Volume 1: Unfinished Manuscripts, Mysterious Stories, and Lost Notes from One of the World's Most Popular Novelists

by Louis L'Amour

  Once Louis knew he could earn a good living selling directly to the paperback publishers, the only reason to try for a hardcover sale was prestige—but prestige was an important goal for Louis in the early 1970s. He knew he could knock the ball out of the park in the paperback arena, but he wanted to win over the critics, too.

  While none of the proposal drafts took the story through to its completion, they do reveal a few additional details.

  The inclusion of the intriguing, sylphlike Woman on the Rock, the girl who turns out to be the Beloved Woman of the Cherokee, was made late in the process. I can remember Dad talking about having discovered the concept of the Beloved Woman while he was doing research for one of his later attempts. He was excited by the opportunity it posed for the creation of a fascinating character. At times she seemed almost a Native American Joan of Arc, and would have been an interesting addition to a tragic story of this scope.

  For the longest time, Westerns and science fiction were the two genres where anything but the most superficial love interest was a taboo. Not so the historical novel, which often showed a tendency to cross over into romance territory. In his proposals, Louis made sure publishers knew he would be playing by the rules of historical novels:

  There is a strong love story, and in certain phases of the story, a good bit of sex, tastefully handled but definitely present. Aside from the action, the love story will be, I believe, one of the most entertainingly developed of recent years. With proper promotion I believe this book will have a great sale, of which we can all be proud.

  Louis intended to play on the hypocrisy that surrounded the Cherokee Removal, showing that the prejudice of the white men did not need a target as obvious as the Western genre’s typical Indians.

  …these Indians were, in many cases, educated, well-informed men and women who lived in the same sort of houses as white men and who wore the same sort of clothing as the white man from preference. Their differences from white society were few; they were not a group of “outsiders.” Many were at least as well educated as the average white man of his time, and several had qualities of genius.

  Not only was he exploring the fact that many Cherokee did not look or act differently from their white neighbors (many were even Christian), but some of his characters among the Cherokee elite were meant to be pathetically tone-deaf to the catastrophe that was bearing down on them. To add irony upon irony, there are some indications that he also intended to add major characters who were the black slaves of those same Cherokee elites, slaves who traveled and died on the Trail of Tears.

  Although, for Louis, being an entertainer came first and a historian a more distant second, he did quote some of his sources for research on this book, and mentioned a few of what I’m guessing are actual episodes that he intended to use in the narrative:

  Material for this book has been culled from the Library of Congress, War Department records, the Peabody Library in Baltimore, the Enoch Pratt Library in the same city; from family records of descendants of Indians who made the march, and many other sources.

  Some of the episodes likely to be included in the novel are the following:

  The massacre of Tsali and his family;

  The burial of Chief Whitepath;

  Gen. Scott’s thwarting of the Georgia militia’s efforts to publicly horsewhip sixteen Cherokees;

  The separation of the Indian, Epenetus, from his son while helping a missionary administer sacraments;

  The lashing of a Cherokee for striking a soldier who had goaded the Indian’s wife;

  The attempt of the Cherokees to put to death members of the treaty party who betrayed them;

  The sinking of the overloaded ferry in mid-Mississippi and the drowning of hundreds on it.

  A quote included in some of Louis’s notes sums up the attitude of many of the military men involved (throughout the frontier period the US Army, while being the blunt tool of government policy, was, in my slight experience, often vastly more sympathetic to Native Americans than the private citizens who were their neighbors):

  General Wool, in command in the area, asked to be relieved rather than carry out the distasteful mission. In the majority of cases the Army was sympathetic, and before the end of the march, almost to a man they were helping the Indians. General Wool is quoted as saying, “The whole scene since I have been in this country has been nothing but a heart rending one….I could not do them a greater kindness than to remove every Indian beyond the reach of the white men who, like vultures, are waiting to pounce upon their prey and strip them of everything they have or expect from the government of the United States.”

  The final pieces of the narrative that lurk in the fragmentary proposal drafts are set out here:

  Meanwhile, Miles is rounding up Cherokees and bringing them to the stockades to be held pending movement to the west. He is disturbed to find them totally unlike the Indians he had known. They are a prosperous and successful people farming their own land, running their own mills, in almost no way different from their white neighbors. It is a fact that causes him to ask questions of himself and others. It is a fact that causes him to reconsider his attitude, which has been positive yet patronizing, toward the Indians he once fought in the far west.

  …Laura is confident they will not have to go, for Will has constantly assured them not to worry. Through beauty, wealth, and education, she is able to straddle the divide between worlds and is unaware of the depth of the prejudice she faces. She dismisses Miles’ warnings as jealousy because Miles doubts the honesty of Will’s intentions. On one side Will is seemingly friendly to the Cherokees, on the other he is working with those who are looting them.

