Her works, featuring cowboys and cows of the Flying U Ranch in Montana, reflected "an interest in ranch life, the use of working cowboys as main characters (even in romantic plots), the occasional appearance of eastern types for the sake of contrast, a sense of western geography as simultaneously harsh and grand, and a good deal of factual attention to such matters as cattle branding and bronc busting.
"[1] She was married three times: to Clayton Bower in 1890, to Bertrand William Sinclair (also a Western author) in 1905, and to Robert Elsworth Cowan in 1921.
Throughout this difficult time, Bower continued to advance her career, signing her first short-story writing contract for Popular Magazine in January 1905.
That same hard winter destroyed the Sinclairs' breeding horse herd on land in eastern Valley County where they had hoped to move in the spring.
After losing their herd, Bower and Sinclair left Montana for good and moved south and settled in a house on the coast in Santa Cruz, California.
[4] In 1920, Bower moved to Hollywood and married her third husband, Robert "Bud" Cowan, a cowboy who she had met in Big Sandy.
In 1921, Bower and Cowan reopened a silver mine in Nevada and operated it for several years until the Great Depression forced them to move again, this time to Depoe Bay, Oregon.
Later that year, Bower published her first Western novel, Chip of the Flying U, as a serial in Popular Magazine by Street & Smith.
Bower also collaborated with director Colin Campbell, writing stories and screenplays for seven Westerns under the name Bertha Muzzy Sinclair, including the 1921 film The Wolverine.
Mix starred in the first adaptation of Chip of the Flying U (1914) as well as in three other films written by Bower: When the Cook Fell Ill (1914), The Lonesome Trail (1914), and Weary Goes A’Wooing (1915).
[8] Bower used her experiences working within the studio system as the source material for several novels, including Jean of the Lazy A (1915), The Heritage of the Sioux (1915), The Phantom Herd (1916), and The Quirt (1920).
Bower's West is a place of change in which characters embrace new technologies from barbed wire to Kodak cameras.
For example, in describing a ranch kitchen, she imagines a tea kettle "singing placidly to itself and puffing steam with an air of lazy comfort, as if it were smoking a cigarette.
"[14] Reviewers praised Bower for her use of "chaste English," her "true-to-life fiction," her "real background of life among the bow-legged brethren," and her "playful, humorous vein."
A 1922 New York Times review stated: "there has always been an authenticity about them, a genuine smell of sagebrush and saddle leather, which many of her pretentious rivals lack.