The Lawless West

by Louis L'Amour

  During the Second World War, L’Amour was drafted and ultimately served with the U.S. Army Transportation Corps in Europe. However, in the two years before he was shipped out, he managed to write a great many adventure stories for Standard Magazines. The first story he published in 1946, the year of his discharge, was a Western, “Law of the Desert Born,” in Dime Western (4/46). A call to Leo Margulies resulted in L’Amour’s agreeing to write Western stories for the various Western pulp magazines published by Standard Magazines, a third of which appeared under the byline Jim Mayo, the name of a character in L’Amour’s earlier adventure fiction. The proposal for L’Amour to write new Hopalong Cassidy novels came from Margulies, who wanted to launch Hopalong Cassidy’s Western Magazine to take advantage of the popularity William Boyd’s old films and new television series were enjoying with a new generation. Doubleday & Company agreed to publish the pulp novelettes in hardcover books. L’Amour was paid $500 a story, no royalties, and he was assigned the house name Tex Burns. L’Amour read Clarence E. Mulford’s books about the Bar-20 and based his Hopalong Cassidy on Mulford’s original creation. Only two issues of the magazine appeared before it ceased publication. Doubleday felt that the Hopalong character had to appear exactly as William Boyd did in the films and on television, and thus even the first two novels had to be revamped to meet with this requirement prior to publication in book form.

  L’Amour’s first Western novel under his own byline was Westward the Tide (World’s Work, 1950). It was rejected by every American publisher to which it was submitted. World’s Work paid a flat seventy-five pounds without royalties for British Empire rights in perpetuity. L’Amour sold his first Western short story to a slick magazine a year later, “The Gift of Cochise,” in Collier’s (7/5/52). Robert Fellows and John Wayne purchased screen rights to this story from L’Amour for $4,000, and James Edward Grant, one of Wayne’s favorite screenwriters, developed a script from it, changing L’Amour’s Ches Lane to Hondo Lane. L’Amour retained the right to novelize Grant’s screenplay, which differs substantially from his short story, and he was able to get an endorsement from Wayne to be used as a blurb, stating that Hondo was the finest Western Wayne had ever read. Hondo (Fawcett Gold Medal, 1953) by Louis L’Amour was released on the same day as the film, Hondo (Warner, 1953), with a first printing of 320,000 copies.

  With Showdown at Yellow Butte (Ace, 1953) by Jim Mayo, L’Amour began a series of short Western novels for Don Wollheim that could be doubled with other short novels by other authors in Ace Publishing’spaperback two-fers. Advances on these were $800, and usually the author never earned any royalties. Heller with a Gun (Fawcett Gold Medal, 1955) was the first of a series of original Westerns L’Amour had agreed to write under his own name following the success of Hondo for Fawcett. L’Amour wanted even this early to have his Western novels published in hardcover editions. He expanded “Guns of the Timberland” by Jim Mayo in West (9/50) to make Guns of the Timberlands (Jason Press, 1955), a hardcover Western for which he was paid an advance of $250. Another novel for Jason Press followed and then Silver Canyon (Avalon Books, 1956) for Thomas Bouregy & Company. These were basically lending library publishers, and the books seldom earned much money above the small advances paid.

  The great turn in L’Amour’s fortunes came about because of problems Saul David was having with his original paperback Westerns program at Bantam Books. Fred Glidden had been signed to a contract to produce two original paperback Luke Short Western novels a year for an advance of $15,000 each. It was a long-term contract, but, in the first ten years of it, Glidden only wrote six novels. Literary agent Marguerite E. Harper then persuaded Bantam that Fred’s brother, Jon Glidden, could help fulfill the contract, and Jon was signed for eight Peter Dawson Western novels. When Jon died suddenly before completing even one book for Bantam, Harper managed to engage a ghostwriter at the Disney studios to write these eight “Peter Dawson” novels, beginning with The Savages (Bantam, 1959). They proved inferior to anything Jon had ever written, and what sales they had seemed to be due only to the Peter Dawson name.