  …Miles meets the girl he has seen diving into the pool. She will tell him nothing of herself, but they arrange several meetings in the deep woods. She is hiding from someone. He becomes aware that that someone is Will Rounce, and the powers that he represents. She is, he later discovers, the Beloved Woman, a personage of real influence in the tribe, an influence even greater than that of many chieftains, and to whom they all must listen with respect, a leader they might rally around in time of war or trouble.

  During one of their meetings Miles hears a faint sound and learns they have been watched. Following the watcher to prevent him from telling what he has seen, he comes suddenly on the body of the man. He has been killed. Later, he sees one of the sons of Tsali leaving the area. He is a Cherokee Miles has met before.

  Miles himself is subjected to searching inquiry, for it is realized that he has won friends among the Cherokee. It is believed the Beloved Woman knows the location of a vast deposit of gold, for the gold discoveries on the Cherokee lands so far have been limited and the interlopers are unwilling to believe there is no more.

  Miles meets Hallett again, and this time in a fight. Hallett attempts to strike him with a whip. Miles gives Hallett a severe beating and is arrested.

  Orders are issued for the McCraes to go west. Shocked, Laura tries to reach Will, but she cannot. They are driven from their home, and escaping, she returns to find Will and some of his friends holding court in her home, and for the first time she realizes that this was what he had always intended, that he had pretended friendship to have first chance at one of the best places in the Cherokee Nation.

  The above would suggest that Will’s short-term goal is to keep the McCraes from selling their land so that he can grab it without having to buy it…but who his mysterious connections are and what the long game is remains a mystery, as does what happened to Will’s inheritance from Uncle Elias.

  Louis was interested in the many utopian, often experimentally socialist communities that sprung up on the American frontier, like the Shakers and New Harmony. I know he had many more intriguing details up his sleeve about the community of Rounceville and the characters of Elias Rounce and Phineas Cronkite.

  Here’s a short breakdown that was done somewhere along the way. It’s the only indication we have of the shape of the entire plot. It’s important to rea
lize that Louis rarely referred to outlines like this once he started writing, so he might have gone on to do something completely different. The “FIRST,” “SECOND,” “THIRD,” and “FOURTH” he is writing about are acts or the major sections of the story.

  FIRST:

  Story opens, protagonists meet, problem is unfolded. Hero’s character is revealed, also that of heavy and girl. Situation is revealed, conflict begins.

  SECOND:

  Conflict increases, characters revealed still more, problem develops, and the whole condition and state of affairs is revealed and made clear. Hero begins coping with problem, meets with failure. His love for girl is revealed to him suddenly.

  THIRD:

  Removal begins: a long, bitter, brutal trek. Take much time with this, and with individual characters who have been developed in early sections, now meet with trouble, death, bereavement. Hero is recalled to Atlanta; refuses to abide by orders; attempt at assassination. Plans are revealed whereby heavies will cut off a small band of Indians and rob them. Heavy reveals his true attitude toward girl: He despises her as an Indian.

  FOURTH:

  Removal continues. After terrible trials, hero returns to girl finding much death, pity, and fatigue along the way, and afraid she will be dead or lost. He comes to her, but is pursued by hatred of heavy until final fight in the swamps or on the river’s edge or on the plains of Oklahoma.

  Begin writing tomorrow and do 1,000 words of the beginning. Do them over. Begin with action, poetry, power. Create a character worth reading about.

  I love that last bit. Louis was always writing himself these sorts of affirmations. They are another facet of his lifelong motivation to keep moving, think positively, and improve himself. Below is the most interesting set of notes on this story, because they are written in first person, as if he, Louis, was the actual narrator. I don’t know of another case of him doing this, even for a story that was ultimately written in first person.

  OUTLINE: TRAIL OF TEARS

  1. I arrive in Georgia, and meet girl and [illegible]; I meet old friend; develop acquaintance with girl, find doubts of friend. Become friends with some Cherokees. Told off by [illegible] in Atlanta.

  2. Trouble develops, affair with girl, acquaintance develops with friend’s girl. My girlfriend’s father also involved. Old friend plots against me. Break becomes definite. Fight at Cherokee town.

  3. The Removal Begins: Harassed, betrayed, the first fight, herds driven off, murder.

  A different, handwritten version of the first-person notes.

  Finally, there is this cryptic passage from some of the Trail of Tears materials:

  1st section: in love but don’t know it.

  2nd in love but won’t say it.

  3rd in love but can’t do anything about it.

  4th can say, can do, no future

  I’m not sure why this book wasn’t eventually completed; possibly it was because of changing priorities in Louis’s career. The struggle to break into the hardcover business may have become less important as his success replaced the need to be well reviewed. He also became more focused on planning his “three family” (Sackett, Chantry, Talon) series and recognized that sooner or later, because of changes in the book business, he was going to be able to publish in hardback without changing genres. While Louis very much wanted to write other kinds of material, he also wanted to win widespread acceptance for his Westerns, and as much as he liked a challenge, he preferred to succeed without having to accommodate others. It was a tension that ran like a subtle stream throughout his later life.

