Yondering: Stories

by Louis L'Amour

  “Death, Westbound” is the earliest example we have of Louis’s short fiction—but for a long time its existence was shrouded in mystery. In Education of a Wandering Man Dad wrote:

  I placed my first story for publication. It was a hobo story, submitted to a magazine that had published many famous names when they were starting out. The magazine paid on publication, but that never happened. The magazine folded after accepting my story and that was the end of it.

  This was interesting, yet not exactly true. Carefully examining his correspondence, I discovered that in February of 1933 he wrote the following to a girlfriend of his in Oklahoma:

  I have…managed to have one short story accepted by a small magazine one finds on the news-stands. It pays rather well but is somewhat sensational. The magazine…is generally illustrated by several pictures of partially undressed ladies, and they are usually rather heavily constructed ladies also. It is called “10 Story Book.” My story was a realistic tale of some hoboes called “Death, West-bound.”

  So, late in life, Louis mentioned an unnamed “hobo story” in an unnamed magazine, a story that supposedly went unpublished. Yet fifty-five years earlier there is the suggestion that a similar story was published. A check of Louis’s list of submissions for the early 1930s shows that he continued to send stories to 10 Story Book for the next several years. That’s not the behavior you’d expect if it had actually folded before the publication of his 1933 story.

  I began to suspect that Dad had misdirected people for a long time—telling them that his first sale was the short story “Anything for a Pal” in 1935—because he was concerned about the risqué content of 10 Story Book. We’ll never know if his appearing in this publication embarrassed friends or family at the time, or if he became concerned later, maybe in the 1950s, as he became more well known.

  Times and attitudes change, however. By the 1960s Louis was considering submitting both fiction and articles to Playboy, a magazine with a very similar format. Like Playboy, 10 Story Book had published work by some well-known authors, including my father’s hero, Jack London, though I sincerely doubt that it paid even a fraction as much as Hugh Hefner’s magazine.

  After years of scrounging at antique shows and contacting collectors of vintage pornography (an “interesting” subculture to say the least), my dogged researcher Charles Van Eman finally located a copy of “Death, Westbound” by “Louis D’Amour.” While the pictorial content of the magazine isn’t something I’d leave lying around the house, to a modern audience I doubt it would be very challenging. Regardless of the racy reputation of its publisher and the fact that the story is little more than a “slice of life,” “Death, Westbound” does document Louis’s first successful attempt at authorship and the fact that he was planning to try and tell a particular type of story.

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  In some ways my father’s vision for his Yondering material was similar to the concept he later used with his Sackett, Talon, and Chantry series. He wanted to create a cycle of stories documenting the life he had witnessed in his years on the road and in different cities around the world: San Pedro in the 1920s (“Old Doc Yak,” “It’s Your Move,” “And Proudly Die,” “Survival,” “Show Me the Way to Go Home”); Shanghai in the 1930s (“The Admiral,” “The Man Who Stole Shakespeare,” “Shanghai, Not Without Gestures”), and Paris in the 1940s (“The Cross and the Candle,” “A Friend of the General”). Other stories would examine the colorful characters, the ships and crews, and the roads and rails that connected these locations.

  Dad was never a cowboy; his Western experiences tended to be related to farming, logging, and, in particular, mining. “Dead End Drift” is an extrapolation of the fears of every miner, but the mention in this story of “The Big Stope” indicates that it was specifically related to his time working at the Katherine Mine in Arizona.

  “Dead-End Drift” was written in the summer of 1939 and, typically, Louis did not think it was very good. Relatively quickly, however, it was picked up by a New Mexico literary journal. It was also listed in the 1941 edition of The Best American Short Stories, rated with two out of three stars. It was the third year that Louis had made it into Best American, but this time he was rewarded with the attention of a prestigious literary agent. Though the man turned out to be a notorious scoundrel and was initially little help, a dozen years later, when Dad was on the edge of failure, the agent managed to sell “Gift of Cochise” to Collier’s magazine, and started a chain reaction that within a few years led Louis to some modest fame writing paperback Westerns.

  In the mid-1920s, after a successful string of boxing matches but an unsuccessful hunt for steady work in central Arizona, Dad left his parents and hoboed his way to Los Angeles, hoping to go back to sea. The employment situation in San Pedro (the Port of Los Angeles) was, however, a disaster. My father estimated there were over seven hundred seamen “on the beach”—out of work. He lived hand to mouth for three months until a lucky break gave him a ship.

  “Old Doc Yak” is a story directly lifted from my father’s life in that period. The somewhat pretentious gentleman got his nickname from a portly, goatlike character in a popular newspaper comic strip. The shack in the story was rented with money borrowed from a friend, Jimmy Eads, whom Dad rescued from being robbed by a group of rough characters from “Happy Valley.”

  This gang of misfits, along with their run-down lair, are depicted in the novel No Traveller Returns. Eads is most likely the guy in “Old Doc Yak” who remarks that the old man talked like someone had “thrown a dictionary at him and he got all the words but none of the definitions.” The story won the full three stars in the Best American Short Stories index in 1942. The 1942 index was notable because the new editor, Martha Foley, greatly reduced the number of mentioned titles. It was the fourth consecutive year for Louis.

