Everything L’Amour wrote reflected his interest in details, both from his research and his own experience. ‘When I do research, I am saturating myself in the time, the place and the feeling,’ he says in his memoir, Education of a Wandering Man. ‘But reading is never enough. One must know the land. In every story of the westward movement the land itself is often the most important aspect. No one could move without knowing something that lay ahead. What are the landmarks, if any? Where will I find water?’

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As a sailor, L’Amour knew how far the curvature of the earth would permit observations, and he probably knew how to calculate that distance. His fictional character Flint observes the famous ‘Inscription Rock,’ El Morro, to the west from the 8,200-foot Cebolleta Mesa. El Morro’s elevation is about 7,200 feet, and it is 30 miles from Cebolleta Mesa. Using the formula for the curvature of the earth, the square root of the elevation difference divided by about 0.6, allows you to determine that you can see approximately 50 miles with a 1,000-foot difference in elevation. So, indeed, you can see El Morro from Cebolleta. Did L’Amour see it himself, I wondered, or did he calculate that it was possible to do so from maps?

From his Army discharge in 1946 until 1950, L’Amour wrote many adventure short stories and some police fiction. Westward the Tide, set in South Dakota, was published in London by World Works in 1950; it was his first Western novel. He moved to Hollywood and began to be published steadily. He wrote four of the books in the Hopalong Cassidy series, using the name Tex Burns. When Collier’s magazine published his story ‘The Gift of Cochise’ in July 1952, his career took off. That story was developed into the 1953 book and movie Hondo, and Hondo brought the author national recognition that ultimately led to his receiving the Congressional Gold Medal and the Presidential Medal of Freedom. At his death in 1988, he had perhaps 200 million copies of his books in print. He produced almost three books per year for the last 30 years of his life, and wrote 100-plus books in all. More than 30 were made into movies.

Almost 40 of his novels are set in Arizona, Utah, Colorado and New Mexico. These four states join at the Four Corners. L’Amour lived on a ranch just west of Durango, Colo., near where the states join, and naturally he often put that fantastic Western country into his writing. The majority of his books are set in the 19th-century West. In 1960 he started the momentous task of telling the story of the development of America through the lives of three families; the Sackett family was the subject of 20 of these books. The Sackett saga begins with The Daybreakers, which concludes with the settlement of the Sacketts in Mora, N.M., in 1867.

The annexation of Texas in 1845 by the United States initiated the war with Mexico. The next year, General Stephen W. Kearny marched down the Santa Fe Trail into New Mexico on his way to California and declared New Mexico a territory of the United States. In his command was Lieutenant William Hemsley Emory, who led a group of topographic engineers. Emory’s group was the first to actually locate by latitude and longitude many of the Southwestern landmarks, including Santa Fe and Tucson. When Emory went on with Kearny to San Diego, he detached a group of topographic engineers to continue mapping New Mexico. In the novel Flint, heroine Nancy Kerrigan’s father had been a military engineer and had found a ranch site near the present town of Grants during his duty in the Mexican War.

As part of the American military operation, Colonel Philip St. George Cooke was detailed to develop a wagon road to California from the Rio Grande. He built west along what was later to be the Butterfield Stage route near Deming, N.M., and turned south through Guadalupe Pass, close to the common corner of Arizona, New Mexico and Mexico. This route was to figure in several L’Amour novels. The other early trails that were active during the time period of his novels included the Santa Fe Trail, the Old Spanish Trail, the Camino Real from central Mexico up the Rio Grande to Santa Fe, and the Ore Trail from the mines at Santa Rita (the Silver City area) down to Janos and south to Mexico’s interior. New Mexico Territory, which also included Arizona until 1863, was a magnificent stage for the L’Amour novels from the bringing of cattle into the Plains of San Agustin in 1858 to the end of the Apache wars in 1886. That nearly 30-year period encompassed the wildest times of the old Southwest.

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