Max Evans’ Second Cowboy Book
Set For Filming After 36 Years

By David Bowser

DES MOINES, N.M. — On a small rise near this community lie the graves of Cain and Able, separated for eternity by their mother.

This is Hi Lo Country.

This is the country author Max Evans knows best. These are the people of whom Evans writes. The country and its people are soon to be immortalized again in film.

The Hi Lo Country stretches from Taos and Santa Fe east to Amarillo in the Texas Panhandle and north to Kenton in the Oklahoma Panhandle, taking in a square of southeast Colorado. It includes the mountains and the plains, but mostly it is a vast sea of grass that is home to large herds of cattle and the people whose livelihoods depend upon them.

Max Evans is a flatlander who discovered the mountains of New Mexico early in life.

Born at Ropes, Texas, near Lubbock, Evans was 12 years old when he ventured to Lamy, N.M., in search of his Uncle Slim, a cowboy who was to contribute considerably, Evans says, to his book The Rounders. Evans ended up working at a ranch on Glorietta Mesa in Northern New Mexico when he wasn't playing football in Andrews, Texas, where his parents by then lived.

By the time he graduated, he had his own ranch east of Des Moines. It was here that Evans' novel Hi Lo Country has its roots.

Written some 36 years ago, it features the mythical town of Hi Lo, drawn from Des Moines, Springer and Cimarron, N.M. The characters are drawn from the soil that sleeps under winter snows and, if the winter moisture is plentiful, produces carpets of grass and fat steers in the summer. If the rain and snow don't come, that soil fills the broad blue sky, turning it brown.

Next spring, Evans' novel will come to life in New Mexico as film crews begin shooting the movie version of Hi Lo Country around Las Vegas, N.M. They are scheduled to shoot for 10 weeks starting March 15. The interior shots will be filmed on a sound stage in Santa Fe.

"It took us the longest time probably in the history of Hollywood to get this title cleared," Evans says. "We were working with lawyers in London and Hollywood. I'm so damned tired of it. It's been 36 years. I don't much give a damn what they do."

Over the years, Evans has optioned Hi Lo Country to a number of filmmakers, including his friend, the late Hollywood director Sam Peckinpah.

But with legal title to the film clear and filming set to start, Evans is happy that the characters he wrote about more than three decades ago will finally come to life on the silver screen.

"It's my last run," he says. "I can't live through another one. They've got to do it this time. I won't be around when they do it next time."

Hi Lo Country isn't Evans' first experience with the frustrations of Hollywood. He also witnessed several false starts with his novel The Rounders, the story of two cowboys played on the silver screen by Glenn Ford and Henry Fonda, who worked for rancher Jim Ed Love, played by Chill Wills.

"They used to have at these studios what they called a slush pot," Evans says. "A New York agent would just send in a manuscript before it was published," and it would go into the "pot."

Burt Kennedy, who eventually directed The Rounders, found it in the slush pot under the name A Taste of Horse Hair.

Kennedy took the story to Fess Parker, who was at the height of his career with his role as Davy Crockett. Parker called Evans and asked him to come to California for a conference.

"I said, 'Well, I'll do that, but I want to explain something to you,'" Evans says. "'You see, I've got four tires, but that's all. They're slick.' I said, 'I can't leave my family here because they can't eat right now.'"

The film option on that book put food on the table and tires on the car for a while. Eventually, however, Parker passed on the project. Several other directors looked at the story, but it was five years before Kennedy finally made the film.

"They got a pretty good movie," Evans says. "I would like to have seen one a little raunchier. I write about cowboys with their warts on them."

He says he feels that Kennedy got about 85 percent of the feeling in the story.

"He got the sense of entrapment those old boys were in," Evans says. "Old Jim Ed Love. There are Jim Ed Loves wherever you go."

Evans says he's proud of that film.

"It's held up," he says. "As far as a working cowboy movie, it's the best one made."

The Rounders was also aired as a television series in the 1960s.

But Hi Lo Country has taken a lot longer.

One of the first to option the book for film was Peckinpah, who directed Evans' favorite Western movie, The Wild Bunch. In fact, Peckinpah optioned the book several times.

Between the different times Peckinpah had the movie rights, Evans sold it to others. One of the directors wanted to cast Steve McQueen and Lee Marvin, but the head of the studio canceled the project, describing the two actors as a madman and a falling-down drunk.

"Within two years, Steve McQueen was the number one box office star, and about five or six years later Lee Marvin won an Oscar and was one of the first people who ever got over a million dollars a picture," Evans says. "That just shows you how crazy it gets, and some of the funny things that have happened to that book."

With each option, new scripts were written for Hi Lo Country, none of which pleased Evans.