  Dad said “Old Doc Yak” taught him a good deal about writing, significantly that he must love all his characters whether they be represented as good, bad, or indifferent. Relaying that lesson, he wrote:

  It was written about a man I profoundly disliked as did most of those around me, but when I wrote a story about him suddenly he became alive and I understood him better and no longer disliked him.

  And then, specifically discussing his goals for the future and what would become of the Yondering stories in particular, he wrote the following to Oklahoma friend Betty Brown:

  It was pleasing to me that OLD DOC YAK won the attention it did. A minor thing, of course, and yet, the story is my best effort at presenting human nature, and handling the case of a cold, unliked man in a sympathetic and understanding manner….I cannot condemn anyone for anything. I do not believe in sin. There is no such thing. There is wrong and right, and those in my conception are simple enough. If you injure another person, you are wrong. Otherwise all is well. What I want to do is write of people so well that when I have gone on those who read my work will understand them better. I want to interpret people, the unfortunate, the lost, the lonely, misunderstood and shiftless. I want others to know how they feel. I never, intentionally, nor do I think unintentionally, did anyone a wrong or injured anyone. I would go far to avoid anything of the kind.

  “It’s Your Move,” another Best American Short Stories selection, was the first of the San Pedro stories to be written and published. This story, and a few others that I will note in this postscript, have a direct link to other works in the Louis L’Amour’s Lost Treasures series. The environment of San Pedro prior to World War II appears over and over in the novel No Traveller Returns, but the more interesting connection is that of the character of Sleeth, who shows up in the “Samsara” chapter of Louis L’Amour’s Lost Treasures: Volume 1. “Samsara” is a mysterious story of reincarnation, and Sleeth plays the role of a man who is just enough aware of his past lives to be tormented by that knowledge. He informs the young hero that there may be a hidden libra
ry, constructed to help the “arrived” incarnations recover their memories, somewhere in Central Asia.

  It’s an idea that also may have inspired the final story in Lost Treasures: Volume 1, “Journey to Aksu.” For photographs of San Pedro at the time and more information related to all of the Yondering stories, a reader might enjoy taking a look at the “Louis’ Adventures” section of the louislamourgreatadventure.com website.

  “Survival” is literally a chapter out of No Traveller Returns. No Traveller is a book that, among other things, deals with the mysterious connections between people. The events leading up to the moment when each of the major characters join the crew of the SS Lichenfield are detailed in separate chapters. “Survival” follows Tex Worden and features another character from my father’s first novel, Shorty Conrad. Louis supposedly knew the real-life versions of these two men. In Shorty’s case, they met when he was shipping off the Gulf Coast, a few years earlier than the San Pedro era. In the case of Tex, he claimed he actually sailed with the man after his ’Pedro days, but I have always gotten the feeling that Dad also knew him during his time “on the beach” in Southern California.

  Unlike the suave protagonist of “Show Me the Way to Go Home,” Louis actually had no idea when he would be shipping out of San Pedro. As you can tell from that story’s introduction, the opportunity came up at the last second; if he had any possessions that weren’t in his pockets, he left them behind.

  “Thicker Than Blood” is one of several stories that came from that voyage; the names have been changed ever so slightly, but even the ending—where the character who is a stand-in for my father encounters the hated first mate “Duggs” on the Columbia River waterfront—is likely true, rather than a fictionalized or poetic resolution. I have followed the career of “Duggs,” and he and Louis were indeed both in Portland at the same time.

  “Thicker Than Blood” also relates directly to the one voyage through Asian waters I can prove my father took. This is the reason all the Yondering stories, whether related closely to Dad’s actual experiences or not, have been arranged in the rough order of that journey.

  “The Admiral” was published in Story magazine, possibly the most exclusive short story publication of the 1930s. Saul David, my father’s first editor at Bantam Books, confirmed that fact for me in an interview just before his death: “Story magazine?” he said. “That was the apex….If you were…aiming for the big time, for the Hemingway/Faulkner/Scott Fitzgerald league, that was the way in.”

  “The Admiral” was the first of Dad’s Shanghai stories. In his journal in 1964, he wrote: “Long ago [I] planned a series, like O. Henry on N[ew] Y[ork], but the town [Shanghai] died. I knew too little of the place, but for my time there, a good deal.”

  The only time that I know for certain that Louis was in Shanghai was just for three or four days, so possibly he’s not kidding about having rapidly taken in the atmosphere of the place. On the other hand, I have shown all of Dad’s Shanghai writings, many more than are presented here, to a number of experts, one of them being Victor Krulak, an author and retired Marine Corps lieutenant general who, as a young officer, was stationed as a military observer in Shanghai prior to World War II. All swore that my father had the measure of the place and they could hardly believe the sum total of his days there was little more than seventy-two hours. Perhaps he returned. Dad’s commentary suggests that this is the case, but the evidence I currently possess does not support that theory.

