The Haunted Mesa (Louis L'Amour's Lost Treasures)

by Louis L'Amour

  Regardless of which mesa he actually climbed as a teenager, throughout the late 1970s and early 1980s we made it an ongoing project to explore more and more of the Lake Powell and Monument Valley area near No Man’s Mesa while doing research for this story. Early on, one of Dad’s friends, Jackson Clark or Don Demarest, drove and I got to come along. Later, it would be Dad and I in our Land Cruiser FJ-55 or a Jeep Wagoneer.

  The area on either side of the San Juan River is extremely desolate and harshly beautiful. To the south, it resembles the surface of Mars. Vegetation is rare and can usually be measured in inches rather than feet. We pounded along a lot of washed-out roads interrupted by sand hills and boulders. We explored Anasazi ruins untouched by archeologists and heard dozens of spooky stories: tales of haunted buildings, Navajo witchcraft, and strange animals. I think we can be pretty sure the old cowboy in Kingman didn’t tell Louis how to find gold disks that came from another universe, but, even in my day, there were plenty of wild stories to choose from.

  On one trip out to the mesa, I spotted some trees on the opposite side of the river. Trees were a rarity in the area and seeing these got us interested in the landscape to the north of the San Juan. We then explored Mike’s Mesa, Nokai Dome, Castle Canyon, and Johnnie’s Hole. Dad flew over the area numerous times in a plane and we landed on top of No Man’s Mesa with a helicopter. I even took a trip up Lake Powell by boat with a couple friends to enter Castle Canyon and Johnnie’s Hole from the lake and shoot photographs that Dad could use for reference.

  Our family met some fascinating people while working on the project: Navajo artist Clifford Brycelea; environmentalist and novelist Edward Abbey; Abbey’s good-natured nemesis and Sagebrush Rebel, Calvin Black; Blanding, Utah, policeman Mike Halliday; and our good friend Tom Austin, police chief, novelist, and recently the State Department’s senior police adviser in both Iraq and Pakistan. In many ways, Tom was Louis’s inspiration for Gallagher in The Haunted Mesa.

  All of this was a great deal of fun. Dad was indulging his interests in a way he’d never really been able to do before; he finally had the time and money to plan these extensive explorations. However, as unlikely as it seems, I fear some of that “fun” may have filled his mind with too many wonderful locations, too many archeological theories, and too many spooky stories for him to coherently piece together into a single novel. Worse yet, all those various discoveries and friendships may have pushed him to begin writing The Haunted Mesa before he was truly ready.

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  Louis famously didn’t like to rewrite. He had spent years training himself to create directly from his unconscious. The benefit of this process was that it led to work that was fast, instinctual, and had a great deal of appeal to readers; they were swept along, experiencing the story unfolding at much the same pace he was. However, to do that sort of writing often required an unconscious gestation period that could run from years to decades. The Louis L’Amour’s Lost Treasures project is an encyclopedia of the ways my father would experiment with a story, often to discover it wasn’t ready to be completed.

  There were a number of factors that may have pushed Dad to write The Haunted Mesa before he should have or that caused problems once he started. Probably the most significant was that, uncharacteristically, he discussed this novel with other people on numerous occasions. Usually, he was very cautious about getting “talked out”—getting to know the story so well he started losing enthusiasm for writing it. Writing for Louis was always a process of discovery; that was the thing that motivated him.

  He also enlisted a number of people in the Haunted Mesa research process—the archeologists he spoke with, the friends who drove or flew him on research trips, and a number of others, not to mention myself. I’m not sure why this story was different, but he talked about it a lot. And doing so raised his aspirations regarding what he wanted to achieve. Unfortunately, he then felt a great deal of pressure to commit to a number of ideas he had merely been considering, as if he had made some kind of promise or had entered into some sort of a contract with the people he had told.

  The problem became even worse when it began to look like his plans might go public. A magazine reporter covered one of our research expeditions, as did a documentary film crew. The businessman in Louis, the guy who had learned how to promote boxers on the streets of Oklahoma City and had built up the recognition of his own name when no publisher would bother with him, jumped at these opportunities. Yet, Dad was sensitive (perhaps overly so) to the possibility that all this attention was creating the expectation that he would soon finish a book he had, so far, barely started…and that the book would live up to all of his various claims about its content.

  Though The Haunted Mesa was the first time Louis had ever gotten himself in this deep, much of the predicament was inherent in his work habits. He maintained his amazing productivity by imagining that any story he could conceive of was actually already finished—all he had to do was type it up. It’s an interesting technique…if you can make it work. Writer’s block tends to be a crisis of confidence more than one of creativity.

  However, this calculated optimism could create problems if it leaked out to the public in the wrong way. Dad would occasionally announce the publication of books he hadn’t even started and indeed never went on to write, or he might publicly mention titles that, once the book was finished, he didn’t use. In the case of The Haunted Mesa, not only did he feel the pressure from outside, but he had also built up some unrealistically high ambitions of his own.

