Frontier Excalibur

THE IRON MISTRESS (404 pp.)--Paul I. Wellman--Doubleday ($3.50).

Some of the liveliest historical writing about the Old West (The Trampling Herd, Death in the Desert) is the work of an ex-cowhand and ex-Kansas newspaperman named Paul I. (Iselin) Wellman. All of it was done before Wellman went to the far West, all the way to Hollywood, in fact, where he became a scriptwriter. Now, in The Iron Mistress, a historical novel about Frontiersman James Bowie, he writes thus:

"[Jim Bowie] heard her gasp, a startled catch of the breath as his hand ran down her arched back with a sleeking motion, encountered the stunning soft abundance of her hips, and drew her hard against him. Mouth crushed to mouth. Perfumed, soft as velvet, hot as fire, her lips trembled under his kiss."

The trembling lips belong to Catherine Villars, quadroon concubine of Pirate Jean Lafitte. It takes a brave man to meet her advances-in Lafitte's own Gulf of Mexico island hangout, but no one can accuse Louisiana's Jim Bowie of lacking nerve. Besides, Lafitte is dead drunk at the mo-mert. As for Catherine, who can blame her? Bowie is a bluff, broad-shouldered god, at once bold and gracious, a fighting terror whose terrible knife is to become a frontier legend, yet so gentle that a woman's touch makes him tremble.

Everything considered, Jim Bowie comes off mighty well in The Iron Mistress. Author Wellman admits that Bowie made his big killing smuggling slaves, the nastiast business of his day, but he uses his novelist's license overtime to show that Jim is uncomfortable in the slave trade and even pities some of its victims. In fact, he is in it only for the money. Even Jim's shady land speculations somehow take on the look of unintentional wrongs.

The Iron Mistress is a creaking fictional makeshift when it strains to get inside Bowie's mind. Author Wellman is more successful when he describes the fightingest man of his day in action, the massive bowie knife flashing, his disemboweled foes falling all about him. No one, it seems, can stand up to peaceful Jim when his dander is up. It is a sad irony that he should be lying helpless on a cot when the Alamo is stormed by Santa Anna's men on March 6, 1836. Even then he sells his life pretty dearly. Bowie's four pistols account for four Mexicans. A fifth, "the boldest of them, lay with the knife buried in his heart."

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