Like Shalako, Captain Tom Kedrick of Showdown at Yellow Butte is a soldier of fortune and a veteran of the Civil War and the Franco-Prussian War. They both had other military experiences in Africa and Asia. L’Amour was able to draw on his own wartime experiences in creating these characters. During and just after World War II, L’Amour wrote letters published in Rob Wagner’s Script, a weekly for Beverly Hills, Calif., residents. Many of the letters were from Europe. They described experiences that are hauntingly like those of his fictional characters.

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Of course, it is not just terrain that L’Amour knew. Accurate details support the action in all his books. When Flint goes West in 1882, for example, he carries Smith & Wesson Russian .44 cartridge revolvers. His wife had found a Navy Colt percussion revolver in his abandoned safe. Although L’Amour does not say it directly, in 1867 the Navy Colt would have been Flint’s weapon of choice, and he would have carried several of them for more firepower (since percussion revolvers had slow reload times). Smith & Wesson came out with cartridge revolvers in the late 1850s, but they were of small caliber and not sturdy. Not until after 1870 did metallic cartridge revolvers become widespread in the American West. Smith & Wesson made the elegant Russian .44 in 1871, and Flint would have switched to that large-caliber revolver when it became available.

The migration of Americans into Apache-haunted, sparsely settled New Mexico is well told through the experiences of the Sacketts in The Daybreakers. The start of the cattle industry is covered in Killoe, Conagher and Radigan, together with the troubles related to land and water rights that still plague Westerners today. Showdown at Yellow Butte also brings 19th-century land fights to life. Transportation — stagecoach and railroad — is spotlighted in both Conagher and Flint, and the prelude to the end of the Apache troubles is the focus of Shalako. All told, L’Amour’s New Mexico novels — especially when the reading is augmented by map study–provide an understanding of New Mexico from the 1846 annexation by the United States to the end of the frontier era.

But as Louis L’Amour himself said, reading is never enough. Visiting some of the New Mexico places that L’Amour writes about can be a highly rewarding experience. In addition to hiking into and camping in the Flint hideout in the Malpais south of Grants (Los Alamitos in the book), my sons and I have hiked the area of the hunters’ camp between the ‘Big and Little Hatchets’ in the novel Shalako. My wife and I have traveled to tiny Reserve (called the Plaza in Conagher, and indeed there were originally three separate towns in the area — Upper, Middle, and Lower San Francisco Plaza), a place that still calls to mind the wild days of the cattlemen in the 1870s.

Except for parks and tourist attractions, the country is remarkably unchanged from the time of L’Amour’s stories. Many of the areas that once saw travelers on foot and horseback seldom see people today; sites where you would formerly have seen wagon camps and riders now lie deserted. These lonesome places wait in silence. Some can be reached by unimproved roads, and some you must find by foot or horseback. If you wear a pack, be sure to leave room for maps and a few good Louis L’Amour books.

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