Review: The Cowpuncher - Bradford Scott (A. Leslie Scott)

Alexander Leslie Scott is best remembered for his novels starring Texas Rangers Jim Hatfield and Walt Slade, of course, and rightly so. But he wrote quite a few stand-alone Western novels as well, most, if not all, of them rewritten and expanded from novellas he wrote for various Western pulps. His novel THE COWPUNCHER was published under the pseudonym Bradford Scott in hardcover in 1942 by Gateway Books, one of the lending library publishers, then reprinted in paperback by Leisure in 2009 and large print hardcover by Center Point in 2010. It’s still available in e-book and trade paperback editions on Amazon, and used copies of the Leisure paperback are easily found for sale on-line.

The original version of this story was published under the title “Black Diamonds”, as by A. Leslie, in the pulp WEST in the October 1940 issue. The black diamonds of the title refer to coal, which leads to a nice twist because this novel is about coal mining rather than gold or silver, as most Western mining yarns are. The hero, a cowboy named Huck Brannon, goes on a bender in Kansas City after the crew he belongs to delivers a trail herd there, and as a result he misses the train back home to Texas, where a rancher’s beautiful daughter is waiting for him. Circumstances forces him to hop a train to Colorado in the company of a couple of hoboes who become his friends and sidekicks.

Once there, they wind up hunting a lost treasure supposedly hidden by an evil Spanish nobleman a hundred years earlier. What they find is a coal deposit that they’re soon mining, a successful operation that makes good money and leads to a friendship with railroad magnate James G. “Jaggers” Dunn, a supporting character who often makes appearances in Scott’s novels. Of course, there are also villains who have their sights set on ruining Brannon.

THE COWPUNCHER is more epic in scope than most of Scott’s Westerns, with its action spanning a couple of years rather than a few days. It has the same vivid settings and dramatic action scenes, though, including a great one where our hero Huck has to ride a makeshift raft down a raging river in an attempt to stop a runaway train. Scott had a lot of experience with both mining and railroading, and he brought a definite air of authenticity to his stories concerning those endeavors. At times, the technical jargon gets so thick I had trouble keeping up with what was going on, but that didn’t detract from my enjoyment of the story.

This is a really good Western novel, the sort of yarn that would have made a great big-budget, late Forties movie from Republic Pictures. I had a fine time reading it and give it a high recommendation for fans of traditional Westerns centered around mining. By the way, I have the pulp in which the original version, “Black Diamonds”, was published, and other than changing the hero’s name from Chuck Brannon to Huck Brannon and the rancher’s beautiful daughter from Millie Doyle to Sue Doyle, Scott doesn’t appear to have revised it. Either version is well worth reading.