Walt Coburn was first and foremost a
cowboy. The Montana native was the son of Robert Coburn, the founder
of Circle C Ranch. In the late 1800s, this was the largest ranch in
the northwest (Montana didn't become a state until 1889). Coburn cut
his teeth as a cowboy, and served in WWI before becoming a full-time
writer in the 1920s. From that period through the 1940s, the author
contributed over a hundred stories to the pulps, predominantly “Dime
Western Magazine”. From the 1930s through the early 1970s, he wrote
over 30 western novels, including “Wet Cattle” in 1955. In 1970,
the novel's title was changed to the much more gritty sounding
“Violent Maverick” via the Macfadden-Bartell line.
Penniless cowboy Pat Roper saved
Mexican bandit Pablo Guerrero's life in a prior gun-battle. Pablo
runs into Roper in a firefight over stolen cattle at the
Arizona-Mexican border. Pablo gifts Roper the Two Block ranch, 25,000
acres of good feed, water and a some start-up cattle. The problem is
that Pablo is running guns through it in an attempt to overthrow the
Mexican government. Roper, not digging into the devil in the details,
accepts the gift and takes the ranch. He later finds out that Pablo's
lifetime enemy, Wig Murphy, borders the ranch with his own cattle
empire, and he's crushing the Two Block ranch out.
Coburn's validity as a real cowboy is a
catch-22. While his books possess dirty, dusty realism, they are
written in “cowboy” terminology that's sometimes really hard to
decipher. It's this element that dampened what was otherwise a
well-crafted story in “Violent Maverick”. It's a short read at
140-pages, and has a breakneck pace that had me finishing it in less
than two hours. Was I maniacally rushing so it was over quickly, or
because I wanted to learn the fate of young sod-buster Pat Roper?
Probably a little of both. The end result is just another dog-eared,
yellowed western that passes the time.
