My two sons were hard to see through the blinding rain. We were working our way into the eastern edge of the treacherous and beautiful black lava beds called the Malpais (’badlands’), south of Grants, New Mexico. It was the summer of 1983. I had read Louis L’Amour’s outstanding Western Flint, and I was now able to see for real the landmarks mentioned in the novel. I had discovered I could follow the book’s action on topographic maps. It all seemed appropriate: 1983 was probably the centennial of the events in the story.

Subscribe Today

• Did you enjoy our article?
• Read more in Wild West magazine
• Subscribe online and save nearly 40%!!!
 

We had decided to trail L’Amour to the Flint hideout. After taking the trail south from the railroad at McCartys, east of the Malpais, to Cebolleta Mesa, the rain let up a little and we discovered the hideout and pasture in a kupuka (island of vegetation) in the lava beds. We hiked in and had a soggy overnight camp in Jim Flint’s hideout. It was much as L’Amour had described it: a grand, isolated island of vegetation–including some tall ponderosa pines — that was sunk 50 feet in an old lava flow. Despite the rain, we did not doubt at that moment that New Mexico was truly the ‘Land of Enchantment.’ Thus began an intense and fascinating journey in which I explored the New Mexico detailed in the novels of L’Amour, who wrote more than 80 Westerns before his death in June 1988.

L’Amour can be trailed through both time and space, for his history and geography are genuine. ‘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 they’ll find that rock,’ L’Amour told author Robert Weinberg. Well, I reckon I wanted to find that rock.

My interest in the Wild West began before I knew of Louis L’Amour. I grew up with the Western serials of the 1930s and came to admire John Wayne. Wayne was 40 and I was 20 in 1947, when I had a summer job working on director John Ford’s Fort Apache in Monument Valley, Utah. Six years later, Wayne would star in Hondo, based on Louis L’Amour’s landmark book of the same name. L’Amour was born in 1908, the year after Wayne, and I’d have to say that those two men did as much as anybody to bring the feel, sound and soul of the Old West to the American people in the second half of the 20th century.

Louis L’Amour’s early life was filled with the same type of adventures that he wrote about. Due to economic problems and an adventuresome spirit, L’Amour left his Jamestown, N.D., home when he was 15 and spent the next several decades tramping the West and sailing the world. He worked at just about everything that would keep him alive. The late 1920s and 1930s were hard times. Young L’Amour worked at skinning long-dead cattle, haying in the Pecos Valley of southeastern New Mexico, mining, and sailing before the mast in all parts of the world. He was a big man, and his father had taught him to box. This skill served him well in the rough-and-tumble places he found during his wanderings. Interested in his genealogy, he traced his ancestors way back, noting that one had been scalped by Indians. His parents had instilled in him a great love of education and literature. Plenty of times during his travels he found food hard to come by, but there were always books in his pack.

L’Amour’s first publication, Smoke From This Altar, a book of poetry, was published in Oklahoma City in 1939. He also published a number of articles and book reviews just prior to World War II. L’Amour was 34 when the war started. After he graduated from Officer Candidate School at Fort Hood, Texas, L’Amour trained troops in survival and later fought in the European theater in tank destroyers. As a company grade officer, he undoubtedly learned much about land navigation and map reading in order to conduct small-unit missions. With his inquiring nature, it seems likely that he also learned all he could about navigation from the maritime officers under whom he served before the war. Given his background of sea and land navigation, his wanderings throughout the West and his historical curiosity, he had a good base for writing his marvelous novels.

Help HistoryNet by bookmarking to