Novel 1981 - Comstock Lode (v5.0) (55 page)

No, it was discouraging, but not that discouraging. I needed the money desperately too, but I knew I was going to do it, and finally I decided the editors couldn’t all be crazy. Something had to be wrong with what I was doing, so I got ten or twelve of my favorite stories from the classics and ten or twelve from the popular magazines and sat down and studied them to see what they were doing that I wasn’t doing. What they were doing that made their stories sell. Shortly after that, mine began to sell.

Q: But the first stories you wrote were not Western stories?

No. No, I never intended to write about the West. I loved it, I knew about it, I had learned about it from the time I was a very small boy, but I had no intention of writing about the West. It was too close to me. Many times when you want to write about something, you pick something that is far away from yourself. You shouldn’t. You should write what you know best. And the West was really what I knew best, but I had been over in the Far East and I had been fascinated by all I had seen over there and there was an awful lot that people didn’t know about that I had learned, and I wanted to tell people about it and tell stories about it—and then the Far East had always fascinated me and that’s mainly what I wanted to write about.

But I wrote several Western stories. I remember I was in France during the war, I went one day to the casual officers’ mess at St. Augustine Place in Paris, and when you went to such places to eat, you had to sign in. After signing in, as I stepped away a lieutenant colonel who stepped up behind me to sign in noticed my name. He called after me, and I turned around and he said, “Are you the L’Amour who writes the Western stories?” I said yes. He said, “The general reads them all the time.” That was Eisenhower. So later I found he did read them all the time, and recently I spoke on a program in Colorado with Gerald Ford, and one of the Secret Service men there had been with Ike and it turns out they’re all fans of mine. And one of them said, “That’s who turned us on first. Eisenhower. He used to read them and pass them on to us.”

Q: Did your name give you troubles as an action writer?

Oh, yes, it did, quite a bit. I had one publisher who said nobody could ever sell a Western story by someone whose name was Louis L’Amour. So they insisted that I use another name, and I had been writing a bunch of stories about the South Pacific and Indonesia about a character called Ponga Jim Mayo, so I used the name “Jim Mayo” for some of my early stories and then switched back.

Q: What was your breakthrough work?

I sold a story called “The Gift of Cochise” to
Collier’s
magazine, and Dick Caroll, who was then editor for Fawcett, saw it and he wanted me to come in and talk to him about it. And he said, “You know, you’ve got a novel in those characters. It’s foolish to waste them on just a short story. You write the novel, and I’ve got a man who wants to buy it.” So I wrote the novel that became
Hondo
and John Wayne bought it and made the movie, and then, of course, everybody wanted more Westerns from me and so I fell into it very easily.

But I didn’t go along just on what I knew already. Although I had been all over the West myself and knew almost every part of it, I didn’t stop there. I started to really do research seriously, and added it to what I had learned or picked up by osmosis. I read all the factual material I could find. I got hold of diaries and journals of the old-timers, and studied them and went to the places.

Q: Then the research never stops?

No, it never stopped in any period, and in fact it’s grown over the years. I do more research now than I used to. And I used to do a lot, but now I’ve done more and more and more as it’s gone along, because I’ve seen the value in it. I’ve seen how much you can add. So I’ve tried more and more to make my stories accurate and write about historical situations.

Q: Your books have been complimented over the years by professionals, archaeologists, and geologists, for your knowledge of the land. Is that mainly from your travel?

Well, I work with a lot of maps. I have a lot of rare old maps. They have things on them you won’t find anywhere else. And I go to the places I write about. For example, I just finished doing some research at a place over in southeastern Utah in a very remote canyon over there. Now I’m doing a novel in which that canyon is involved and it’s a canyon that no one seems to know anything about. And people have been in there, but it’s been years and years ago. Indians used to be in there. Now, I could just as well—I know the terrain around there—I could just as well have written that story without going down in there. I don’t think anyone would have known any different, but I would have known the difference. And also, in many cases you find things by doing the actual research that you wouldn’t guess were there and so you miss a lot if you don’t do the research. I’ve gone into very strange terrain and found all sorts of odd and unusual places, and some I’ve used in stories and some I haven’t. I’m going over there soon and try to find a trail to the top of the mesa. I’ve always been told there was no such trail, but now I’ve found out that there is, and wild horses have used it. I can’t imagine how, and I would love to see them using it, because it must be a real scramble for them. Because there is no easy trail at all, and the last three to five-hundred feet are sheer rock. I’ve looked everyplace, flown all around it and gone over it with a helicopter, but there is a trail up there and I’m going to find it.

Q: Your feeling for the land and the West seems to affect your readers in such a special way.

One thing a person has to realize is that in any kind of a frontier story, the land itself is an actor. The land itself is a very vital part of the story. Nothing can happen, nothing can be done without considering the land, and considering the distance between here and there and what the problems are in getting across the country. Many, many times in the West some effect to the land, or some physical appearance of the land, changes the whole story.

Q: But the men and women who came West accepted that challenge of the land for the most part?

Yes, they had to and they did. They had to learn to live with the land, you couldn’t fight it. If you fought it, you’d get killed. But you could learn to live with it, get along, and it’s still essential today, like it was in those days. The desert hasn’t changed a bit.

Q: You don’t write about the names that are famous in history, but in their own way, the characters you create are not ordinary people.

There were people who became extraordinary because the times demanded it. And every once in a while somebody talks about the heroes in my stories. My characters are not heroes, they are people who do what they have to do at the time. And they are not heroes at all. I wish people would really read the stories the way I write them. Some of them do, but some of them let my lead characters take on a kind of aura where they think there is something very special. If they stop and really examine what they are doing, they are just doing what comes naturally. They are just doing what they have to do, and some of them have more skill in handling guns than the average man does today, but not more than they had in those days.