  “Shanghai, Not Without Gestures” and “The Man Who Stole Shakespeare” both take advantage of Louis’s knowledge of Shanghai, no matter where it may have come from. They also introduce us to Haig, a mysterious character who has an apartment on an alley off of Avenue Edward VII where Louis or his fictional alter ego may have stayed. Haig is doubly mysterious because he also shows up in the obviously fictional story fragment “Journey to Aksu” and in his presumably nonfiction memoir Education of a Wandering Man!

  In Education, Louis describes “the old crowd” as a type whose “ranks are thinning” and can be found “in every large seaport city.” These men were smugglers, dealers in information, and those who wanted to “avoid the eyes of officials.” Dad claimed a man named Oriental Slim (mentioned elsewhere in this volume), whom he met while “on the beach” in San Pedro, first put him in touch with this group:

  My first contact in Shanghai came in a sailors’ joint called, if I remember correctly, The Olympic, having nothing to do with the games—although games of other kinds were played there.

  It was a perhaps-accidental meeting with a Scotsman, a former British-India Army officer named Haig. He had left the service and become a Buddhist, but I always suspected he was with British Intelligence.

  Also mentioned in “The Man Who Stole Shakeseare” is underworld figure Dou Yu-seng. Dou was a real character, though not well known outside of China. He was the leader of the Green Circle Society (one of the infamous “Tongs”) and controlled a great deal of Shanghai’s French Concession. He joined with Chiang Kai-shek to fight both the Communists and the Japanese when they attempted to take over his city. The story suggests that Dou was the owner of the Edward VII apartment building, and, of course, he would be exactly the sort of contact that a man like Haig would want to have. He was also the sort who might have set up Paul Medrac, the would-be mercenary of “Journey to Aksu,” or the Louis-like narrator of “The Man Who Stole Shakespeare” with a dangerous assignment either “up the river” or in China’s Far West.

  Moving on from China, at least for the moment, “Off the Mangrove Coast” introduces us to four desperate characters and a story that Dad claimed was based on truth. In the summer of 1939 Louis related a similar tale to columnist Roger Devlin of the Tulsa Tribune:

  Louis condensed four thrilling weeks of treasure hunting into a few agonizingly casual sentences. Happened up in the Malay States, he recalled. Some native ruler had fled a revolution a few years before, loading all his gold and jewels on a river boat. Hurricane came up, ship sank.

  “It was believed to be several million dollars of treasure in the ship’s strong room,” Louis said. “A bunch of [us] obtained a boat and with four weeks’ supply of food aboard, we set out to be wealthy.

  “We charted the currents of the river, figuring just where the ship might have drifted. That took time. But finally, in diving outfits, we found a sunken vessel, and we were fairly certain it was the right one.

  “The only trouble was that it was half drifted over with sand, and it took us a long time to clear that off. Then we found the ship was made of teak, just about the hardest wood going, and even harder after its long immersion. Took a long time to break through the side of the vessel. By then, too, we were running short of food. Had to live on the few fish we could catch.

  “At last we were just about ready to break into the strong room. We felt we already had the treasure in our hands, when—” He paused….

  “When another hurricane came up. We managed to live through it, but by the time it quieted down the treasure ship was completely buried in the sand. Far’s I know she’s still there.”

  Now, I’m not sure that I really believe all that. Louis himself noted in his journal that there were some mistakes in Devlin’s retelling of the story. But while Dad did spend some time, even longer than four weeks, in both the Federated Malay States and the Netherlands East Indies (today’s Malaysia and Indonesia), and while he did sail past Darvel Bay, the location of the wreck in “Off the Mangrove Coast,” it is highly unlikely he was able to take time off for treasure hunting. However, and regardless of its fictional aspects and whatever inconsistencies may have been added by the reporter, this story does form a sort of “first draft” or inspiration for “Off the Mangrove Coast.”

  If there are any autobiographical qualities included in “The Dancing Kate,” they may come from stories Dad used to tell of sailing with the Captain Dou
glas mentioned in his introduction. That said, there are a number of suspicious aspects to these tales. The first is that I can’t track down even a hint of when they could have occurred. There are several notable “dark periods” in Louis’s young life, times when I have no idea what he was up to. However, as with China, none seem long enough to have included travel time to the Far East and then the months necessary for significant adventures. The second is that Douglas, depicted in this version of “The Dancing Kate” as a man who claims to have been sailing in Asian waters for nearly fifty years, is described as being a virile man in his mid-thirties in my father’s correspondence from the 1930s. Lastly, a pulpier take on the same story was published in Thrilling Adventures magazine in 1941. The Yondering version seems to have been created, and toned down, specifically for the 1980 edition of Yondering.

  However, my father’s including this story was not just a case of his searching for additional material for Yondering or seeking to further establish some fictional alter ego in Indonesian waters; he included a modified and possibly more realistic iteration of this adventure in the background of Fritz Schumann, one of the characters in No Traveller Returns. On top of that he wrote the following story fragment, which is a bit like a sequel to “The Dancing Kate,” sometime after the mid-1950s. Given the way my father could turn out new story ideas, it seems odd he would become so preoccupied with this one unless it had some significance to him that I have yet to fathom.

  He was a big man in a sweat-stained khaki shirt and he came to the door mopping his face with a rumpled handkerchief. His hair was uncombed and there was a two-day stubble of black beard on his swarthy face.