  Saul David wanted to know from L’Amour if he could deliver two Western novels a year. L’Amour said he could, and he did. In fact, by 1962 this number was increased to three original paperback novels a year. The first L’Amour novel to appear under the Bantam contract was Radigan (Bantam, 1958). It seemed to me, after I read all of the Western stories L’Amour ever wrote in preparation for my essay, “Louis L’Amour’s Western Fiction” in A Variable Harvest (McFarland, 1990), that by the time L’Amour wrote “Riders of the Dawn” in Giant Western (6/51), the short novel he later expanded to form Silver Canyon, he had almost burned out on the Western story, and this was years before his fame, wealth, and tremendous sales figures. He had developed seven basic plot situations in his pulp Western stories, and he used them over and over again in writing his original paperback Westerns. Flint (Bantam, 1960), considered by many to be one of L’Amour’s better efforts, is basically a reprise of the range-war plot which, of the seven, is the one L’Amour used most often. L’Amour’s hero, Flint, knows about a hideout in the badlands (where, depending on the story, something is hidden: cattle, horses, outlaws, etc.). Even certain episodes within his basic plots are repeated again and again. Flint scales a sharp V in a cañon wall to escape a tight spot as Jim Gatlin had before him in L’Amour’s “The Black Rock Coffin Makers” in .44 Western (2/50) and many a L’Amour hero would again.

  Basic to this range-war plot is the villain’s means for crowding out the other ranchers in a district. He brings in a giant herd that requires all the available grass and forces all the smaller ranchers out of business. It was this same strategy Bantam used in marketing L’Amour. All of his Western titles were continuously kept in print. Independent distributors were required to buy titles in lots of 10,000 copies if they wanted access to other Bantam titles at significantly discounted prices. In time L’Amour’s paperbacks forced almost everyone else off the racks in the Western sections. L’Amour himself comprised the other half of this successful strategy. He dressed up in cowboy outfits, traveled about the country in a motor home, visiting with independent distributors, taking them to dinner and charming them, making them personal friends. He promoted himself at every available opportunity. L’Amour insisted that he was telling the stories of the people who had made America a great nation, and he appealed to patriotism as much as to commercialism in his rhetoric.

  His fiction suffered, of course, stories written hurriedly and submitted in their first draft and published as he wrote them. A character would have a rifle in his hand, a model not yet invented in the period in which the story was set, and, when he crossed a street, the rifle would vanish without explanation. A scene would begin in a saloon and suddenly the setting would be a hotel dining room. Characters would die once and, a few pages later, die again. An old man for most of a story would turn out to be in his twenties.

  Once, when we were talking and Louis had showed me his topographical maps and his library of thousands of volumes that he claimed he used for research, he asserted that, if he claimed there was a rock in a road at a certain point in a story, his readers knew that, if they went to that spot, they would find the rock just as he described it. I told him that might be so, but I personally was troubled by the many inconsistencies in his stories. Take Last Stand at Papago Wells (Fawcett Gold Medal, 1957). Five characters are killed during an Indian raid. One of the surviving characters emerges from seclusion after the attack and counts six corpses.

  “I’ll have to go back and count them again,” L’Amour said, and smiled. “But, you know, I don’t think the people who read my books would really care.”

