The Shadow Mountain

by B.M. Bower

kids book

Genres: Westerns

196 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1936

About the 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.

Reviews

[Debbie Zapata · Rating 2 out of 5]

I looked over my Bower shelf to see how many other titles of hers I rated as two star or less. I found that I gave just one book one star, and four (five with this one) received two stars. So I cannot say that this is the Bower book I liked the least, but it was pretty close to it.

Another of her later titles, Shadow Mountain was published in 1936. It tells the story of a singing cowboy who returns to his native habitat of The West after a year of working the vaudeville circuit with a specialty as a yodeler. He arrives at the Triangle J ranch with a letter of introduction from the boss's cousin.

But before he gets to the actual ranch house, he had ridden into the ranch's winter range known as Shadow Mountain Basin. The Triangle J has had exclusive use of this meadow for many many years, but they do not own it or have grazing rights, they just have always been there.

So later when the neighboring rancher, who runs sheep on his property, shows up the winter after a fire ruins all the grazing on his side of Cherry Creek, the Triangle J crew naturally run the sheep off 'their' winter grazing area. And the stage is set for a range war.

But remember the legend about Shadow Mountain: there was a certain shadow in the basin that always points to trouble, and if it actually touches a man, he will die.

Well, there you go. Add in the lovely daughter of the Triangle J's crippled up owner, and a jealous cowboy who thinks he has property rights on said daughter, and you can just imagine what kind of trouble Linn the yodeler will be facing.

But I couldn't connect with anyone here, or give myself over to the story the way I usually can with Bower. When she introduced the incident of basically a locked room murder mystery, all I could do was roll my eyes and skim through the rest.

One of the few stinkers I have come across in Bower's works, but I have one print book of hers left to read, and of course I plan Someday to go back and reread a few of her earlier titles, so this one will soon be just a shadow in my memory.

Oh, almost forgot. The best part about this book is the quote that someone else beat me to adding to GR database. I had seen it on the list when I added something from one of the books I was reading, but I never thought I would be reading the book it came from since at that time I was reading only the Project Gutenberg editions of Bower's books. Fun to see the context of the quote, even if it was in a stinker of a book. lol

[Elisabeth · Rating 4 out of 5]

Another solid, entertaining Western from B.M. Bower. The opening chapters pull the reader straight into the story, with the encounter that begins the plot-driving quarrel, and the atmospheric descriptions of Shadow Mountain and its legend, coupled with the references to Shakespeare, the apt "Moving Finger" quotation and characters with names drawn from Greek mythology, give them an intriguing poetic flair. The clue to the murder-mystery, an earnest attempt at a locked-room puzzle, wasn't hard to spot. But the book still holds your interest in following the characters' efforts to navigate the turmoil and suspicion the murder causes, while already engaged in an ongoing battle with sheepherders invading their winter range. The wintry Montana landscape springs vividly off the page at every turn:

They had entered the Basin and were galloping against a north wind that stung their cheeks and whipped their breath in white steam over their shoulders. Yet overhead the sky was blue and the bright sunlight laid diamond dust upon the snow. Like a great horseshoe around them the bold rocky bluffs walled them in, Shadow Mountain rising bleak before them.

This one's also fun in that the protagonist is a real, live singing cowboy—not the Hollywood variety; his musical accomplishments are accounted for and affect the story in a unique way.

[Robert Hepple · Rating 3 out of 5]

First published in 1936, Shadow Mountain is a fast-paced Western adventure. Set against a conflict between a cattle ranch and a sheepherder over grazing access to government land, it is perhaps not so much a range war, but more of a minor skirmish in outlook. The descriptive passages and characterisations are nicely done, even if some of the dialog sounds like something out of the movie Blazing Saddles. Enjoyable even if it is routine, because it is so well done.

[Christopher Taylor · Rating 4 out of 5]

Bower's writing is always engaging and has a strong sense of reality as opposed to much of the stylized, romanticized gunfighter cowboy stories set in the old west. But for someone who has read many of her books, they follow an all-too-familiar pattern in terms of characters and story arcs. The exact events are fresh and interesting but you know the players too well.