a conversation with louis l'amour

A Conversation with Louis L’Amour

Michael T. Marsden

Louis L‘Amour is a born story teller. With over 71 million copies of his 70 books in print, he has become the best selling Western writer of all time. His biographical background, which includes various jobs as longshoreman, lumberjack, elephant handler, hay shocker, flume builder, fruit picker, officer on tank destroyers during World War I1 and even a stint as a professional boxer, can be found in succinct form in the back of any of his recent novels.

The reasons for L‘Amour’s success are many, but one of the most important ones seems to be his emphasis on the concept of the family in the West. Not content with a single family for his epic tale of the winning of the West, L’Amour has created a triad of principal families: The Sacketts (the pioneers), the Talons (the builders) and the Chantrys (the thinkers). These three families represent the three stages of the development of the American West, and the interaction between members of the three families on the frontier provides a most impressive dynamic in his fiction.

But for the vast majority of his readers L’Amour is importantly, and quite simply, “the best story teller of them all.” The conversation with the master story teller which follows was conducted in Durango, Colorado during one of L’Amour’s vacations there with his family.

MM: At what point in your life did you decide tha t you were going to write for a living?

LL: I think it was always in my mind. I remember in the first grade once I was asked by a teacher what I intended to be when I grew up. I said scientist, but that wasn’t what I was thinking about. Actually, had I been able to phrase it, I probably would have said a philosopher. What I was really thinking about was writing about people. I was twelve years old when I first tried to write. Then I started knocking around when I was fifteen, working just about all over the world, and all over the West. I’d grown up on stones. My grandfather had fought Indians and he was around home when I was a little boy. I had a brother and a sister who wrote. My sister wrote a history of the Dakota Territory. Her name is Edna Lenore Waldo. She didn’t start writing until after I was knocking around, but we always read, always had books in the house. Her opinion of my grandfather is far different from mine. She found him a very cold, reserved man. But probably because I was a little boy and he was very open with me, he told me all sorts of stories about Indian fighting and the fighting of the Civil War. I was fascinated by

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military tactics, so when I was a little boy, he used to talk to me about them and used to draw diagrams on the blackboard. Of course, anything he did I was fascinated by. On Memorial Day he’d dress up in his army uniform which looked pretty good to a child, a blue uniform with a sash. He used to show me how the great battles of history were fought. So I got tuned into listening to older people, and then when I started knocking around and began meeting them, I’d listen and constantly picked up a n awful lot. You know, so many old people want to talk about what happened to them, and so many young people aren’t interested. I never intended in those days to write about the West; I intended to write about the far east which I was very involved and interested in. As I traveled around meeting various Western characters, most of them by accident in the course of my work, I’d listen to them. George Coe, for example, had been in the Lincoln County War with Billy the Kid and lost a finger in one of the fights, by Buckshot Roberts in fact, and I used to listen to him. If anybody had ever asked him if he knew Louis L’Amour, he wouldn’t have known the name a t all because I was just a lean kind of gangling kid who’d hung around while he talked to some old cronies of his. It was the same with Jeff Milton who was for two years a Texas Ranger and for two years the Chief of Police in El Paso which was a rough, rough town. I’d listen to them talk and I’d like to hear the stories.

MM: What year marked the actual beginning of your writing career?

L L I can’t very well tell you a year. I tried to write for quite a long time when I was knocking around, but I didn’t have any stability to my life and it was difficult to do anything serious. Then I finally settled down. I was living in Oklahoma and I decided to stop there. I originally had planned on going back to sea again, but I decided to stop there and settle down to write. And my stories came back consistently. After a while it began to dawn on me that perhaps the editors weren’t all crazy or mistaken or in error or determined to ignore me, that something must be wrong with my work. So I got several of my favorite short stories, several of Robert Louis Stevenson’s, a couple by Jack London, several by O’Henry and by de Maupassant. I got them together with half a dozen stories from current magazines and began to analyze them to try to find out what I wasn’t doing. What I learned is that you have to start telling the story from the very first line. Another thing I learned is not to start the story at the beginning, always in the middle or close to the end. Then flash back and tell what has happened. After I’d learned those things, I began to sell.

