the late 1940s and early 1950s, years that included editorial skepticism and the collapse of Louis’s Kilkenny series and that lasted until the very end of the pulp-magazine era—right up until the moment when the adaptation of “The Gift of Cochise” into Hondo changed his life forever.
Beau L’Amour
May 2018
Bantam Books by Louis L’Amour
NOVELS
Bendigo Shafter
Borden Chantry
Brionne
The Broken Gun
The Burning Hills
The Californios
Callaghen
Catlow
Chancy
The Cherokee Trail
Comstock Lode
Conagher
Crossfire Trail
Dark Canyon
Down the Long Hills
The Empty Land
Fair Blows the Wind
Fallon
The Ferguson Rifle
The First Fast Draw
Flint
Guns of the Timberlands
Hanging Woman Creek
The Haunted Mesa
Heller with a Gun
The High Graders
High Lonesome
Hondo
How the West Was Won
The Iron Marshal
The Key-Lock Man
Kid Rodelo
Kilkenny
Killoe
Kilrone
Kiowa Trail
Last of the Breed
Last Stand at Papago Wells
The Lonesome Gods
The Man Called Noon
The Man from Skibbereen
The Man from the Broken Hills
Matagorda
Milo Talon
The Mountain Valley War
North to the Rails
Over on the Dry Side
Passin’ Through
The Proving Trail
The Quick and the Dead
Radigan
Reilly’s Luck
The Rider of Lost Creek
Rivers West
The Shadow Riders
Shalako
Showdown at Yellow Butte
Silver Canyon
Sitka
Son of a Wanted Man
Taggart
The Tall Stranger
To Tame a Land
Tucker
Under the Sweetwater Rim
Utah Blaine
The Walking Drum
Westward the Tide
Where the Long Grass Blows
SHORT STORY COLLECTIONS
Beyond the Great Snow Mountains
Bowdrie
Bowdrie’s Law
Buckskin Run
The Collected Short Stories of Louis L’Amour (vols. 1–7)
Dutchman’s Flat
End of the Drive
From the Listening Hills
The Hills of Homicide
Law of the Desert Born
Long Ride Home
Lonigan
May There Be a Road
Monument Rock
Night Over the Solomons
Off the Mangrove Coast
The Outlaws of Mesquite
The Rider of the Ruby Hills
Riding for the Brand
The Strong Shall Live
The Trail to Crazy Man
Valley of the Sun
War Party
West from Singapore
West of Dodge
With These Hands
Yondering
SACKETT TITLES
Sackett’s Land
To the Far Blue Mountains
The Warrior’s Path
Jubal Sackett
Ride the River
The Daybreakers
Sackett
Lando
Mojave Crossing
Mustang Man
The Lonely Men
Galloway
Treasure Mountain
Lonely on the Mountain
Ride the Dark Trail
The Sackett Brand
The Sky-Liners
THE HOPALONG CASSIDY NOVELS
The Riders of High Rock
The Rustlers of West Fork
The Trail to Seven Pines
Trouble Shooter
NONFICTION
Education of a Wandering Man
Frontier
The Sackett Companion: A Personal Guide to the Sackett Novels
A Trail of Memories: The Quotations of Louis L’Amour, compiled by Angelique L’Amour
POETRY
Smoke from This Altar
LOST TREASURES
Louis L’Amour’s Lost Treasures: Volume 1
“I think of myself in the oral tradition— as a troubadour, a village taleteller, the man in the shadows of the campfire. That’s the way I’d like to be remembered—as a storyteller. A good storyteller.”
IT IS DOUBTFUL that any author could be as at home in the world re-created in his novels as Louis Dearborn L’Amour. Not only could he physically fill the boots of the rugged characters he wrote about, but he literally “walked the land my characters walk.” His personal experiences as well as his lifelong devotion to historical research combined to give Mr. L’Amour the unique knowledge and understanding of people, events, and the challenge of the American frontier that became the hallmarks of his popularity.
As a boy growing up in Jamestown, North Dakota, he absorbed all he could about his family’s frontier heritage, including the story of his great-grandfather who was scalped by Sioux warriors.
Spurred by an eager curiosity and desire to broaden his horizons, Mr. L’Amour left home at the age of fifteen and enjoyed a wide variety of jobs, including seaman, lumberjack, elephant handler, skinner of dead cattle, miner, and an officer in the transportation corps during World War II. He was a voracious reader and collector of books. His personal library contained 17,000 volumes.
Mr. L’Amour “wanted to write almost from the time I could talk.” After developing a widespread following for his many frontier and adventure stories written for fiction magazines, Mr. L’Amour published his first full-length novel, Hondo, in the United States in 1953. Every one of his more than 120 books is in print; there are more than 300 million copies of his books in print worldwide, making him one of the bestselling authors in modern literary history. His books have been translated into twenty languages, and more than forty-five of his novels and stories have been made into feature films and television movies.
His hardcover bestsellers include The Lonesome Gods, The Walking Drum (his twelfth-century historical novel), Jubal Sackett, Last of the Breed, and The Haunted Mesa. His memoir, Education of a Wandering Man, was a leading bestseller in 1989. Audio dramatizations and adaptations of many L’Amour stories are available from Random House Audio.