Louis LAmour - The Sixth Shotgun

Ross turned abruptly, and saw the two men he had seen in town at the restaurantKerb Dahl and the shorter, hard-faced man.

In that single instant he became aware of many things. Bob Vernon stood in the door, white as death. Kerb Dahl, a hard gleam in his eyes, was on the right and he walked with elbows bent, hands swinging at his gun butts.

Behind Ross there was a low moan of fear from Sherry, but he did not move, only waited and watched the two men coming toward him. It could be here. It could be now. It could be at this moment.

Dahl spoke first, his lean, cadaverous face hard and with a curiously set expression. The shorter man had moved apart from him a little. Haney remembered the girl behind him, and knew he dare not fightbut some sixth sense warned him that somewhere else would be a third man, probably with a rifle. The difference.

Kerb Dahl spoke. Youre Ross Haney. I reckon you know me. Im Dahl, an this here is the first time youve come to the VV, an this is goin to be the last. You come on this place again an you get killed. We dont aim to have no troublemakers around.

Ross Haney held very still, weighing his next words carefully. This could break into a shooting match in one instant

It is this by which we measure a
man, by what he does with his life,
by what he creates to leave behind.

Louis LAmour

When Louis LAmour died on June 19, 1988, he was the most decorated author in the history of American letters. In 1983 he was the first American author ever to be awarded a Special National Gold Medal by the United States Congress for lifetime literary achievement and in 1984 President Reagan awarded him the Medal of Freedom, the highest civilian honor in the nation.

LAmour for decades had merchandised himself as much as, and even more than, his Western fiction with a success enjoyed by no one since Ned Buntline who had made Buffalo Bill Cody a figure of international prominence. Movie cowboy Tim McCoy, who knew Buffalo Bill, recalled him as once saying that so much had been written about him and his various exploits that he no longer knew himself what was true and what may have been exaggeration. LAmour had no such publicist as Buntline; instead, he was the principal source of information about his past. In a letter quoted in the Gregg Press reprint edition of KILKENNY (1954), LAmour claimed to have been taught to use a six-shooter by Bill Tilghman, a frontier lawman noted for having captured Bill Doolin and who was shot to death in 1924 at the age of seventy-one by a drunken Prohibition agent when Tilghman was city marshal at Cromwell, Oklahoma.

He was born Louis Dearborn LaMoore on March 22, 1908 in Jamestown, North Dakota, the son of Louis Charles LaMoore and Emily Lavisa Dearborn LaMoore, the youngest of seven children. The main source of biographical information about LAmour while he was alive came from the brief sketches that he supplied and periodically revised on the back pages of his original paperback novels. He contended that he ran away from home at fifteen and for at least two decades traveled throughout the world having the kinds of adventures he would later describe in his fiction. Among the jobs he said he had were those of ranch hand, merchant seaman, roustabout for a traveling circus, fruit picker, ship loader, and lumberjack. He recalled being very athletic, bicycling through Italy, Hungary, and British India, fighting as he traveled, eventually becoming a professional boxer. Depending on which one of these sketches you might read, LAmour won anywhere from fifty-one to fifty-eight of fifty-nine bouts. While in Macao in 1927, LAmour claimed he heard a story about a sunken ship and was determined to be the first one to salvage the money left in the captains safe. He was the first and, afterward, went to live a Bohemian life in Paris. Wearying finally of being a drifter and loner for so long, LAmour said he returned to the United States in the late 1930s and turned to writing fiction for pulp magazines, turning out mysteries and detective stories, adventure tales, sports stories, and Westerns. His first book was a collection of verse titled SMOKE FROM THIS ALTAR (1939), printed in a very limited edition by a publisher in Oklahoma City. During the Second World War, LAmour served in a tank destroyer unit and in the Transportation Corps. It was not until after the war that he came to specialize in writing Western fiction for the pulp magazines.

The cowards didnt go, LAmour remarked as we sat across from each other in the summer of 1980 on the patio behind his large, Spanish-style home on the corner of Sunset Boulevard and Loring Avenue in Los Angeles. It was inevitable that the Indian way of life should cease. And look at what replaced it! Where there was wilderness, there are now hospitals and schools.

And what of the buffalo? I asked him.

They had outlived their usefulness, he replied confidently. It was necessary that they be killed. Now there are farms throughout that whole area, farms that grow food to feed one third of the world. Its a matter of progress. The Indians didnt own the lands they occupied. Many of the tribes, in fact, had only recently occupied certain regions before the white man arrived. The Indians took the land from others, the cliff dwellers, for example. And the white man took the land from the Indians. It wasnt the Indians land to claim or to sell. It went to the strongest. The white men were stronger. Theres nothing more stupid, in my opinion, than to talk about paying the Indians for the land. It was never theirs to sell.

The garden beyond the patio was neatly manicured, a truly Wordsworthian garden, Nature cut back, trimmed and controlled. A seemingly endless stream of cars swished past on Sunset Boulevard and the sky was tinted by a reddish-brown smog.

My favorite tree, LAmour continued, is the white aspen. For me, it is the most beautiful tree in all Nature. I saw a terrible thing on a recent trip I took. I climbed to the top of this hill and I could see white aspen covering an adjacent hill. But growing around the bottoms of those white aspens was scrub oak. Scrub oak is short, tough. It will choke the life out of the white aspens. Thats the way it is in Nature.

LAmour then took me on a tour of that part of the house in which he worked, the library with its 10,000 volumes stored in gigantic bookcases that could swing out into the room only to reveal a second built-in bookcase of similar dimension, all of them filled from top to bottom with books, most of them pertaining to some aspect of the American West.

I use these books in my research, LAmour explained. Every incident in any story I write is authentic and usually based either on something I personally experienced or something that happened in history. And over herehe said, moving toward a map case in the hallwayare my maps. He pulled open a drawer to show a thick pile of topographical maps. Handing me one to study, he pointed out the extensive detail in the cartography. When I say there is a rock in the road in one of my books, my readers know that, if they go to that spot and look, theyll find that rock.

There is one thing that continues to trouble me about your books, I said.

And what is that?

Well, take LAST STAND AT PAPAGO WELLS. After an Indian attack, according to the story, only five characters have been killed, but one of the surviving characters counts six corpses.

Ill have to go back and count them again, LAmour said, and smiled. But, you know, I dont think the people who read my books would really care.

It was a curious remark and very much at odds with the impression he had been trying to give me when showing me his library and his detailed maps. Even the way he dressed, with the striped cowboy shirt, the silver belt buckle, the Western boots and rawhide bolo tie was intended to give one the impression that he was a man who had stepped out of the 19th Century into the 20th.