MM: I read somewhere that thirty-three members of your family were writers.

LL: Well, when I say writers, thirty-three members of the family tried writing. Some of them never published, most of them did. That’s since 1716. I am descended from a Dr. Levi Dearborn, and his brother was General Henry Dearborn who was Secretary of War under Jefferson. General Henry Dearborn was a writer but not by vocation; he kept diaries of Arnold’s march to Quebec, Bunker Hill, the second battle of Saratoga, of Valley


Forge, and of the surrender of Cornwallis. Then his son wrote at least a dozen books, one of them a naval history of the Black Sea, of all places! He also wrote a biography of Admiral Bainbridge who commanded the Constitution, which by the way wasn’t published until the 1930s by Princeton University Press. There were a number of others on down the line who tried writing, some of them successfully, some of them not. My sister wrote five books, many school plays and pageants and even had a column on history in a newspaper for years. My brother was a foreign editor for a chain of twenty-one newspapers and he wrote a biography of Pat Hurley.

MM: Do you resent being referred to as a popular writer?

LL: No. I resent a little bit perhaps the implication that is attached to the term “popular writer” because with some people being popular is not regarded as a flattering term. I don’t see it this way at all myself. I like to be popular because in the first place a writer to write anything well needs time, and popularity buys money and money buys time. I t buys me freedom from trouble so that I can sit down and think and work. That I like very much. Then I like finding people who read my work. I like to hear their comments on it. I’m interested in the comments of scholars, but I’m more interested in the comments of the people who live in the country and actually know what I’m talking about. The people who have been there. The people who have tasted what I’ve eaten and know the kind of country I’ve seen. Their opinions are very important to me.

MM: You put a great deal of emphasis upon the geology and geography in your fiction, don’t you? Your readers want tha t kind of realism, don’t they?

LL: Yes.

MM: Do they want that same kind of realism in your characters, or do they just want them to be probable?

LL: Probable, yes, but if they aren’t realistic or if they do something that is false to their character, the readers tell you right away. I never plot a story out beforehand. I take a couple of characters and put them in a situation that interests me. Sometimes the story will take off on a tangent tha t I didn’t expect a t all. My characters react to what happens to them in ways that are logical to them or fit the situation in which they’re involved. Some of my characters are bound, some are not. Many are not. There is never a n y sadism in my books; there is never any violence for the sake of violence. The characters I write about lived in a violent time and with them violence is a last resort. They never indulge in it. Bill Tilghman told me one time that a good gunfighter never drew a gun unless he was going to shoot, and he never shot unless to kill. But he didn’t shoot unless he absolutely had to. For example, in my book The Daybreakers Tyrel Sackett is a cold man, who in his own words, “was the mean one of the family.” What he really meant was that he was the one there was no nonsense about. He might give somone a chance, but if anyone ever pulled a gun on Tyrel, he didn’t get a chance. But


even that changed. As he gets in command of himself and the gun, he is suddenly facing a man in the streets of Abilene. The man wants to be a gunfighter and has tried to impress everyone that he is a gunfighter. But Tyrel is perceptive enough to realize the man doesn’t really want to be a gunfighter, that really he’s afraid and so he doesn’t have to kill him. Tyrel walks up to him, tells him off, and that’s it. Gunfighters who were good man, like Tilghman, like Ham Gillette, like Jeff Milton, they soon learned that there were a lot of men they didn’t have to shoot. They didn’t have to pull a gun on them a t all. They could handle the situation by their presence and their bearing. This was the difference between the good man and the bad man, you might say.

MM: Are you generally satisfied with the movies tha t have been made from your novels?

LL: No. There are four or five that I a m satisfied with.

MM: Which ones are they?

