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

As a youngster, Louis had received boxing lessons from his father, and he had the ambivalent blessing of older brothers eager to act as tutors. When he was 14, he began studying under professional fighters, and occasionally was able to supplement his family's meager income with a purse earned in a prizefight.

"Fighters came from everywhere, but the best ones always came out of the ghettos or the mean streets," wrote Louis in his memoir. "Money was hard to come by, and jobs paid little, yet if a boy could fight, he often had a ticket to the top, or hoped he did. Nearly every small town had someone who believed he was a fighter, and some of them were good."

"Many of my fights were in tank towns such as these, where I was a stranger or a new arrival facing a local boy who was popular," he continued. "To win at all, one had to win decisively.... There was not much money to be made fighting in small towns, but any money was good money to me in those rough years." Since the young men with whom Louis fought were motivated by the same combination of pride and desperation, the four-round matches he fought were often bitter, vicious contests. "That is one of the reasons the fights in his books seem so real," commented Louis's daughter Angelique. "I get the feeling Dad actually delivered and received those punches."

By the time he was 16, L'Amour was a broad-shouldered, thick-chested 6'1" figure who looked roughly a decade older. Desperate to find work, Louis would often quietly abet misunderstandings about his age. "I spent my first years making people think I was older than I was," he recalled in a 1980 Writer's Digest interview. "Now I'm working just as hard at keeping people from guessing my age."

While drifting through New Mexico in 1924, Louis had an experience that would be recreated, in various forms, in several of his later novels.

"I was a stranger in another town, sixteen but passing as twenty-four, hunting any kind of a job that could be done with two hands," Louis recalled shortly before his death in 1988. "A stranger and alone, I drew comment from some rowdies. Maybe they were decent enough fellows most of the time, but they were just feeling their oats that day. One word led to another, and one of them, under the mistaken belief that he was a fighter, selected me for a demonstration. No doubt he wished to augment a reputation he already had, or create one he wished to have."

Louis was hardly the timid type, but he also wasn't one to borrow trouble. Furthermore, he knew that breaking a hand in a street fight would make it more difficult to find a job. If he had simply walked away, however, "the chances were that they would follow, and I was young enough to wish not to be considered a coward." Accordingly, he squared off with his older tormentor. Slipping a roundhouse punch to the head, Louis dug a fight into the man's midsection. "When that punch landed the way it did," L'Amour recalled, "he knew and I knew the fight was over, but he dared not quit in front of his friends."