  First and foremost was the challenge of evoking the air of mystery and suspense that a book like this requires, especially since science fiction was an unfamiliar genre to him. Additionally, Dad wanted the story to examine how the Ancestral Puebloans, or Anasazi, might have developed if they had not had to deal with drought, internal strife, competition from other tribes or clans, and the eventual encroachment of Europeans. Dad also wanted to reverse-engineer some of the controversial work of Julian Jaynes (The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind, 1976) in order to create a fictional society directed by mysterious, otherworldly. oracle-like powers.

  My quick and dirty take on Jaynes’s theory of the bicameral mind is that in ancient times human beings’ left and right brains may not have been as interconnected as they are today, and that some people experienced intuition as if it were the voices of the gods speaking in their heads. Louis found fascinating the idea that, as the two hemispheres became more completely integrated, there were only a few throwbacks who could hear these messages: the oracles, the insane, and, perhaps, the creative. For a man who worked almost exclusively from his unconscious, it was a fascinating concept.

  Here are some of Louis’s notes regarding the ancient leader referred to in The Haunted Mesa as “He Who Had Magic:”:

  Sit [Situation]: Long ago—about 1240—large party breaks away (check for clan that disappeared) & returns to land beyond veil.

  Finds area and build small dams to hold water.

  Move into cliffs as before but larger dam is built at behest of new leader who arises.

  All is done on voices. New leader acts thru one of oracles perhaps.

  He organizes his clan—or some of them—and they undertake projects—others object—goes against old ways. His success aroused jealousy. By observation he discovers which soil is best. He learns to know by feel and touch…Use crude astronomy. He carries on beyond what is usually done. He advocates major changes, emboldened by success. He is stoned to death. Yet his practices are continued under cover by others, including a grandson.

  Below is a description of the damage that a violent minority inflicted on the society on “the other side.” It has some similarities to much more recent theories concerning a negative influence on the Ancestral Puebloans, possibly related to interlopers from the Toltec lands of Mexico, which may have spread to the surrounding
area from Chaco Canyon.

  They had built wells, larger pueblos, underground tunnels bringing the water down from the mountains, but evil had come among them, a few great lords acquired much of the land and control of the water, salt impregnated much of the land and superstition had grown. Human sacrifice had begun again, and a priesthood developed. A mild and simple people were so no longer. Then some of these had fled to the mountains to try to maintain their own way of life and there they had formed ties with He Who Knows Magic and attempted to live a life away from the Lords of Shibalba.

  A part of those Shamans have chosen evil ways. What is evil? Discuss whole question of evil, Biblical evil, other. Various definitions.

  What was [the] evil from which they fled in third world? Or the first or second? Suppose this evil awaited them on their return? A subtle evil not at first recognized or understood?

  What lies beyond the veil? What was the nature of the evil?

  A disciplined culture that has achieved much progress but is now failing through lack of new blood, new ideas, and creativity.

  Deviations from the norm have been neglected if quiet, punished if out-spoken.

  Medical practice has tended to build immunity rather than to cure; research has all been to build walls against illness instead of curing once it is found. Quarantines have been set up on certain areas, efforts made to isolate disease and then to build immunity against it. (Examine the possibilities of this and how work was directed.)

  A tendency developed to isolate the nonconformist also to the extent that growth patterns have either ceased or become erratic.

  To control the use of water a tightly disciplined people were essential.

  Passages through the veil have been sharply limited and only by especially trained and immunized people.

  All action is directed by the Hand…

  And then regarding the people who oppose the oppressive forces of The Hand and The Lords of Shibalba:

  Gov? [Government?] How organized? Rebels in outlying districts, like old Hopis. Gentle, strong, enduring.

  These were all interesting ideas, and pretty soon Dad had written about seventy pages of the manuscript. But then, as we have seen over and over in the Louis L’Amour’s Lost Treasures series, the process temporarily stalled. The story needed time, and he went off to work on other books while still continuing to do research and exploration. However, the tensions within him were mounting. He may have felt that his pride or reputation was at stake because he had talked the project up to so many people, and without a doubt he wanted to get on with it and discover how the story would turn out. Eventually he allowed The Haunted Mesa to be placed on the release schedule at Bantam Books. Normally, this might simply have motivated him to get on with it, but The Haunted Mesa was a hugely ambitious project. To top it all off, Dad was also dealing with an extraordinary number of external commitments.

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  In the mid-1980s, Louis L’Amour was at the peak of his popularity; he had a number of books on the bestseller lists, he was receiving prestigious awards, and accepting numerous speaking engagements. Though he’d been a modestly successful author for many years, the increase in his notoriety between 1975 and 1985 had been significant, and he was only just learning how to balance this new version of his public and private lives. At the positive end of the scale, Dad had been asked to join the National Commission on Space and the Library of Congress’s Center for the Book. On a more negative note, he was also involved in a lawsuit over the placement of a power line on our Colorado ranch and another suit between rival publishers. Louis seemed to relish a certain amount of pressure, but the number of distractions that were piling up could not have been conducive to the sort of stream-of-consciousness writing that was his forte.