LL: The best movie made from my work was Hondo. It was directed by John Farrow. The screenplay was done by James Edward Grant, and we had John Wayne and Geraldine Page in it. I t was a n exceptionally well done picture. I wanted a girl in the picture who looked like she had been living out in the desert for quite a while, and Geraldine Page didn’t mind a bit. And Wayne, of course, was the typical Western man. He really was. They played it beautifully in the situation. The desert was right, the Indians were right, everything was right. What I was really telling there was the story of three people living their lives against a n Indian outbreak in the background. An Indian chief was leading his people in a battle he knew he couldn’t win. A man who is fiercely independent, even to the extent that the dog along with him is not his dog, he’s his own dog. A woman who had a home and who was going to cling to it regardless of everything else; it was her whole being. She had a son a t home and even though it was dangerous to stay there, she was going to try and stay. Then I did another story called Stranger O n Horseback that Joel McCrea did about a judge in a Western community bringing laws as a circuit riding judge. I liked that and I also like Heller i n Pink Tights. Couldn’t have been improved. I t was a story about a theater in the West with Sophia Loren and Anthony Quinn. I liked Shalako within limits. Same thing with Catlow.

MM: One of the interesting things about the popular Western is tha t it is constantly changing, not in its essentials but in its acc identah according to the changing needs and interests of its audience. I t may be the only story form we’ve ever been able to develop tha t continues to meet the changing social and psychological needs of the audience. I’ve noticed a number of themes in your novels that have changed through the years. For example, your treatment of the Indian has changed. The Indian in your novels is not depicted in flat terms anymore, but rather is portrayed more fully in relation to his in the settling of the West. The same is true ofyour treatment of


women, so much so that in some of your more recent novels there is a female heroine. Eileen in The Californios, for example, is a marvelously strong character.

LL: Yes. Part of that is due to the fact of not only a changing audience but also that I’ve learned to handle my medium better, and I know better what I want to say. But I’ve always been impressed with the importance of women in the West; I haven’t always been able to show that as well as I would have liked. The publishers of books and magazines want the emphasis on the man. But once you get a little standing, then you can write just what you please. I’ve always been fascinated by the women because the women in the West were strong. There’s an old saying that it was hell on horses and women, and it was. I’ve been through countless Western graveyards and the number of women who died in childbirth is unbelievable. I’ve known so many really strong women in the West. My own grandmother nursed her children with a rifle across her knees, fearing an Indian outbreak. Women survived amazing things.

MM: Do you have any contact with other Western writers?

LL: I don’t read Western stories a t all. I used to, but due to the fact that I write so much myself, I don’t want to inadvertently pick up anything. I read only non-fiction about the West. I read a lot of it and of old newspaper files. I even go to court records at times and Army reconnaissance reports also.

MM: Do you spend a good deal of time trying to recreate the actual events?

LL: A great deal. I have several diaries and journals I reread constantly. I have one by a horsethief from up in South Dakota who was literate, but just barely. He wrote a pretty good account of his own, and while he didn’t say that he was a horsethief, by reading between the lines it is obvious that he was. There is something in the flavor of his writing. When I write a Sackett book, for example, I always read him first. He is nothing like the Sacketts, but there is something about the flavor and tone of his writing. Another thing about my writing, I don’t know whether you’ve noticed it or not, but I write my work to be read aloud.

MM: Another important dimension of your writing is your emphasis on the family. As I understand it, the Sacketts are the settlers, the pioneers; the Talons are the builders, they are the ones who are good with their hands, to build things; and finally, there are the Chantrys who are the intellectuals and who will apparently inherit the land. Are we supposed to respect one family more than the others?

LL: No, you’re not. I’m trying to show what the West was like as it developed through the eyes of these three families. Some of the Western problems I take very lightly. I won’t touch on the Whiskey Rebellion, for example, even though the effect it had was far more profound than many people realize. But as for the families, I’m going to show just exactly the kind of people they


were, what they did and the way the West developed through them. At times the families will merge, a t times they will take over the occupations or activities of the other side of the family. They’ll be people facing the West. Certain general charactersitics will run through the families. The Chantrys are, if you want to put it that way, intellectuals. Not all the Chantrys, but some of them are able to see the West in perspective. They have read history, they know the great migrations of the past and they know about the movements of people and are able to look a t the Indian with clearer eyes. Not just a savage, but a s a human being in a different environment with a different culture and background. Therefore, they can see in a better perspective and let us see more of what it was like.