  All of this notwithstanding, there are many fine, and some spectacular, moments in Louis L’Amour’s Western fiction. I think he was at his best in the shorter forms, especially his magazine stories, and the two best stories he ever wrote appeared in the 1950s, “The Gift of Cochise” early in the decade and “War Party” in The Sa
turday Evening Post in 1959. The latter was later expanded by L’Amour to serve as the opening chapters for Bendigo Shafter (Dutton, 1979). That book is so poorly structured that Harold Kuebler, senior editor at Doubleday & Company to whom it was first offered, said he would not publish it unless L’Amour undertook extensive revisions. This L’Amour refused to do, and, eventually, Bantam started a hardcover publishing program to accommodate him when no other hardcover publisher proved willing to accept his books as he wrote them. Yet the short novel that follows possesses several of the characteristics in purest form that, I suspect, no matter how diluted they ultimately would become, account in largest measure for the loyal following Louis L’Amour won from his readers: a strong male character who is single and hence marriageable; and the powerful, romantic, strangely compelling vision of the American West that invests L’Amour’s Western fiction and makes it such a delightful escape from the cares of a later time—in this author’s words: “It was a land where nothing was small, nothing was simple. Everything, the lives of men and the stories they told, ran to extremes.”

  Chapter 1

  I rode down from the high blue hills and across the brush flats into Hattan’s Point, a raw bit of spawning hell, scattered hit or miss along the rocky slope of a rust-topped mesa. Ah, it’s a grand feeling to be young and tough with a heart full of hell, strong muscles and quick, flexible hands! And the feeling that somewhere in town there’s a man who would like to tear down your meat house with hands or gun.

  It was like that, Hattan’s Point was, when I swung down from my buckskin and gave him a word to wait with. A new town, a new challenge, and, if there were those who wished to take me on, let them come and be damned.

  I knew the whiskey of this town would be the raw whiskey of the last town, and of the towns behind it, but I shoved through the batwing doors and downed a shot of rye and looked around, measuring the men along the bar and at the tables. None of these men did I know, yet I had seen them all before in a dozen towns. The big, hard-eyed rancher with the iron-gray hair who thought he was the bull of the woods, and the knife-like man beside him with the careful eyes who would be gun slick and fast as a striking snake. The big man turned his head toward me, as a great brown bear turns to look at something he could squeeze to nothing, if he wished.

  “Who sent for you?”

  There was harsh challenge in the words. The cold demand of a conqueror, and I laughed within me. “Nobody sent for me. I ride where I want and stop when I want.”

  He was a man grown used to smaller men who spoke softly to him, and my answer was irritating. “Then ride on,” he said, “for you’re not wanted in Hattan’s Point.”

  “Sorry, friend,” I said. “I like it here. I’m staying, and maybe in whatever game you’re playing, I’ll buy chips. I don’t like being ordered around by big frogs in such small puddles.”

  His big face flamed crimson, but before he could answer, another man spoke up, a tall young man with white hair. “What he means is that there’s trouble here, and men are taking sides. Those who stand upon neither side are everybody’s enemy in Hattan’s Point.”

  “So?” I smiled at them all, but my eyes held to the big bull of the woods. “Then maybe I’ll choose a side. I always did like a fight.”

  “Then be sure you choose the right one”—this was from the knife-like man beside the bull—“and talk to me before you decide.”

  “I’ll talk to you,” I said, “or any man. I’m reasonable enough. But get this, the side I choose will be the right one.”

  The sun was bright on the street and I walked outside, feeling the warm of it, feeling the cold from my muscles. Within me I chuckled, because I knew what they were saying back there. I’d thrown my challenge at them for pure fun; I didn’t care about anyone. And then suddenly I did.

  She stood on the boardwalk straight before me, slim, tall, with a softly curved body and magnificent eyes and hair of deepest black. Her skin was lightly tanned, her eyes an amazing green, her lips full and rich.

  My black leather chaps were dusty, and my gray shirt was sweat-stained from the road. My jaws were lean and unshaven, and under my black, flat-crowned hat my hair was black and rumpled. I was in no shape to meet a girl like that, but there she was, the woman I wanted, my woman.

  In two steps I was beside her. “I realize,” I said as she turned to face me, “the time is inopportune. My presence scarcely inspires interest, let alone affection and love, but this seemed the best time for you to meet the man you are to marry. The name is Mathieu Sabre. Furthermore, I might as well tell you now. I am of Irish and French extraction, have no money, no property but a horse and the guns I wear, but I have been looking for you for years, and I could not wait to tell you that I was here, your future mate and husband.” I bowed, hat in hand.

