Troubadour of the American West: an exemplar of the frontier life he wrote about, author Louis L'Amour celebrated the honorable individualism of the men and women who settled the American West

New American, The, March 21, 2005 by William Norman Grigg

I have walked the high country; I have breathed its air, bedded down under its trees, watched the white clouds drift and the storm clouds gather. Far away I have seen dust-devils do their weird dance and I have heard the pelting rain on the trees above me. I remember the decks of ships where I have walked, the feel of the wheel in my hands, the drip of water from yellow oilskins, and I have heard the crash of great trees coming down in the forest. One does not have to live among these things to remember them, and I do. They were and are a part of me.

--Louis L'Amour, from his memoir Education of a Wandering Man

At the age of 12, Louis Dearborn LaMoore decided that schooling was interfering with his education. The last of seven children (two of whom died quite young), Louis was born on March 22, 1908, and was raised in a household full of books. As a young child, Louis developed a wide-ranging curiosity and omnivorous appetite for reading. By the time he took himself out of school, Louis had already begun a detailed study of history and the natural sciences, as well as the lore of distant lands. His expanding desire for knowledge and experience made it increasingly difficult to be chained to a desk in a classroom.

Louis was also enchanted with the stories of the western frontier told by uncles who paid frequent visits to the LaMoore household in Jamestown, North Dakota. Some had been itinerant cowboys, or successful ranchers. Others had fought in the Civil War, or in Indian campaigns. As hungry as he was for knowledge, Louis found that he craved adventure just as much. Much later in life, he would tell his children that "adventure is just a romantic name for trouble."

Adventure thrust itself on the LaMoore household shortly after Louis decided to end his formal education. After a series of bank failures devastated the midwestern economy, Louis's father, Dr. L.C. LaMoore, uprooted the family and hit the road in search of financial security.

Thus began what amounted to a decades-long apprenticeship as an observer, historian, and chronicler of America's western culture. Writing as Louis L'Amour (he preferred the original spelling, rather than his father's anglicized version), he would go on to become one of our nation's most prolific and widely read novelists. At the time of his death in 1988, he had 90 novels to his credit, and an estimated 200,000,000 copies of his works were in print. L'Amour's contributions to our national culture earned a National Gold Medal from Congress in 1983, and a Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1984.

Louis L'Amour's detractors complain that his stories tend to be formulaic. His heroes are, almost without exception, stoic, physically imposing men of unbending principle; his female characters are strong-willed women who can take care of themselves but prefer to be cared for by the heroes. While the standard L'Amour hero is a wiry loner, his typical villain is well-fed, smugly corrupt, and politically connected--seeking to enrich himself through intimidation and manipulation, rather than through personal initiative and industry.

Granted, L'Amour didn't invest his literary creations--men such as Chick Bowdrie, Conagher, Kilkenny, Hondo, or his version of Hopalong Cassidy--with nuance, angst, or self-doubt. The same could be said of many of the characters that inhabit his Sackett series (that multi-generation epic, taken as a whole, has attracted serious critical comparisons to the works of Zola and Faulkner).

But this doesn't illustrate a lack of literary skill on L'Amour's part. Rather, it reflects his appreciation for the character traits--such as personal honor, physical courage, self-reliance, and discipline--he found so abundantly represented in his study of the men and women who tamed the American West.

"L'Amour stresses the endangered American virtues of violent patriotism," points out literary critic Robert L. Gale. "He shows us the values of fighting for family, home, region, country, the frontier way of life.... [He] reinforces our notion that the fading American way of life--nothing less than the dramatic destiny of a westering people--has been presented with justifiable pride."

L'Amour's distinctive literary style, continued Gale, "evolved out of a humble adolescence, a rollicking early youth marked by jobs in various fields and aboard many ships, global war, and decades of intense writing." In a very real sense, L'Amour lived much of what he wrote. Through L'Amour's novels, commented his daughter Angelique, "each reader has met a part of my father. Each hero has a bit of Dad's experience that makes him who he is."

Fisticuffs and Inspiration

By the time the LaMoore family left Jamestown in 1923, most of the children had left home. Louis's sole remaining sibling was an adopted brother named John, described in one account as "a spunky street fighter from New York and an example of a natural survivor, quick of wit and sharp of tongue." Louis emulated those traits, and learned how to defend himself with his fists. Those skills proved useful as he made his way west--skinning cattle in west Texas, baling hay in New Mexico, working in mines in Arizona and Nevada. Like the characters who would inhabit his stories, Louis found himself embroiled in more than a few fights.