MM: Is it fair to say that you are attempting to recreate the West as realistically a s you possibly can, based upon your readings of journals, etc.?

LL: That’s right, and from my talks with people and listening to them. I want to recreate the West as it was, but I also want, to an extent, to interpret it and to let people understand what happened here. You know, something absolutely unique happened in America. Until America came into being the world was pretty ordered and set. There were caste systems, class systems in all the countries. A man was born on a certain piece of land, stayed there all his life and never got ten miles away from it unless he got into the Army or Navy or something. It was a very ordered, set society. Suddenly America is opened and people come West and all the borders and restrictions have broken down. Suddenly he becomes a different type of man; he senses freedom, independence, he asserts himself more. Even more than that, he finds out something that is really unique in the world. He finds out that he can make himself, that he has a piece of raw material that is himself and that he can do with it what he chooses. He doesn’t have to conform to any set law and religion. He’s away from the church. He can join any church he wants to or he can create a new religion if he wants to, which many of them did. He can make of himself something which is different in the world. It’s entirely unique and I think it is one of the things which is attractive to the people in the Western. Not only the freedom and the fact that you can get on a horse and ride off across the country, but that man is freeing himself from the bonds of ages.

MM: But while you’re saying in your fiction that the West allows the individual to go off and form his own life and to make himself in his own image, whatever that may be, you seem to be also saying that there is a past that he/we must take into account, that we must understand. The past that accounts for the recent past.

LL: Yes, nothing begins here. There was always a past and all of us are influenced by the past and should, be to an extent, at least. In my fiction I am now reaching back to the very beginnings of these people, to show you where they came from in England, in Ireland or in France, and the things that motivated them to move West. I want to bring out the fact that the migrations of people in America were different from any other migrations


that ever existed. Before, migrations were directed by a king, by a chief, by a general, by someone who said “move” and they moved. In the West it was different. I t began in Europe before they came to America, but more after they got here. Each man made his individual decision; nobody told him to. He chose himself. Now there were a lot of people in the same economic situation who didn’t come West. There were also a lot of people in the same economic condition who didn’t leave Europe and come over, but he did. This to my notion makes him a little different, a little special. Maybe not better, but different in that he was able to make that decision to go.

MM: Some educators and critics are often heard to say that people aren’t reading novels anymore, yet millions are obviously reading your novels and those of other Western writers. Is there really a problem?

LL: I think that people are just as ready to read novels now as they ever were if writers would write novels for them to read. Now too many writers are writing trash. They’re writing social documents, but they’re not writing books. The way I feel about it is this: no one should try to deliver a message in a novel. If you feel something deeply, its’s going to come out. But if you try to deliver a message or if you try to write for effect, you make a mistake. I regard myself, not as a novelist, not as a n author, but as a storyteller. I’m the guy sitting by the campfire or the guy at the end of the bar. I’m telling stories.

MM: Do you have a fairly good idea of who your audience is?

LL: My audience is split 50150 with men and women; I have just as many women readers as men. I just finished answering three fan letters, all from college girls in the east. My readers are from all classes, all kinds of people, all ages. I get letters from people from 9 to 94-1 especially picked 94 because that’s the oldest one so far. The appeal seems to cut right across all walks of life and all nationalities.

MM: How many languages have your books been translated into?

LL: Seventeen, now.

MM: That clearly suggests that the Western has appeal to nowAmericans who also need a frontier, who may also have certain social and psychological needs which are met by the Western.

Could you comment on your writing schedule, techniques, etc.?

LL: I sometimes write on two books at once and a m planning a third one. Often when I get so far along with one of them, I’ll stop and finish it completely before I take up the other one again.