  In a number of places, if you read carefully you can see Louis fighting to get inside The Haunted Mesa, to really own it in the same way he owned almost everything else he wrote. As the story evolves there are characters who seem to get ahead of themselves, reacting prematurely to situations that have not fully materialized. Yet in other places they take the strangest things for granted. Mike doesn’t choose to simply sit down and read Eric’s daybook, the place where all the answers can be found. Eric deliberately doesn’t look at the paintings in the kiva he is excavating, even though he is just feet away and must have cleared the dirt away from them. Mike drives back and forth asking himself a near-endless series of questions (questions Louis was actually asking himself), wondering, most of all, if he can actually allow himself to believe what he has just experienced.

  All of this is evidence that Dad was struggling with a process he had found easy and pleasurable at almost every other juncture of his career. He was desperately trying to start the engine of his unconscious, but, just like Julian Jaynes’s intermittent oracles, his muse had become unreliable. It wasn’t telling him what was in Eric’s daybook. It wasn’t telling him if the paintings in the kiva were important to the story. And it wasn’t giving him the answers to all those questions that Mike (or Louis) kept asking. It simply wasn’t ready.

  In later chapters I think Dad was hoping that the characters of Weston, Volkmeer, or Zipacna would step in and clarify the story by adding information or, more to the point, conflict. Under less problematic circumstances, introducing such characters might have immediately turned the plot in a more positive direction. But, as potential antagonists, Volkmeer and Zipacna arrive too late and don’t play large enough roles to refocus the direction of the novel.

  Working on my TV adaptation of The Haunted Mesa, I was forced to take into consideration every detail of the book and everything I could remember about the writing of it. Luckily, I was also in the process of organizing all of Louis’s notes for the Lost Treasures project. One of the things I discovered was that early on Dad’s muse had delivered a very clever idea, an ingenious and underdeveloped theme that was, unfortunately, at odds with other aspects of the narrative. This theme had to be either used or discarded; committing to it partway wasn’t really going to be helpful. I believe that many of the issues in The Haunted Mesa probably would have been resolved if I had been able to identify the problem back in the days when Dad was asking me for my help….

  Throughout the first two thirds of the story, a great deal of the conflict occurs within Mike Raglan. Mike is a professional skeptic. He writes for a magazine like Skeptical Inquirer (a magazine Louis himself subscribed to). He debunks myths and ghost stories; he proves that accepted science and rational thought are the be-all and end-all. Though Dad didn’t write Mike as a man who enjoyed criticizing people who believe in unconventional things, that is often the sort who work for these publications. To do their job they must be hyperrationalists who treat the current scientific dogma as the final word on every subject.

  But once Mike starts looking for Eric, he has to personally confront the very sort of paranormal events that his articles utterly reject. Though Dad fudged a bit on the extent of Mike’s belief or disbelief, The Haunted Mesa can still be seen as the tale of a character whose perception of reality is challenged to its very core.

  Now, that is a very solid and simple foundation for a great story. The problem in this “Professional Skeptic Confronts the Supernatural” interpretation is that, if the story is all about Mike Raglan having to face the reality of something he can’t believe is true, then the story is pretty much over as soon as he accepts the legitimacy of the other world. That is the moment when the main premise has been fulfilled.

  In fact, before he ever started, Dad did tell me a version of The Haunted Mesa that fit this description. I have forgotten many of the details, but the important elements were essentially that Mike Raglan comes to Utah looking for his friend, but finds him missing under very mysterious circumstances. He eventually discovers Eric’s daybook. The diary forms the bulk of the novel and tells the bizarre story of Eric�
�s adventures on “the other side,” a story which forces Mike to reexamine his beliefs about the nature of what is, and is not, possible. Not knowing what to think but having had some strange experiences himself during his investigation of the disappearance, Mike goes back one last time to Eric’s house on the mesa. It is then that he finds that Eric has tried to return home. His body is lying in the kiva, its torso cut in half by a wall that appears to be a thousand years old!

  That version might be the best incarnation of the “Mike is a professional skeptic who is forced to believe” plot. Certainly, it allowed Mike Raglan to follow a straightforward character arc from skeptic to believer, accepting something that couldn’t yet be explained by science…and the discovery of his dead friend would have been the final dramatic moment that brought home the reality of it all.

  Why Dad chose not to follow that path I do not know. It might be that he thought it was a bit old-fashioned to use a protagonist who never gets completely involved in the adventure and only reads the story of another man who did. It was a common convention a hundred years ago for “exotic adventure” or science fiction authors, like Edgar Rice Burroughs, to use the mechanism of a storyteller. Possibly the idea was that this would increase the public’s acceptance of an outlandish story.

  It is surely a trade-off: The audience might lose some of the sense of action and excitement that they get with a more involved hero. But a more subtle approach might have played into the novel’s sense of mystery, the idea that just beyond the boundaries of our perception unknown forces are at work. And this version of the story might have helped alleviate another concern that plagued my father: the need to try and explain things that were unexplainable. For a man who had made history and geography the foundation of his stories, there may have been just a bit too much fiction in science fiction for him to be truly comfortable.