Why Read Louis L'Amour

Louis L’Amour is one of America’s best storytellers who describes the history of the American West without a numbing recitation of dates, facts, names and figures. His advice to those who have not been readers is “to read what interests you. Reading is fun. Reading is adventure. It is not important what you read at first, only that you read.”

His stories recognize that everyone in the West had come from someplace else—except for the Native Americans—and that the West could be said to have begun with the Louisiana Purchase in 1803.

Mountain men, trappers, and fur traders came before the Mormons to Utah, the gold rush in California, and the land rush to Oregon. Texas broke away from Mexico in 1836 and became a state in 1845, while the end of the Civil War had ripped the country apart but can be said to have started the West.

The West and Westerns basically cover a 30-year period from 1865 to 1895, a period that witnessed eastern states in disarray. The land was vast, the people few, and opportunity beckoning. Not many people occupied a large space, but those who did carried the attitude that they were starting tradition rather than living on it.

Women played roles in settling the West from devoted unsung wives to saloon people. L’Amour explores relationships between men and women on a realistic level involving the problems of frontier life. He did not write about sex because, “It has been there all the time,” while “I am writing about men and women who were settling a new country, finding their way through a maze of difficulties, and learning to survive despite them.”

 Hondo introduces Angie Lowe who had settled for a bad husband due to the fact that women had so few choices in those days and many such unions turned out poorly.

Hondo is considered by many to be L’Amour’s finest book, but there are many others. If one is interested in the women in his books, I recommend Bendigo Shafter, Kiowa Trail, Matagorda, Cherokee Trail, Ride The Dark Trail, Where The Long Grass Grows, Ride The River, Papago Wells, The Rider of Lost Creek, and for the worst woman (Myra Cord) in all of literature perhaps, Reilly’s Luck. The latter may also be one of his best books.

As he explained, “My stories are history of a kind. The difference is that I write of the nameless ones, and when they have left no stories I write what must have been, what could have been, using knowledge of the country itself, how it was travelled, how many people lived by hunting and gathering, and what their relationships might have been with the Indians and others.”

What follows are what might be considered as “Louie’s Gems” or statements by characters in his stories that I think are worth quoting or at least pondering:

“Remember this, Bendigo, that it is the work a man does that matters. Many men who have made mistakes in their own lives have created grandly, beautifully. It is this by which we measure a man, by what he does in this life, by what he creates to leave behind.”

“We were not like the Europeans from whom we sprung; we were not settled in villages or classes where we would stay, generation after generation.”

“Sometimes I think that if it were not for books I could not live, I’d be so lonely.”

“We in the West asked no questions of a man. He was taken by the name he gave you, if he chose to give one, and judged by his actions. A man’s affairs were his own.”

“To live is not only to exist…To live is to feel.”

“To each of us is given a life. To live with honor and to pass on having left our mark, it is only essential that we do our part, that we leave our children strong…The important thing is to do the best one can with what one has.”

“The West was a place where you started over. There should always be a place for people to start over.”

“What I like about this country is that nobody thinks anything is too big or too hard. If they want to do something, they just take it for granted they can do it, and then they just naturally go ahead.”

“You’ve got me there. Only—well, you’re a lady….” “I hope so.” She smiled again. “I have never found it to be a handicap.”

“We want women here who can make a home, and, if need be, handle a rifle.”

“The men who settled the West were a hardy lot, as were their women, and they did not accept being pushed around by people, events, or even the elements.”

“Times bred the men they needed, and the West needed men who could bring peace to the wild land—even while finding death themselves. The West was won by gunfighters no less than by pioneering families and Indian fighters.”

“Men who were deadly with guns were as much a part of the West as Indians and buffalo. …Many of the gunfighters became marshals of Western towns. No matter how lawless they themselves might have been, they became a force for law and order who kept anyone from disturbing the peace, bothering citizens, or interfering with business.”

Those are just a few of the pearls one finds in L’Amour’s stories. Incidentally, Louie was born in South Dakota in 1908, the youngest of seven children. His father was a veterinarian who changed the family’s name from “LaMoore” to “L’Amour” before Louis became famous. In fact, Louis knocked around for much of his teens and adult life, with some 10 years being in Oklahoma. His biography sums up this part of his life as his leaving school at 15 to roam the world while all the time having a lifelong love affair with learning.

Because Western and frontier stories (especially movies) portray American Indians in a manner many will find unacceptable today, it may be worthwhile to consider the historical context of the period between 1865 and 1895. Native Americans, who had been in North America long before the Europeans, were not granted United States citizenship until 1924. The Fourteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution (1868) did not apply to American Indians who had the misfortune of having mostly been on the side of the South during the Civil War.

Parenthetically but importantly, in understanding the history of how American Indians have been treated, one must understand that they were a conquered people. They did not invade the white man’s land, and their treatment is a subject for another time and place. L’Amour takes American Indians as his stories would have found them, namely, good, bad, or whatever suited his stories.

L’Amour wrote at a furious pace because, as he put it, he was anxious to learn how the story was going to turn out. He was enormously well read and hungry to learn, being mostly self-educated. His love of books sometimes shows up in a story when a book in a jacket happens to block a bullet destined for one of his heroes.

More from and about L’Amour:

In his memoir, “Education of a Wandering Man,” he shares many interesting thoughts.

A writer, he tells us, “One is not, by decision, just a writer. One becomes a writer by writing, by shaping thoughts into the proper or improper words, depending on the subject, and by doing it constantly.”

“Many people waste time writing about their story rather than telling their story.”

“Writing, however, is a learning process, one never knows enough, and one is never good enough.”

“A book is less important for what it says than for what it makes you think.”

As to his stories, “There is woven into the texture of what I hope are entertaining tales; a good bit of how people lived; what they thought; and how they survived in desert, mountain, and city.”

“A writer is bound by no earthly ties, what he is and what he sees he creates in his mind, or his subconscious creates it for him.”

“We simply must free the mind from its fetters and point it to function without restraint. Many of us have learned to supply ourselves with raw materials and then allow the subconscious to take over. This is what creativity is. One must condition oneself for the process and then let it proceed. …A writer, or for that matter any artist, is continuously making demands upon the subconscious and producing results.”

“Each book I write is an adventure in itself.”

“History to me is the story of people and how they lived, not just an endless story of dynasties and wars.”

“Books are the building blocks of civilization, for without the written word, a man knows nothing beyond what occurs during his own brief years and, perhaps, in a few tales his parents will tell him.”

“Books as books must be preserved. There is an effort now to preserve everything by mechanical means, but of what use will they be to a man who has no power?”

L’Amour had over ten thousand books in his personal library. “Of the value of books, I am myself my best example. If it were not for books, I should never have been more than a laborer…”           

Also in his memoir, he defines a frontier as “that line beyond which man has not been, or where he is only beginning to go.” But he also cautions that “In almost every instance where somebody was supposed to be first, we find there was somebody else already there.”

In 1989 he observed, “I believe that all that has gone before has been but preliminary, that our real history began with that voyage to the moon.”

—Dick Fischer, donor of the L’Amour Collection, June 2021