MM: What is your yearly output?

LL: Three. Sometimes four, but definitely three.


MM: And your writing techniques?

LL: I write on a n electric typewriter. My first copy is usually my finished copy. After I get it out of the typewriter, my wife goes over it and I do, too, for typographical errors, for anything that isn’t clear, or for repetition of the same word in a paragraph, for example. Things like tha t destroy the rhythm of the reading. I try to make my writing so that one is never arrested by it or stopped by it. I like to make it clear so it flows very smoothly.

MM: Do you keep notebooks or journals?

L L I take notes as I’m sitting down sometimes, usually over a cup of coffee, but not always. Sometimes when I a m waiting for somebody I take out a notebook and write down notes about a possible story or a possible idea I want to express in the story. I may never refer to the notes again, but it serves to pin it in my mind, to focus my attention upon it or it gets me thinking. Now as you know, a book is not so important for what it says but for what it makes you think. I read a lot with that in mind.

MM: You obviously believe that a book should not only entertain but enlighten in some ways as well. I a m fascinated by your plan to recreate the history of America in a forty to fifty novel sequence. Why such a massive scope?

LL: I think we in this country need to know of what happened in our country. What developed the country to the way it is; the histories in school give us too little of it. They give us just the bare outline, and the fiction writer can do it much better than the historian for the simple reason that the historian writes fact. The fiction writer writes truth.

MM: Popular Westerns have been used for many purposes from telling us about the history of our country to being used in some law courses to present basic, popular ideas of what law is, what it should be, and so forth. I suppose what you are arguing is tha t Western fiction can be used to complement history.

L L That’s more it. I wouldn’t want to try to replace history with it. But I think that one of the best ways to study history is through the historical novel.

MM: Do you think your novels are becoming more historical now? It doesn’t seem to me that your earlier novels were as historical as the ones you are now contemplating.

LL: That’s probably true. They are all historical in a sense since they were part of history, and they are a part of the period; but I think they are becoming more historical now. Of course they’re going to become more so because what I want to do is tell the whole story of the opening of America. I want people to see what led up to the various difficulties with the Indians


and correct all the misunderstandings that have taken place. You see actually this is never dwelled upon, but many treaties were broken by the Indians also. It’s easy to understand if you just stop and think and look a t the Indians in human terms. To be a man in a n Indian tribe you had to be a warrior. To be warrior you had to have killed a n enemy in battle or to have at least struck a living enemy and gotten away with it. Then you could speak in the Council, then you were a man whose opinions were respected. Then you were somebody; until you had done that you were nobody. The old men were the establishment, and when the white man comes along they are ready to make peace. They see it as necessary. But the changes happen so rapidly that there is no other way in the culture for the young Indian to become a man. So while the old Indian makes peace, the young Indian makes war. It’s perfectly understandable. The difficulty was tha t if the white man had moved West slower, the Indian probably would have adjusted his culture to the white man’s to the degree that he would have found some other way for the young Indian to obtain status.

MM: It would seem that your audience is very important to you. How would you characterize the mail you receive from your fans?

L L Nearly every question in every letter I’ve received has a n intelligent comment to make or a n intelligent question to ask. I was on a radio call-in show in Houston one night for three hours, and questions just filled the switchboard-and every one of them was intelligent. Factual things-for example, one woman wanted to know how much a covered wagon would carry, how much weight and what the weight was composed of. Of course, they used to be overloaded when they’d start out, planning on eating up part of the load before they’d gone too far, cutting down the weight before it got too serious. You get questions like why they used oxen instead of mules or horses. They did it because in the first place oxen hooves spread on turf and he can walk better on turf than mules or horses can. Secondly, the oxen were better eating than the horse or mule if they had to eat them. But the oxen were slower moving. They come up with some interesting questions and you find out that there’s a surprising amount of knowledge of the West out there. They have read a lot of non-fiction books.

MM: In addition to tracing the development of your three principal families, aren’t you also planning a trilogy of the American Indian?

