by Greg Hischak
06.11.01

"Exploitation isn't just a word
in an Indian Treaty."

—Wallace Bearbourne

FROM THE VERY DAY OF HIS BIRTH, the sage-covered ranges that Western artist Wallace Bearbourne called home were just too small to hold him. A precocious child and misfit bully, Wallace was removed from the constraints of schooling at age eight to work the uranium seams and railyards of Ely, Nevada. By age ten he was a hard-drinking, cussing, knife-wielding sonofabitch who had nonetheless developed a keen knack for drawing. By age fifteen there wasn't a juvenile correctional facility in Eastern Nevada whose cellwalls weren't scrawled on, scratched over or burrowed through by Wallace Bearbourne.

Set loose amidst the Great Depression, the young Wallace obtained a WPA job painting numbers onto highway mile markers. Covering twenty miles a day at two cents a mile, Wallace learned quickly not only the rudiments of mathematics but the correlation between land and profit. His meticulously rendered yellow diamond Cow signs and Stock in Roadway variations gained for Wallace some reputation, but it was his work along Nevada's secondary highways between Winnemucca and Panaca — Leaping Deer Next 4 Miles and 6% Grade signage — that brought him to the attention of Shipberg & Sons, publishers of pulp serials. Snatched by opportunity from the shoulders of the West, Wallace Bearbourne suddenly found himself a fledgling illustrator in Chicago.

Wallace rose quickly in his field, winning coveted assignments through a combination of raw talent and workplace intimidation. The gutsy bravado of his linework and compositional tension carried, and frequently overshadowed, the derivative shoot-out storylines he was assigned to illustrate. His mercilessly insensitive renderings of savage Indians, gnarly-toothed border banditos and hourglass-hipped school marms all helped define Wallace as not just a cowboy artist's cowboy artist, but also something of a rube.

The Border Raid Round-Up — illustration from Chapter Seven of Big Spank at Stetson Hole

From his comfortable Evanston, Illinois rambler Wallace Bearbourne looked back at his squalid Western roots, not in anger, but with little dollar signs pulsing in his eyes. As money started coming in, he bought several thousand acres of land outside Elko, Nevada. Wallace called his new-bought acreage Hidden Driveway Springs and he spent several weeks there each summer denuding its hills and banks of forest and topsoil.

"Logging makes strong neighbors," Wallace wrote that first summer to his fiance, Lyla Humpfmann, daughter of a prominent John Birch Society fundraiser.

After the war years — spent painting big-toothed Japanese caricatures on 80-pound incendiary bombs — Wallace began illustrating regularly for such serials as Black Stallion Stampeders, Santa Fe Shootist, and the feverishly adored Ranger Tom Dinkum series. With the consecutive successes of Ranger Dinkum and the La Brea Bandits, Ranger Dinkum at Enchanted Canyon Spigot, and Vamanos to Lubbock with Ranger Tom — Wallace wasn't just drawing the West; to his many young readers he personified it. His trademark rhinestone-studded denim shirts became as familiar to his impressionable young pulp audience as the psychopath vigilante lawmen he illustrated. To the regulars at the Green Mill in Chicago, however, Wallace was "that creepy guy in the cowboy hat" hunched over at the end of the bar who muttered to himself and enjoyed throwing peanuts at beat poets.

With such lucrative serials as Ghost Riders of Septic Mesa, Wallace's fame grew and his already close ties with the fringe right strengthened after marrying Lyla. Wallace's strong advocacy of a first-strike nuclear strategy with which he infused the syndicated Drawing Cowboys with Wally series also landed him high-profile NRA calendar assignments. From a comfortable distance, Wallace Bearbourne was defining the American West.

When his Aryan Dan Diphthong Gang illustrations won the coveted Oro d'Boise Award, he used the winnings to expand his Hidden Driveway Springs holdings — buying up as much neighboring ridgeline as he could to begin the manganese surface mining operation he had always dreamed of.

The curmudgeonly sidekick Borachito portrayed in a pensive moment from Ranger Dinkum's Tortilla Pow Wow

"Deep mines make strong neighbors," Wallace always said and indeed, he became well-known across Nevada as the absentee landholder with the strongest neighbors. Artist, armchair cowboy, red-baiter and venture capitalist, Wallace's dogged pursuit of such resources as pyrite, iridium, soft coal and manganese — none of which would be found on his Hidden Driveway Springs holdings — drained his bank accounts as fast as Sacajawea Chaparral Sweethearts brought the money in.

Yet the swaggering line quality that had propelled Wallace's career forward was beginning to waver. He complained that the well was running dry, the trail was petering out, the horse was on its last legs and every other cowboy metaphor he could think of — all to shift blame from a career of flawed speculating. He was drinking too much as well and missing deadlines to days spent shooting cans of corn off his wife's head in the basement of their Oak Park split-level — and then the terrible accident. Fortunately, Lyla's thick glasses took the brunt of the bullet and she survived with only minor scars and a stutter — but it signaled an end to their marriage.

The revenue from pulp novels was also running dry as America's youth discovered drugs to be more exciting than Westerns. Soon Wallace found himself with ample time to wander the depleted natural resources of his Hidden Driveway Springs. Driving its Big Hole country, maliciously peppering with buckshot the yellow diamond road signs he had painted as a youth, Wallace Bearbourne was home.

One cold dawn in the cab of his pickup rental atop Big Chief Butte, a shotgun trigger aimed at his throat Wallace suddenly had a vision: the expanses of profitless borax processing facilities stretching across his valley below were suddenly transformed into a vast lake. Sucked from irreplenishable aquifers deep in the earth — a narrow, shallow, prone to evaporation inland sea would form to become a freshwater beacon to recreational boaters from across the country. Filling behind the bulldozed gravels of Wallace Bearbourne Dam, it would be called Hidden Driveway Lake.

"Deep wells make big lakes," Wallace announced as he began making the dream a reality. From his command post back in Illinois, he oversaw the construction of boat ramps and tackle kiosks with the greed and cupidity of a man half his age. Mine tailings were leveled to accommodate trailer parks and splintery plywood old Western town facades were hastily erected for kiddies to play on as angling parents waded the verdant algae blooms of Hidden Driveway Lake.

Sadly, Wallace Bearbourne never saw the completion of his masterwork. Turning his resources and attention to a series of proposed shopping malls in Salt Lake City, Wallace never got around to gazing upon his thin brackish strip of recreational paradise. But had he remembered to, surely a tear might have formed in his eye for one reason or another.

Wallace took much from the West — and gave precious little back. Still, when gazing from Bearbourne Banks Campground at the glittering brown backwater and abandoned mining equipment of Hidden Driveway Lake, we can't help but think of Wallace Bearbourne and his immortal words:

"You can't bury a mistake forever, but you can cover it with water and stock it with big mouth."

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