  She stared, startled, amazed, and then angry. “Well, of all the egotistical…”

  “Ah.” My expression was one of relief. “Those are kind words, darling, wonderful words. More true romances have begun with those words than any other. And now, if you’ll excuse me?”

  Taking one step back, I turned, vaulted over the hitching rail, and untied my buckskin. Swinging into the saddle, I looked back. She was standing there, staring at me, her eyes wide, and the anger was leaving them. “Good afternoon,” I said, bowing again. “I’ll call upon you later.”

  It was time to get out and away, but I felt good about it. Had I attempted to advance the acquaintance, I should have gotten nowhere, but my quick leaving would arouse her curiosity. There is no trait women possess more fortunate for men than their curiosity.

  The livery stable at Hattan’s Point was a huge and rambling structure that sprawled lazily over a corner at the beginning of the town. From a bin I got a scoop of corn, and, while the buckskin absorbed this warning against hard days to come, I curried him carefully. A jingle of spurs warned me, and, when I looked around, a tall, very thin man was leaning against the stall post, watching me.

  When I straightened up, I was looking into a pair of piercing dark eyes from under shaggy brows that seemed to overhang the long hatchet face. He was shabby and unkempt, but he wore two guns, the only man in town who I’d seen wearing two except for the knife-like man in the saloon. “Hear you had a run in with Rud Maclaren.”

  “Run in? I’d not call it that. He suggested the country was crowded, and that I move on. So I told him I liked it here, and, if the fight looked good, I might choose a side.”

  “Good. Then I come right on time. Folks are talkin’ about you. They say Canaval offered you a job on Maclaren’s Bar M. Well, I’m beatin’ him to it. I’m Jim Pinder, ramroddin’ the CP outfit. I’ll pay warrior wages, seventy a month an’ found. All the ammunition you can use.”

  My eyes had strayed beyond him to two men lurking in a dark stall. They had, I was sure, come in with Pinder. The idea did not appeal to me. Shoving Pinder aside, I sprang into the middle of the open space between the rows of stalls.

  “You two!” My voice rang in the echoing emptiness of the building. “Get out in the open! Start now or start shootin’!”

  My hands were wide, fingers spread, and right then it did not matter to me what way they came. There was that old jumping devil in me, and the fury was driving me as it always did when action began to build up. Men who lurked in dark stalls did not appeal to me, or the men who hired them.

  They came out slowly, hands wide. One of them was a big man with black hair and unshaven jowls. He looked surly. The other had the cruel, flat face of an Apache. “Suppose I’d come shootin’?” the black-haired man sneered.

  “Then they’d be plantin’ you at sundown.” My eyes held him. “If you don’t believe that, cut loose your wolf right now.”

  That stopped him. He didn’t like it, for they didn’t know me and I was too ready. Wise enough to see that I was no half-baked gunfighter, they didn’t know how much of it I could back up and weren’t anxious to find out.

  “You move fast.” Pinder was staring at me
with small eyes. “Suppose I had cut myself in with Blacky and the ’Pache?”

  My chuckle angered him. “You? I had that pegged, Jim Pinder. When my guns came out, you would have died first. You’re faster than either of those two, so you’d take yours first. Then Blacky, and after him”—I nodded toward the Apache—“him. He would be the hardest to kill.”

  Pinder didn’t like it, and he didn’t like me. “I made an offer,” he said.

  “And you brought these coyotes to give me a rough time if I didn’t take it? Be damned to you, Pinder! You can take your CP outfit and go to blazes!”

  His lips thinned down and he stared at me. I’ve seldom seen such hatred in a man’s eyes. “Then get out!” he said. “Get out fast! Join Maclaren, an’ you die!”

  “Then why wait? I’m not joining Maclaren so far as I know now, but I’m staying, Pinder. Any time you want what I’ve got, come shooting. I’ll be ready.”