Tippecanoe and Cougars Two
By Tuttle, W. C.
High in the mountains above Piperock, prospectors Ike Harper and Magpie Simpkins are minding their own business when a sputtering automobile climbs the road to their hillside cabin, carrying the most absent-minded pair the West has ever seen: "Tippecanoe" Seeley, a guide who can't remember his own boots, and Professor Aloysius Van Fleet, a bespectacled tenderfoot bent on filming wild cougars with a moving-picture camera. Add a long-suffering wife, a wide-eyed daughter, and a fastidious English lord to the party, and the stage is set for a tangle of ropes, claws, dust, and dialect-laced disaster. Narrated in the salty vernacular of a cowboy who has clearly seen too much, W. C. Tuttle's tall tale of the Montana high country is pure frontier slapstick from start to finish. First published in Adventure magazine in 1921, it remains a vintage gem of pulp-era Western humor.
Publisher: The Ridgway Company (in Adventure Magazine)
First published: 1921