New Mexico geology also contributes in a major way to the stage on which the Louis L’Amour novels were cast. The Colorado Plateau in the northwest, for instance, is where his Showdown at Yellow Butte occurs. The Plains of San Agustin, west of Socorro, is where the 1858 cattle drives from Texas ended, as described in Killoe. The continued development of ranching on the plains through the 1860s and early 1870s is covered in L’Amour’s Conagher. Today the Plains of San Agustin hold the Very Large Array telescope, with its huge electronic ears listening for alien transmissions from space. The basin and range area in the extreme boot heel of southwestern New Mexico is the setting of Shalako.

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The Rio Grande Rift, a long trough running from Colorado to Mexico and now containing, literally, a ‘great river,’ cuts the state essentially in half north to south. East of the Rift Mountains, which include a southern extension of the Rocky Mountains, are the plains drained by the Canadian and Pecos rivers. The Rio Grande Rift has experienced a great deal of vulcanism, and the Jemez Caldera is featured in the L’Amour story Radigan. To the west, along the same lineament, vulcanism created the jagged, tumbled rocks and caves of the Malpais, which is the setting for Flint.

Fights over land, a major theme of The Daybreakers, continue in Showdown at Yellow Butte, located near Farmington, N.M. Radigan includes a land fight between Anglos and describes high-mountain ranching in the area of San Ysidro and Los Alamos in the early 1870s.

Of Louis L’Amour’s seven novels written primarily about New Mexico, Killoe, which was published in 1962, covers the earliest time period. It tells the story of a family and their friends who migrate from West Texas in 1858, up the Pecos River to Delaware Creek, through El Paso to the Mimbres area, and then north into the Plains of San Agustin. The Daybreakers, the first Sackett novel, came out in 1960 and treats the time around 1867. It traces some of the Sackett brothers as they venture west from their home in the Tennessee Mountains on a cattle drive and then settle in the town of Mora. There, they become involved in the land grant fights. Conagher, published in 1970, tells about the rustlers that were attracted to the lawless open-range ranching of that time. It is also an 1870s love story about a widow with two small children trying to make it on a dirt-poor ranch on the Plains of San Agustin. The development of the stagecoach lines, which provided crucial communication and transportation in the Old West, is an important part of the novel. Showdown at Yellow Butte was written under the name Jim Mayo and copyrighted in 1953. It was probably L’Amour’s second Western novel, after Westward the Tide and before Hondo, and the time is not as well defined as in his other novels. But it is certainly postCivil War and involves land scams and land fights in northwestern New Mexico.

Two New Mexico novels are set in 1882-83, just after the Atchison, Topeka & Santa Fe Railroad was built through New Mexico and created Grants Camp, which became simply Grants. In Flint, Grants is referred to as Los Alamitos, which means ‘little cottonwood,’ and indeed it was named that prior to the railroad’s being built. One of Louis L’Amour’s finest novels, Flint tells the story of an orphan boy who, after being raised by a Western assassin, becomes a successful Eastern business tycoon and then goes back to the West when he expects to die. It is a love story, as well. It also explores railroad land scams and looks at the early history of Grants and the Malpais to the south.

Shalako, whose action unfolds over a five-day period in southwestern New Mexico, tells of the historic Apache meute from San Carlos and their joining with the bands out of the Mexican Sierra Madres in the early spring of 1882. Shalako Carlin is a soldier of fortune who had served in the Civil War. He encounters the Apache, the U.S. Army, and a European royal hunting party. The movie of the same name came out in 1968, with Sean Connery and Brigitte Bardot playing the leads.

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