Book Review: Bowdrie

Title: Bowdrie

Author: Louis L’Amour

Publisher: Bantam

Date: 1983

ISBN: 0-553-23132-4

Length: 174 pages plus trailer for a forthcoming book

Quote: “The Rangers, working in concert or alone, fought Indians, bandits, horse and cattle thieves, highwaymen, bank robbers, and lawbreakers of every kind. Mostly young, each Ranger was required to furnish his own horse, rifle, and a pair of pistols…Chick Bowdrie, who appears in all of the stories in this collection, is a fictional character.”

This character was meant to be the quintessential Texas Ranger, reenacting some fictionalized adventures recorded of real ones—only the “interesting” ones where something had to be resolved by killing somebody, of coursse. Somewhat at a disadvantage in his own time (he became “Chick” at school because the boy called “Chuck” was bigger, and though the man in the jacket drawing blends into a wheat-colored landscape the stories continually mention his Apache look), Bowdrie never complains about the blatant bigotry of his day, but just quietly solves mysteries, rights wrongs, enforces respect for young ladies in distress, and is generally nice to everybody, even making it quick when he has to kill people. Which, unfortunately, is often. Each of the eight stories in this book was originally published independently, so each story has its own baddie and the final body count is high.

Were there really Apaches among the Texas Rangers? They weren’t identified as Apaches, but…Texas was its own, madly multiethnic, nation before it considered becoming a State, and, L’Amour tells us in the first of his historical notes, some of the men defending the Alamo with Davy Crockett were even of Mexican origin. If their loyalty was to Texas, then they identified as Texans. Their grandparents might have been French, German, Swiss (each of those countries set up little cultural colonies in Texas) or who knows what-all. I know for sure that my grandmother, growing up in Texas in the early twentieth century, studied only English at school but could make conversation in the local versions of Spanish, German, or Cherokee. So it seems historically appropriate that fictional Bowdrie has an Anglo-American name and education but a distinctly Apache face…even if, in the 1940s when his adventures were first published in a long-gone magazine, Hollywood’s code would have required that his part be played by a White actor.

Perhaps the most interesting part of this collection of Bowdrie’s fictional adventures, for me, is the notes that hint at whose adventures they were fictionalized from. One of the real Rangers, L’Amour tells us, was apparently born righthanded, lost the use of his right hand when he was fifteen, and did all of his riding, roping, and shooting with only his left hand. (He survived gun fights and other attempts on his life until he was eighty-nine, when, apparently tired of waiting, he killed himself.) L’Amour seems to be reporting these things for the benefit of critics who complained that shoot-’em-up “western” stories weren’t realistic. The fundamental idea that killing one or a few baddies will solve everybody’s problems isn't…but there really were people who were as tough and lucky as L’Amour’s heroes. And L’Amour never limited them to the nineteenth century or the Western States; he’d met a couple of them in real life, and so perhaps have you, though you certainly don’t meet them every day.