Genuine Western Montana Cartoonist Stan Lynde Knows How To Tell A Good, Authentic Cowboy Story

“The Bodacious Kid” By Stan Lynde, (Cottonwood Publishing, 241 pages, $24.95)

Those of us who were children of the 1950s still recall a time when Westerns reigned the airwaves. From “Gunsmoke” to “Bonanza,” “Maverick” to “Wagon Train,” we embraced what we thought was the Western experience from the comfort of our living rooms.

Those days no longer exist, and that’s not all bad. If the Western ever does resurrect itself on television, maybe the Indians finally will get a fair shake.

Until then, Western fans take their pleasure where they can, and that typically involves trips to the library or to stores where videos and books are sold.

We’ll save videos for another time. Right now, we’re concerned with Stan Lynde.

Lynde, you may recall, is the Kalispell, Mont., author-cartoonist who for many years wrote and drew the Western comic strips “Rick O’Shay” and “Latigo.” Now, after several years of putting together collector’s editions of past strips, Lynde has published his first novel.

And while the estate of Louis L’Amour has nothing to worry about, Lynde’s book “The Bodacious Kid” should delight anyone who can both appreciate a good story and who is nostalgic for a traditional tale of the Old West.

The setting is the fictional county of Progress, Mont., in the late summer of 1882. Young Merlin Fanshaw is a young cowboy on the lookout for a job. His father having been killed in a range accident, Merlin is looking to “hire on with some cow outfit as a rider on their rough string.”

But very quickly that plan unravels. First, he is braced by the sheriff of Shenanigan, Mont., a walrus-mustached rough sort named Androcles Wilkes who accuses him of horse thievery.

Then almost as soon as he is sent on an undercover mission to find the famed robber Original George Starkweather, he is braced by another lawman: U.S. Marshall Chance Ridgeway. Seems Ridgeway, too, wants Starkweather - but he wants Wilkes as well, and so he forces Merlin to help.

If things weren’t already complicated, they get even more so when Merlin finds Original George to be as tough as the two lawmen - but, at least at first, immensely more worthy of loyalty and respect. For young Merlin, life is a conundrum.

There are other aspects to the story, including a love affair with a purty li’l thing named Mary Alice. But the central theme of “The Bodacious Kid” - which is the outlaw alias that Merlin adopts - remains Merlin’s search to find his own way. Until he decides for himself what is right, he remains more a kid than a man.

Lynde isn’t mining new territory here. A whole library of Western literature has probed just about every facet of the Western experience there is, and that includes the new authors such as James Welch (“Fools Crow”) who provide a voice for the Indian tribes.

But Lynde, a Montana native, understands his world. His grasp of the cowboy life is genuine, as is his understanding of the ambiguities surrounding those essential issues of good vs. evil. Stan Lynde is the real thing. And so, in its way, is “The Bodacious Kid.”

, DataTimes