Louis LAmour - The Lawless West

You move fast. Pinder was staring at me with small eyes. Suppose I had cut myself in with Blacky and the Pache?

My chuckle angered him. You? I had that pegged, Jim Pinder. When my guns came out, you would have died first. Youre faster than either of those two, so youd take yours first. Then Blacky, and after himI nodded toward the Apachehim. He would be the hardest to kill.

Pinder didnt like it, and he didnt like me. I made an offer, he said.

And you brought these coyotes to give me a rough time if I didnt take it? Be damned to you, Pinder! You can take your CP outfit and go to blazes!

His lips thinned down and he stared at me. Ive seldom seen such hatred in a mans eyes. Then get out! he said. Get out fast! Join Maclaren an you die!

Then why wait? Im not joining Maclaren so far as I know now, but Im staying, Pinder. Any time you want what Ive got, come shooting. Ill be ready.

from Riders of the Dawn by Louis LAmour

A short novel is a story too short to be a novel40,000 words or lessand too long to be a short story. It was a literary form that once was encouraged and flourished when there were numerous fiction magazines published weekly, monthly, or quarterly in the United States, and it is a form at which numerous American writers excelled. Although a great many authors have written excellent Western fiction, beginning with Mark Twain and Bret Harte, only three managed as a result of their Western stories to attract a sufficient readership to become wealthy. Zane Grey, Max Brand, and Louis LAmour were the three, and their work has endured with generations of readers throughout the world. For this collection I have selected a short novel by each of these authors, consisting of stories I regard as among their best work. This is the third, and last, time I shall do so. Earlier collections of short novels by these three authors have been titled The Golden West and The Untamed West respectively for first publication in paperback.

The greatest lesson the pioneers learned from the Indians is with us still: that it is each mans and each womans inalienable right to find his own path in life, to follow his own vision, to achieve his own destinyeven should one fail in the process. There is no principle so singularly revolutionary as this one in human intellectual history before the American frontier experience, and it grew from the very soil of this land and the peoples who came to live on it. It is this principle that has always been the very cornerstone of the Western story. Perhaps for this reason critics have been wont to dismiss it as subversive and inconsequential because this principle reduces their voices to only a few among many. Surely it is why the Western story has been consistently banned by totalitarian governments and is sneered at by the purveyors of political correctness. Such a principle undermines the very foundations of totalitarianism and collectivism because it cannot be accommodated by the political correctness of those who would seek to exert power over others and replace all options with a single, all-encompassing, monolithic pattern for living.

There is no other kind of American literary endeavor that has so repeatedly posed the eternal questionshow do I wish to live?, in what do I believe?, what do I want from life?, what have I to give to life?as has the Western story. There is no other kind of literary enterprise since Greek drama that has so invariably posed ethical and moral questions about life as a fundamental of its narrative structure, that has taken a stand and said: this is wrong; this is right. Individual authors, as individual filmmakers, may present us with notions with which we do not agree, but in so doing they have made us think again about things that the herd has always been only too anxious to view as settled and outside the realm of questioning.

The West of the Western story is a region where generations of people from every continent on earth and for ages immeasurable have sought a second chance for a better life. The people forged by the clash of cultures in the American West produced a kind of human being very different from any the world had ever known before. How else could it be for a nation emerging from so many nations? And so stories set in the American West have never lost that sense of hope. It wasnt the graves at Shiloh, the white crosses at Verdun, the vacant beaches at Normandy, or the lines on the faces of their great men and women that made the Americans a great people. It was something more intangible than that. It was their great willingness of the heart.

What alone brings you back to a piece of music, a song, a painting, a poem, or a story is the mood that it creates in you when you have experienced it. The mood you experience in reading a Western story is that a better life is possible if we have the grit to endure the ordeal of attaining it, that it requires courage to hope, the very greatest courage any human being can ever have. And it is hope that distinguishes the Western story from every other kind of fiction. Only when courage and hope are gone will these stories cease to be relevant to all of us.

Jon Tuska

Portland, Oregon