LL: Yes, I want to do that. You see, the Indian has been misrepresented so terribly in every sense of the word. I would like to tell a story about a n Indian as he lived. Of the life of the Indian as a warrior, of his spiritual life, of his life inside the village. The old notion of the Indian being very stoical is nonsense. I’ve known a lot of Indians. I can remember when I was a little boy of about four or five years, my father taking me down to a camp of Indians. I’ve never heard such marvelous laughter in my life as I heard from those old squaws. The old Indian women were sitting around a fire chuckling over something in deep, rich, wonderful chuckles. In their own villages the Indians were very alive, very excitable, and the only reason


they got the reputation of being stoical was that some white man came along and ask them some stupid question.

MM: Have you determined which Indians the trilogy will focus on?

LL: Yes, on the Cheyenne. I’ll take the Cheyenne Indian before the white man reached him. I want him to discover the horse in this period and I want to show what a change it made in his life, out of his whole existencein a way, and then bring him down to the point in the first book where he has a n encounter with his first white man. Then I will develop the phase of the Indian wars.

MM: Do you ever read your own works?

LL: Not until months afterwards. I immediately reread to correct, but by that time I’m fed up with it and interested in my next book. My favorite book is always the one I’m writing; I have no other favorites. I do go back and read them afterwards when I can have the proper perspective. Sometimes I enjoy them, sometimes I don’t. I always learn something, I think, from them. Sometimes I like things that I’ve said. Sometimes I wish tha t I’d said them another way. Sometimes I a m irritated by the way a character has developed and I wish I had said more about him. I’ve tried to bring out a lot of things about the West. One of the great tragedies of the West, as I have said earlier, was the tragedy for women. It was hard many times for a man to grasp, but any woman understood. I touched on this in The Quick and the Dead. A man and his wife and child had started West; they were intelligent, educated people. The trouble is that they’re the poor branch of the family, while the rest of the family is well-off. So they don’t want to stay east and be the poor relatives; they head West to make a new life for themselves. The wagon is too heavily loaded and the husband subconsciously knows it. They meet a Western man who tells them so. It’s loaded heavy because she is bringing a particular article of furniture West around which she can build her whole life. This was true of woman after woman after woman. There was one article of furniture tha t maybe had been in the family for years and years, sometimes a chair, sometimes a dresser, sometimes a table, a desk, many things. Maybe a cradle. This they had to have and the wagon just couldn’t carry it. The weight was such a problem tha t here and there they had to discard things, throw them off the wagon. There used to be a place, hardly noticeable on the map, called Ragtown and beyond that was the desert, then the Sierras. So this was the last place to which those treasured items could be carried. There were acres and acres of discarded furniture, mattresses and even blankets just waving in the wind. All the discarded hopes and discarded loves and treasures. Many women were willing to accept the fact that they were going into a log cabin, that they were going to live in a shack, that they were going to live with a dirt floor, but they wanted this one article of furniture around which they could build their lives. This was something from home. I tried to show that, as I said, in The Quick A n d The Dead. I did it fairly well, but not as well as I should have. But sinceit is a major thing, I’ll touch on it again.


MM: Do you believe, as some of your characters do, that the landscape renews man?

LL: Yes, I do. I think this very definitely. I think tha t all of us could profit by going out in the hills once in a while. I t does something to you spiritually. The poet tha t I think I find the most in is Robinson Jeffers. He has the greatest feeling for the land of anybody I know. There’s something very serious, very real in his writing.

MM: Is there any one writer who influenced you more than anyone else?

LL: No, there isn’t. I was influenced to a n extent by a lot of writers. If there were to be one, it would be Robert Louis Stevenson. But I don’t think any one of them influenced me more than the others. My books are short, but if I wrote like many writers do they would be three hundred pages longer. I believe in saying things as simply as possible, in as few words as possible.

Michael T. Marsden is a n Associate Professor in the Popular Culture Department a t Howling Green State University

a conversation with louis l'amour

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