  * * *

  A WOMAN WORTH HAVING

  * * *

  A Treatment for an Adventure Story

  COMMENTS: A “treatment” like the following document is the description of a story rather than the story itself. It is used as a sales tool when an author is attempting to present an idea for which he wishes to be paid, by a publisher or a movie studio, to write. In Louis’s case, treatments were almost never intended to be an exact description of the finished work; they were much more like a very early rough draft where he experimented with the potential of different structures and ideas.

  * * *

  “A woman worth having must be fought for or stolen.”

  —Arab proverb

  Hot and dusty were the crowded streets of Mosul on that afternoon in 1845, but the tall, erect young Englishman who made his way through the crowd was aware of something more than the dust, smells, and flies of the Near East. He was aware of a subtle undercurrent of revolt, of seething unrest. And Henry Layard was fully aware of the reason for that feeling, for during his short stay in the country he had seen much and heard more of the sadistic cruelty of the local governor, Mohammed Pasha.

  Layard was a handsome young man, skilled in the arts of diplomacy, which was his profession, and knowing in all the languages and many of the dialects of the Near East. Yet he was a man ridden by a driving urge to find the fabled cities of Nineveh, to uncover the ruins he knew existed in the valleys of the Tigris and the Euphrates. Nor was this his first trip to Mesopotamia, for he had been here before and had scouted the country carefully while hunting. Near the rivers he had found several huge mounds that seemed geologically out of place, and he had come to believe they were actually heaps of sand and debris blown up and over the ruins of the ancient cities mentioned in the Old Testament.

  He was walking now to a meeting with Sir Stratford Canning, British ambassador to the government of Turkey, who was visiting in Mosul from his headquarters in Istanbul.

  As he pushed through the crowd, his mind was fraught with anxiety. He needed money to finance his project, and he feared he would neither get it nor receive permission to remain in the country until conditions became calmer than they now were. The slightest wrong move could explode into revolt, and only fear of the bloody vengeance of Mohammed Pasha was keeping the people quiet.

  Ahead of him he saw a sedan chair carried by slaves and preceded by two stalwart desert tribesmen. It was an unusual sight, for sedan chairs were rarely seen and almost never in charge of Bedouins; it betokened a person of some importance.

  As he drew abreast of the sedan chair there was a sudden outburst in a dark alleyway and a rush of men. In an instant the marketplace had exploded into a fighting, screaming, brawling mob. One of the bearers was knocked to the pavement and the chair fell, turning half over and spilling a very startled, and beautifully robed young woman into the street.

  The Bedouins who were her protectors had been separated from her by the fighting, and in an instant, Layard sprang to her side and stood over her, fighting off the brawling Arabs. Quickly as it had begun, the fighting washed past them, and Layard helped the shaken girl to her feet.

  “Are you hurt?” He spoke as he helped her up, and he found himself looking into a face covered by a heavy veil but revealing a pair of large and amazingly lovely dark eyes. For an instant she was in his arms, then she stepped back and, to his surprise, thanked him in English!

  Before he could ask a question the Bedouins had reached her side and she had moved toward her chair, which had been righted and was awaiting her. She looked back once and thanked him again, but startled out of his lethargy by the prospect of losing a girl he wanted very much to know, he started after her, asking who she was and where she lived.

  The girl got into the chair without seeming to hear and then was borne away, leaving him standing in the street. This was not, he remembered unhappily, Paris, London, or Naples. It was a Moslem city where the women did not talk to men other than those of their immediate family and rarely met foreigners or even set eyes on them.

  Disappointed, but excited by her touch and the memory of her eyes, he hurried on to keep his appointment with Sir Stratford.

  —

  Henry Layard is an Englishman of French parentage, a brilliant scholar, gifted in his command of languages, and a skilled hunter of big game. Yet his greatest interest is in antiquities. For a long time many people had belie
ved the great cities of the ancient east, Babylon and Nineveh, to be mere fantasies of the imagination, like the Arabian Nights. Herodotus, who wrote many of the legends, had also written of other things too fantastic to be believed, and most of the scholars of the time either doubted the cities had ever existed or doubted their size and importance. When other students had been concerned with boating or cricket, young Layard had been studying Arabic, perfecting himself for just this task. With his dark, strongly boned features and his tall, lean build, Layard could, and in fact had, passed for an Arab himself.

  —

  Sir Stratford Canning was a tall, white-haired man of great dignity, and Layard was his personal friend and protégé. Far more than Layard realized, Sir Stratford shared his enthusiasm, but he doubted the time was favorable for such an endeavor as Layard had in mind. He knew this was reputed to be the home of the oldest civilizations on earth, older even than Egypt. The idea that fantastic cities, filled with the treasures of centuries, might lie beneath the sands had been rumored since the discoveries of Botta, but these wild theories were not discussed by sober men of science. Still, Sir Stratford knew Layard’s enthusiasms and what to expect of this conference, though he had not made up his mind as to his reply.