Thanks for all the replies, I was beginning to think the topic was dead 
I can buy that maybe REH was just a rowdy guy and fairly young, so maybe they had a lot of wrestling and boxing matches in the neighborhood. Hey, we did the same thing when I grew up here in the south.
But as the above poster mentioned, a casual observer might think sword play (or any weapon play) is more basic than it really is. I've read some passages in REH where he gives me the impression he understands it at a deeper level. Some of the concepts are the same in hand to hand, that is true. Maybe it is his understanding of that shining through.
When I mentioned "martial arts". I didn't mean that to imply eastern martial arts, but all types of fighting in general.
IF REH was a very heavy and thorough researcher, could we assume that he researched fighting (of all sorts) to give his stories that extra pop?
I brought up this question because it's fascinating to me how many authors out there will try to write a fight scene that doesn't feel real...and yes, i know we are really talking about fantasy
It's more than just that he was "rowdy." Howard was an accomplished amateur boxer, and was a regular down at the local ice house, where all of the town roughnecks would gather at the end of the week to blow of steam. Several eye-witness accounts have Howard making a good showing for himself in and amongst those guys.
Howard was no stranger to violence. He grew up with it. His father was a country doctor. People showed up on the porch with various wounds and injuries from time to time. In boomtowns, gunshots and knife wounds weren't uncommon. In addition to that, there were plenty of "old timers" still around; gentlemen who had participated in the Civil War, and who helped run the Comanche out of Texas, by force. Howard listened to their stories, just as he listened to the roughnecks bragging about other towns they'd been to and the things they'd done. It's stuff like this that informs the Conan stories.
As to research, let me again state that whatever he may have "researched" came from pulp mags like Adventure and fiction by Harold Lamb and Talbot Mundy. There was no library in Cross Plains, and the library in Brownwood would not have had access to old, translated from the French, manuals on dueling. Such things would have been of invaluable interest to REH, but you're talking about rural Texas in the mid 1920s to 1930s. From a civilization point of view, that would have been equal to roughly to the turn of the century anywhere else.
That said, there's no telling WHAT Howard saw or read, to be honest. He made trips to Dallas, Fort Worth, Austin, New Orleans, San Antonio, and other cities that DID have bigger and better libraries. While there is some mention of what he researched on these various trips, it's by no means an indicator of everything he researched. If there was a book on Calvary Saber fighting, Howard may have looked through it. If Burton's "Book of the Sword" were on hand, you betcha, he'd have devoured it. But there was a lot of accurate info to be had from Adventure magazine; many of its contributors were former soldiers, world travelers, and men-of-action.
Let's face it: the key ingredient to Howard's fight scenes is his incomparable imagination. He could visualize violence in simple yet dynamic terms and that's what makes it seem so "realistic" when you read it.
