A Man Called Brazos

by Theodore V. Olsen

BRAZOS KANE CAME UP THE HARD WAY
No parents. No kin. Just a drunken old man who'd made the kid his partner, taught him to work the wild herds, turned Kane into as tough a mustanger as ever held a rope.

Now the old man was gone--murdered. And with the killer was every cent the two of them had, the once-in-a-lifetime stake of $12,000 that Brazos had sweated through hell to earn.

But Brazos knew what the killer looked like--and knew he was headed for a place called Two Troughs. Brazos would follow him. Brazos would find him--and nothing on earth would come between Kane and revenge. Not the tender pleas of a girl who loved him, nor the hardcase gunmen waiting to cut him down, nor the terrible range war that would engulf them all in a raging, bloody massacre.

Genres: Westerns

Hardcover

First published January 1, 1964

About the author

Theodore Victor Olsen (April 25, 1932 in Rhinelander, Wisconsin – July 13, 1993 in Rhinelander) was an American western fiction author.

Olsen's family immigrated from Norway in 1901. Theodore Olsen was born on April 25, 1932 in Rhinelander, Wisconsin. He went to school in Rhinelander and began to write in high school. He began a western novel at that time. Olsen went to college in Stevens Point, Wisconsin. He finally finished his novel, Haven of the Hunted, and it was published in 1956. Olsen also began to sell western stories to pulp magazines at this time. Though Olsen would occasionally travel west, he lived his whole life in Rhinelander and would use exhaustive research to help accurately portray scenes of the west in his stories.

Olsen was married to fellow western fiction author Beverly Butler.

Olsen died in Rhinelander on July 13, 1993, and several works were published posthumously.

Much of T.V. Olsen's family still lives in the Rhinelander region. They own a 300-acre (1.2 sq km) ranch with a century old farm house and dairy barn.

Reviews

[David]

T.V. Olsen's work usually hits the target square between the eyes. While there are admirable qualitites in this work, it falls short of its real potential.

Initially, the novel is set up as a basic revenge piece. Along the way, though, Olsen loses sight of that basic premise. As a young orphan on the street, Brazos is taken under the wing of old Pop Malvern, who teaches the youngster all there is to know about catching wild mustangs. As Brazos reaches adulthood they become equal partners and manage to raise $12,000 through a good season of capturing and gentling wild mustangs. I think Olsen lost sight of the old west economy, for this amount seems somewhat inflated. The amount is not so consequential as Malvern gets drunk and is robbed and murdered before they can follow through on their plans to buy a ranch. With a partial description, Brazos sets out to avenge his mentor's death. A local rancher, new to the area appears to match the description and Brazos hires on to the ranch in hopes of uncovering key evidence.

Sadly, the novel takes a different turn as Brazos gets involved in a brewing range war between two outfits. It isn't long until his desire for vengeance is placed on the back burner and he is trying to find a way to prevent the range war. Brazos almost completely forgets his vengeance in order to stand firm for peace. He is also framed for an attempt at rape with the rancher's wife and pulled into a gunfight with the rancher. He spends a number of days in hiding and healing from a bullet wound that causes him to hobble about on crutches for the rest of the novel.

There is one character who is very well developed. The Rancher, a wealthy man from the East, is manipulated by his lovely wife. He begins the novel as an incompetent drunk. However, she puts some starch in his backbone, he quits drinking, and gradually realizes that he can be a better man. His realization that his wife has been lying to him about her past, the attempted rape, and even the staged shootout brings his storyline to a satisfying climax.

Brazos ends up in a foot chase with the real bad guy. His leg wound causes this chase to border on absurdity, but Olsen balances the chase by having the bad guy wounded as well. The bad guy confesses that he is the man Brazos is looking for and attempts to goad him into a foolish action, but Brazos, finally remembering the need for vengeance, tempers his response so he can get the bad guy.

This novel contains some old thinking and vocabulary applied to Mexican people. The author prevents them as either shiftless and unscrupulous or hard-working and honorable. Other characters demonstrate their negative attitude towards these people with racist epithets and distrust. Brazos doesn't share these attitudes, but never confronts those with that attitude. Eventually, he falls in love with the daughter of the other rancher involved in the conflict, a half-Irish and half-Mexican woman.

What could have been an above average western novel suffers from its hero's own lack of focus. There never seems to be a moment when he wonders about his own future and his need to retrieve the stolen money, at least until the tragic conclusion of the novel. If the author had managed to keep his hero on the right track, continuing his search for his partner's killer even in the midst of the growing conflict, this novel could have been much better.

[Johnny]

Westerns are not a steady part of my reading diet. Occasionally, my brother sends me one that he thinks I’ll like. A Man Called Brazos was one of those. It has the requisite shoot-out, a European-style pistol duel (which was unexpected), the rancher-sheepherder war trope, and the spoiled, ambitious rancher’s wife trope added to the mix of a revenge story and a loner seeking something beyond his revenge. There aren’t a lot of twists in this novel, but the few there are were entertaining to read, and they were necessary because so much of the plot was predictable.

I very much appreciated the fact that the sheriff was neither a drunk nor corrupt. At the same time, that doesn’t mean that all run-ins with the law are going to be favorable in the novel. The catalyst behind the shepherd/rancher war is not the stereotypical greedy cattle baron. The protagonist, Brazos Kane, has a much more sophisticated reading list than the average drifter (much like Don Pendleton’s The Executioner seems well read in philosophy) would have, but he doesn’t preach at anyone—just pulls up thoughts in answers to questions.

I also appreciated the fact that Kane doesn’t solve everything by himself. It seems like he’s going to do so as one travels approximately halfway through the novel, but he relies on the help of others when it counts. This might be foreshadowed so much it isn’t surprising, but it was nice to read. And I also like the fact that when the justice, poetic and otherwise, is dispensed (as one would expect in the basic western formula), it has a cost and doesn’t feel like a clean-cut victory for Kane.

A Man Called Brazos is purely escape reading, but it is enjoyable for the same reason a good pulp adventure is fun to read: you think you know what’s coming but you want to see it play out in an exciting way. In that sense, A Man Called Brazos is a success.