Many casual fans of Abbey might consider George Washington Hayduke as the author's favorite character, but it was John W. "Jack" Burns who Abbey kept writing about. Burns is introduced in The Brave Cowboy. He is also a major character in Abbey's science fiction novel, Good News. Burns makes cameo appearances in both The Monkey Wrench Gang and Hayduke Lives!.
The Brave Cowboy also contains elements of future books, though the relationship between them is unclear. The Brave Cowboy explains that Burns is the grandson of Henry Vogelin, whose ranch Burns spent time on as a child. The ranch, currently in the hands of the US Air Force is part of a base commanded by General DeSalius. Vogelin and DeSalius will be characters six years later in Abbey's 1962 work Fire on the Mountain, the story of a boy from the East Coast who visits his grandfather's ranch and falls in love with the desert and ranch life just in time to see both destroyed by development. However, Burns's time on the ranch is well detailed in Brave Cowboy and the only characters the stories share are Vogelin and DeSalius. Though the book is written as a memoir, Jack seems too old to have been the boy staying on the ranch at the moment of dispossession. Having written Fire On The Mountain after The Brave Cowboy, Abbey chose to write about the child "Billy" rejecting the option of using the novel to explain the past of Jack Burns. Yet it is still possible that the novels are directly linked, as the number of Vogelin's children is never revealed. Jack and Billy may be cousins or brothers, and the Vogelin and ranch in question may indeed be the same in both novels.