Q: Did the people who came West really know what they were getting into, in terms of the wilderness and the challenges?

Very few. They had heard about it, but when you hear about such things, it all sounds rather glamorous and exciting and you don’t really get the true picture. And they knew the desert was hot, but they didn’t know how hot it could be, didn’t know how sweaty it could be, how dusty it could be. How desperate it is to try to get a drink sometimes. They sort of took those things for granted, you know. It’s one thing to hear about them, it’s another to try to do them.

Q: And yet they survived.

Yes, they survived because they rose to the occasion. And most of them found out that even though they may have doubted themselves in the beginning, they had the quality they needed to come through, and they did it.

There was no free ride and there was no easy way. It was very tough going. Many people died of thirst at the foot of mountains where there was a whole lot of water that was just fifty or sixty feet away up in the rocks.

It was a hard time and a violent time and men who are very physical and very daring and get into situations like that are very prone to settle those disputes personally. They weren’t so apt to go to court and file a lawsuit against somebody.

Q: Many people feel the appeal of the frontier was that it was a simpler time. Was it?

It wasn’t simpler. The only way in which it was, was that in the majority of cases your problems were pretty stark and clear. You knew exactly what they were, and furthermore, you could cope with them. Nowadays it’s kind of difficult, we’re surrounded by so much red tape, so much bureaucracy, so many things we would like to oppose, we don’t know how to do it. We have to get lawyers and sometimes a whole bank of lawyers. The Western man could go face his problem by himself. His basic problems were easily defined: he had to get wood for a fire, water to drink, something to eat, and he had to find shelter for himself. If he had difficulties with anybody, he knew exactly who it was and what to do about it. Whether he wanted to do it or not was up to him.

Q: But we see in your books that a man not only needed the physical skills, but the moral fiber as well, to cope

The moral backing was extremely important because a man was on his own to a degree that none of us are now. If he wanted to be a thief, there was almost nothing that could stop him. If he was a good man, he was a good man because that was his nature to be a good decent human being and the restrictions on him were very few. And so consequently it was strictly up to him. They joke about the black hats and white hats, but there were very few grays in the West. There were some, but very few. There were a few men who shifted from one side of the law to the other, but by and large that was not true, they were just what they seemed to be.

A couple of years ago, somebody asked me what I would point out as the one quality that a Western man had. It’s dignity—they have a certain dignity, a certain self-poise, a very quiet, certain assurance; you will find many an old Western man who is very poor now and who is just getting along now, but he has pride and he has dignity and carries himself well. He admits no man his superior and yet he has no false pride, no nonsense with that sort of thing, but he has dignity, and this is true of the old women too. I know a lot of them.

Q: The women who came West had to be a very hardy breed. They had to be able to survive as well as their men

They were the same type basically. They were just as rugged and strong as the men were. They might not look it, some of them looked all pink and white and pretty, you know, and frilly, but there was a lot of steel underneath all that and they knew what they were doing and they were capable of doing it. Many a woman ran the ranch or business while her husband was away. And sometimes he was gone for months. Like during the Civil War, many of them were gone while their wives carried on for them, and did a superb job.

Q: Many of your characters seem to have the urge to build, and in Bendigo Shafter you actually show how a town develops out of the sheer wilderness

This was the West. They were building. Men had the desire to build, the desire to create, the desire to bring something out of nothing. Sometimes it was done hastily because they wanted results immediately. Some had no philosophical background at all, and they went ahead and built towns the way a beaver builds dams, without really thinking about it. Because it was more or less their nature to do it. But there were others who had a very distinct appreciation for what they were doing and understood what they were doing, and maybe changed the whole history of the world doing what they were doing.

It was an exciting time. Something was happening in the country. There are times now when you get that feeling, but it’s been a while now since we’ve had it. But at the time when they were crossing the plains, the country was suddenly coming alive and everybody had the feeling that they’d better get on with it, that “Gee, I’d better get doing something ’cause everybody’s going to get ahead of me, everything’s happening, all these people are going somewhere, moving, getting somewhere, and I’m standing still.” At least that was the feeling they had. So all of them had the feeling that they had better improve themselves.

Q: And yet some of the people who started the settlements didn’t really feel comfortable staying there. They have that yearning to see what’s over the next hill, like Tell Sackett, who gets a little nervous when there are “three smokes within five square miles.”

Well, that was typical, because basically they were pioneers and pioneering was in their blood, so getting here and building a town was fine, but once they got that started, they began to itch to go on and do it again or go over to the next rise to see what was there, or around the next bend in the road or across the river, and it was very typical. I find myself that way now when I go out in the desert or mountains hiking. I have to be very severe with myself and set limits or else I’ll just keep on going. And I could keep on going forever—there is always another bend in the road, and when you get around it, it’s just the same as it was, there’s just another bend up ahead.

Q: Your Sackett family probably generates the most attention from your fans. They seem to have a whole lively following of their own. How did you start to work on the Sacketts?

It started actually in the town square in Tucumcari, New Mexico. I got into a fight there. It wasn’t a fight in the ring—I was a stranger in town, and a stranger in some of those towns is the butt of anybody’s jokes. Anyway, I got into a fight with a fellow, and when I was whipping him and some of his friends tried to step in and help him, two fellows stopped them.

When it was all over, I became quite friendly with these two guys and they were cousins. And we rode across the country to Puerta de Luna together and we camped out one night and we were talking about it and one of them said we never have any fights. I said, “Well, you’re lucky.” He said, “No, we’re not lucky. I have thirteen boys in my family and he’s got sixteen in his.” So I figured, boy, that’s the way to go.