"There's no telling how many guys wrote scripts on this," Evans says. "Nobody ever got a script that was good, to tell you the truth. The Peckinpah script, you'd be disappointed in it. He thought it was his best work. It was really bad. In the first place, it would have been a five hour film the way he had it written. It would have cost so much money, if it wasn't a huge Gone With the Wind type success, it would have broke the studio. But he was just blind to it. He was just desperate to get that thing made. He never gave up. He was still trying when he died."

But Evans is happy with the selection of Waylon Green to do the latest rewrite for Hi Lo Country. He did the screenplay for The Wild Bunch.

There is a saying among writers that you write about that which you know best. Evans knows the ranchland of Eastern New Mexico and West Texas. He knows drouth. He knows the blizzards that blow down across the prairie. He even knows the outlaw horse in The Rounders. It was a four year-old roan that his Uncle Slim rode.

Evans draws on experience, but it was only after careers as a cowboy, a rancher and a painter that he turned to writing. Still, the written word was always there.

During the Depression, when his family lived on a small ranch near Hobbs, N.M., Evans’ father established a town, Humble City. Evans’ mother was postmistress. Even through the rough times, Evans says, she came up with money to buy books to read to her young son.

"By the time I started school, I could read almost as good as my teachers," he says. "Of course, we just had one teacher, so I didn't have a lot of competition there."

Later, when he took the job up on Glorietta Mesa, he read the French author Balzac. The cow camp where he lived didn't have a phone, a radio or water in the house, but there were three volumes of Balzac.

"I don't know how they got there, but I started reading those things," he says. "I was just a little old kid. Of course, like all little old kids, I read Zane Grey. That's the thing you're supposed to do, isn't it? I'm not going to blame my deciding to be a writer on Zane Grey, but I'll tell you one thing, he sure entertained the hell out of me. Anyway, I started reading that pot-bellied Frenchman, and I was just astounded when I finished that first book. I thought, 'How in the unholy hell did that little sucker take scores and scores of people and just weave them in and out of their lives, and then at the end you know where everybody is?'"

The next step in his writing was provided by the principal of Andrews High School. Although Evans played football in Andrews, his memories of the school's library are more vivid than those of the gridiron.

The principal, J.D. Smith, arranged for Evans to play football and take a minimum of classes so he could spend time in the library reading. Evans was even allowed to check out books to take up to Glorieta Mesa while he worked up there.

It probably helped, Evans grins, that he knew where all the quail were in the county and took Smith hunting.

About the time Evans graduated, his aunt's husband, a doctor in Oklahoma City, took over a ranch 14 miles east of Des Moines, N.M., in payment of a debt. The couple sold it to Evans on an easy payment plan. He borrowed money from Farmer and Stockman Bank in Clayton to buy cattle.

He married his high school sweetheart and started his family, but World War II had broken out and Evans joined the army and soon found himself in the infantry, fighting his way across Europe. After the war he returned to New Mexico and his ranch.

"I was surrounded by huge ranchers," Evans says. "I had really good water. Before the war, they were all going broke so nobody was trying to buy anything. But when I got back from the war, they'd had three or four good years of cattle just going up, up, up.

"Now they've got all this money and all three are looking at my water holes. As dumb as cowboys are, I caught on to this. I was working for all three of them, doing day labor. I thought, 'Wait a minute, this isn't the way I had it figured.' There were two other little guys there I could lease from, but that's as big as I could ever get."

He sold out, got a divorce and moved to Taos to become a painter. It was here that he met his current wife, Pat.

Evans studied with Woody Crumbo, a Pottawatime Indian artist, whom Evans calls not only his art instructor but a spiritual mentor and friend. It was while under Crumbo's tutelage that Evans started writing, a decision that initially met with little enthusiasm from his wife.

"I said, 'I believe I'll quit painting and go to writing,'" Evans says. "She said, 'We just got to where we can eat.' I wouldn't have blamed her if she'd chopped me right in half with a dull ax, but in about a minute she said, 'Okay, get after it.'"

Life is a circle, Evans says. He's getting more and stronger urges to go back to painting again.

"I figure I can finish up what the Great Mystery in the Sky allotted me to do this time around in about two years if I keep my health," he says. "If somebody just don't blow my damned brains out."

Evans says he was in his early 40s when he realized that no matter how a person plans things, there are occurrences that will take him in a different direction.

"I always play the odds," he explains. "The odds are I'm just in fair health. I've got three books started. I figure I can finish up three and do two new ones. Then if I have any time left, I'll paint. Then I wonder what I'll run into that will keep me from doing it. I'll be turning a corner, and there'll be a big old rock that I'll stumble over, and it'll turn me another way."