Louis Lamour Book Reviews

Conn Dury is the arch-type cowboy.  He manages a rough outfit of hard riding men and manages them well.  He carries a gun and he knows how to use it.  He doesn’t just understand and know cattle, he loves what he does and he wouldn’t choose any other life.

He rides hard and works hard.  He has no interest in violence beyond surviving it long enough to be able to enjoy a life free from it.  He doesn’t seek to hurt but rather wants to build.  He wants to build towns by building commerce.

Conn Dury is so busy working and building that he doesn’t even recognize his own growth and change.  He doesn’t realize that he has fallen in love with Kate Lundy.  Not that he is ignorant, but he simply puts the needs of others before his own - to the point of ignoring himself at times.

All across the west, through Arizona, California, Utah, Oregon, Idaho, Montana the landscape is dotted with towns that used to be.  Most of the towns that were built by pioneers and adventurers simply didn’t make it.  People built in areas that had no resources or too few resources.

The landscape changed quickly, and with it the sources of income.  The stage line that ran through one year would be replaced by the railroad the next.  Suddenly the towns along the railroad prospered and the others disappeared.  Gold appeared one day and in a few months towns of several thousand sprouted to life.  A year or two later the same towns completely disappeared.

Today the landscape doesn’t change as quickly.  Offices that belong to one company can be replaced quickly by leasing them to another company.  Jobs change.  Products change.  Services change.  The expenses associated with building and rebuilding are often prohibitive, especially when much of the work can be done with email or tele-conferencing.

Towns in the old west were a bit different from the notion of towns common today.  In Kiowa Trail L’amour describes a town as “ten buildings long on the north side of the street, and seven long on the south.”

There are few towns these days that would meet that description.  Personally I’ve lived in only one town in my life time that comes even close to that description, and by today’s standards it would be considered nothing more than a rest stop along the highway.

Even the smallest of towns have more than seventeen buildings.  In the west a town could be defined as nothing more than a place a wagon stopped to sell whiskey or anywhere more than two or three people gathered regularly.  Often these towns lasted no more than few years, some only a few months.  Those that had resources and something to offer grew into the towns of today.

Revenge is a compelling theme that runs throughout many of Louis L’amour’s books.  Often it is vengeance for some act that happened while the protagonist was still a very young person.  This revenge then takes the character on a series of adventures that leave him fairly alone and without purpose in the world.  The course of revenge provides the character with the ability to survive, the tools to fight, and a knowledge of bad men.

Both “Kiowa Trail” and “Taggart” feature revenge as a sub-theme and sub-motive of the main character.  They are presented as background information for the main character and apparently have little to do with the main plot of the story, but without the revenge of earlier years the main character could not really exist in their current state.  Revenge provides a great place for a story to build and L’amour is expert in his ability to turn revenge into a thrilling and captivating tale or to use it to embellish a character into something believable and engaging.

Many of Louis Lamour’s novels describe the sanctity of women in the old west.  From Hanging Woman Creek “You could steal cattle or shoot a man and maybe get away with it, but if you bothered a decent woman you stood a good chance of getting lynched.”

How true this notion is can never precisely be determined just as so many other aspects of cultures from the past, but it is quite apparent that Lamour believed it firmly.  Many of his stories hinge on the importants of not bothering a woman or of the consequences of violence against women.  Kiowa Trail, for example reaches resolution because the antagonist makes the fatal mistake of attacking a woman.

Certainly women were relegated to a station in life that has taken many years to overcome and which some would argue has not yet been overcome.  It took a half a century following the civil war for women to receive the vote, and more than a half century after that before legislation was passed to protect their employment status in the United States to ensure that their wages would be equal to that of a man.

Though the cowhands and ranchers would not tolerate bothering a woman, ironically these same men would also not tolerate the same women to vote or work a full day for full wages.  How deeply vested is this notion?  How far does is persist today?  Where will it be in another century?