Bud “Frenchie” La Mar: Iowa’s Forgotten Cowboy Writer

 

Bud "Frenchie" La Mar (Des Moines Register. February 14, 1926)

For a few years in the 1920s, Bud “Frenchie” La Mar made a living getting on horses that wanted nothing to do with him.

 

Then he started writing about it.

 

La Mar was a rodeo cowboy, artist, and writer who worked the Iowa rodeo circuit during the mid-1920s. He rode broncos, drew them, and eventually turned the people he met and the trouble they got into stories for some of the country’s most popular magazines.

 

Then he disappeared from sight.

 

What little is known about La Mar comes largely from a feature he wrote for the Des Moines Sunday Register Magazine on February 14, 1926. The paper called him an “Iowa Rodeo Expert” and pictured him riding at the Centerville rodeo. 

 

Another photograph showed a young, clean-cut La Mar sitting at a desk, pencil in hand. The caption summed him up neatly: “Bud ‘Frenchie’ La Mar, cowboy artist and writer.”

During the previous two years, La Mar had appeared in rodeos and roundup exhibitions at Winterset, Cedar Rapids, Centerville, Eagle Grove, Knoxville, Fort Dodge, Perry, and Indianola. 

 

He had been called “Frenchie” since he was four years old, although the Register didn’t explain the nickname.

 

The previous fall, he married Lucile Hager of Cedar Rapids. The Register printed a photograph of her riding a galloping bronco in what the caption described as a “playground broncho.” So she may have followed the rodeo circuit as well, although there’s no contemporary information to support it.

 

Old-timers liked to talk about how much tougher cowboys had been in the old days. La Mar wasn’t buying it.

 

“You boys don’t ride like the old-timers used to,” was the complaint he said rodeo riders heard everywhere.

 

His answer was simple. The old cowboy wanted a horse he could eventually ride. The rodeo contractor wanted one that nobody could ride.

Mrs. Bud "Frenchie La Mar - Lucile Hager
(Des Moines Register. February 14, 1926)

Contractors traveled hundreds of miles looking for especially nasty horses, sometimes paying as much as $500 for one. The worse the horse behaved, the better. A rancher had little use for a horse that threw everybody who climbed aboard. A rodeo promoter had just found himself a star attraction.

 

La Mar knew the other side of rodeo life, too. Cowboys paid entrance fees, traveled from town to town, and hoped their winnings lasted long enough to reach the next show. A bad ride could leave a man bruised, broke, or both.

 

He could draw the action as well as describe it. The Register reproduced one of his sketches, a cowboy being launched over the head of a bucking horse. La Mar signed it simply, “Bud La Mar.”

 

In January 1927, Blue Book Magazine published his “Scandalous Bill’s Rodeo.” More stories followed, including “Carnival Ballyhoo,” “That Graveyard Horse,” “The White Elephant,” “The Bar Act,” “Buckin’ the Air” and “Cossack and Cowboy.”

 

His stories weren’t grand Western epics about sheriffs, cattle barons, and gunfighters staring each other down at high noon. They were about rodeo people—trick riders, bronc busters, showmen, bad horses, and cowboys trying to outdo one another.

 

And they were funny.

 

“The Bar Act,” published in Short Stories in 1928, revolves around trick riders trying to invent increasingly ridiculous stunts. One rider’s secret weapon involves a Ford axle bolted to a saddle. “Buckin’ the Air” takes rodeo cowboys and puts them aboard an airplane, which gives La Mar an entirely new way to make his characters miserable.

 

Magazine editors recognized that he wasn’t merely borrowing cowboy slang from the movies. Blue Book promoted him as a genuine rodeo rider, referring to him as its “bronco-buster fiction-writer.”

 

For a brief period, Frenchie La Mar had made the jump from Iowa rodeos to national magazines.

And then the trail goes cold.

 

Even basic details of his life remain elusive. His birthplace, real first name, later career, and eventual fate are unknown. 

 

Lucile Hager La Mar likewise largely disappears from the available record. Modern references to Bud La Mar remember the stories but have almost nothing to say about the man who wrote them.

 

That makes the 1926 Register feature something of a time capsule, showing his life before the pulp magazines made his name familiar to Western readers: riding a bronc at Centerville, sitting at his desk with a pencil, showing off one of his drawings and arguing that the cowboys of 1926 were every bit as tough as the men who came before them.

 

Frenchie La Mar didn’t need to imagine the cowboy life. He had lived it.

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