GOLDEN GUNMEN
GOLDEN GUNMEN
LOUIS L’AMOUR
a western sextet
Previously published as Dutchman’s Flat in 2011. Copyright © 2011 by Golden West Literary Agency. “Trap of Gold” © 1951 by Popular Publications, Inc. “Keep Travelin’, Rider” © 1948 by Standard Magazines, Inc. “Big Medicine” © 1948 by Standard Magazines, Inc. “Trail to Pie Town” © 1948 by Better Publications, Inc. “McQueen of the Tumbling K” © 1947 by Standard Magazines, Inc. “Dutchman’s Flat” © 1948 by Best Publications, Inc.
E-book published in 2017 by Blackstone Publishing
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Library e-book ISBN 978-1-5385-0646-2
Fiction/Westerns
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INTRODUCTION
by Jon Tuska
Louis Dearborn LaMoore (1908-1988) was born in Jamestown, North Dakota. He left home at fifteen and subsequently held a wide variety of jobs although he worked mostly as a merchant seaman. From his earliest youth, L’Amour had a love of verse. His first published work was a poem, “The Chap Worth While”, appearing when he was eighteen years old in his former hometown’s newspaper, the Jamestown Sun. It is the only poem from his early years that he left out of Smoke From This Altar, which appeared in 1939 from Lusk Publishers in Oklahoma City, a book which L’Amour published himself; however, this poem is reproduced in The Louis L’amour Companion (Andrews and McMeel, 1992) edited by Robert Weinberg. L’Amour wrote poems and articles for a number of small circulation arts magazines all through the early 1930s and, after hundreds of rejection slips, finally had his first story accepted, “Anything for a Pal” in True Gang Life (10/35). He returned in 1938 to live with his family where they had settled in Choctaw, Oklahoma, determined to make writing his career. He wrote a fight story bought by Standard Magazines that year and became acquainted with editor Leo Margulies who was to play an important rôle later in L’Amour’s life. “The Town No Guns Could Tame” in New Western (3/40) was his first published Western story.
During the Second World War L’Amour was drafted and ultimately served with the U.S. Army Transportation Corps in Europe. However, in the two years before he was shipped out, he managed to write a great many adventure stories for Standard Magazines. The first story he published in 1946, the year of his discharge, was a Western, “Law of the Desert Born” in Dime Western (4/46). A call to Leo Margulies resulted in L’Amour’s agreeing to write Western stories for the various Western pulp magazines published by Standard Magazines, a third of which appeared under the byline Jim Mayo, the name of a character in L’Amour’s earlier adventure fiction. The proposal for L’Amour to write new Hopalong Cassidy novels came from Margulies who wanted to launch Hopalong Cassidy’s Western Magazine to take advantage of the popularity William Boyd’s old films and new television series were enjoying with a new generation. Doubleday & Company agreed to publish the pulp novelettes in hard cover books. L’Amour was paid $500 a story, no royalties, and he was assigned the house name Tex Burns. L’Amour read Clarence E. Mulford’s books about the Bar-20 and based his Hopalong Cassidy on Mulford’s original creation. Only two issues of the magazine appeared before it ceased publication. Doubleday felt that the Hopalong character had to appear exactly as William Boyd did in the films and on television and thus even the first two novels had to be revamped to meet with this requirement prior to publication in book form.
L’Amour’s first Western novel under his own byline was Westward The Tide (World’s Work, 1950). It was rejected by every American publisher to which it was submitted. World’s Work paid a flat £75 without royalties for British Empire rights in perpetuity. L’Amour sold his first Western short story to a slick magazine a year later, “The Gift of Cochise” in Collier’s (7/5/52). Robert Fellows and John Wayne purchased screen rights to this story from L’Amour for $4,000 and James Edward Grant, one of Wayne’s favorite screenwriters, developed a script from it, changing L’Amour’s Ches Lane to Hondo Lane. L’Amour retained the right to novelize Grant’s screenplay, which differs substantially from his short story, and he was able to get an endorsement from Wayne to be used as a blurb, stating that Hondo was the finest Western Wayne had ever read. Hondo (Fawcett Gold Medal, 1953) by Louis L’Amour was released on the same day as the film, Hondo (Warner, 1953), with a first printing of 320,000 copies.
With Showdown At Yellow Butte (Ace, 1953) by Jim Mayo, L’Amour began a series of short Western novels for Don Wollheim that could be doubled with other short novels by other authors in Ace Publishing’s paperback two-fers. Advances on these were $800 and usually the author never earned any royalties. Heller With A Gun (Fawcett Gold Medal, 1955) was the first of a series of original Westerns L’Amour had agreed to write under his own name following the success for Fawcett of Hondo. L’Amour wanted even this early to have his Western novels published in hard cover editions. He expanded “Guns of the Timberland” by Jim Mayo in West (9/50) for Guns Of The Timberlands (Jason Press, 1955), a hard cover Western for which he was paid an advance of $250. Another novel for Jason Press followed and then Silver Cañon (Avalon Books, 1956) for Thomas Bouregy & Company. These were basically lending library publishers and the books seldom earned much money above the small advances paid.
The great turn in L’Amour’s fortunes came about because of problems Saul David was having with his original paperback Westerns program at Bantam Books. Fred Glidden had been signed to a contract to produce two original paperback Luke Short Western novels a year for an advance of $15,000 each. It was a long-term contract but, in the first ten years of it, Fred only wrote six novels. Literary agent Marguerite Harper then persuaded Bantam that Fred’s brother, Jon, could help fulfill the contract and Jon was signed for eight Peter Dawson Western novels. When Jon died suddenly before completing even one book for Bantam, Harper managed to engage a ghost writer at the Disney studios to write these eight “Peter Dawson” novels, beginning with The Savages (Bantam, 1959). They proved inferior to anything Jon had ever written and what sales they had seemed to be due only to the Peter Dawson name.
Saul David wanted to know from L’Amour if he could deliver two Western novels a year. L’Amour said he could, and he did. In fact, by 1962 this number was increased to three original paperback novels a year. The first L’Amour novel to appear under the Bantam contract was Radigan (Bantam, 1958). It seemed to me after I read all of the Western stories L’Amour ever wrote in preparation for my essay, “Louis L’Amour’s Western Fiction” in A Variable Harvest (McFarland, 1990), that by the time L’Amour wrote “Riders of the Dawn” in Giant Western (6/51), the short novel he later expanded to form Silver Cañon, that he had almost burned out on the Western story, and this was years before his fame, wealth, and tremendous sales figures. He had developed seven basic plot situations in his pulp Western stories and he used them over and over again in writing his original paperback Westerns. Flint (Bantam, 1960), considered by many to be one of L’Amour’s better efforts, is basically a reprise of the range war plot which, of the seven, is the one L’Amour used most often. L’Amour’s hero, Flint, knows about a hide-out in the badlands (where, depending on the story, something is hidden: cattle, horses, outlaws, etc.). Even certain episodes within his basic plots are repeated again and again. Flint scales a sharp V in a cañon wall to escape a tight sp
ot as Jim Gatlin had before him in L’Amour’s “The Black Rock Coffin Makers” in .44 Western (2/50) and many a L’Amour hero would again.
Basic to this range war plot is the villain’s means for crowding out the other ranchers in a district. He brings in a giant herd that requires all the available grass and forces all the smaller ranchers out of business. It was this same strategy Bantam used in marketing L’Amour. All of his Western titles were continuously kept in print. Independent distributors were required to buy titles in lots of 10,000 copies if they wanted access to other Bantam titles at significantly discounted prices. In time L’Amour’s paperbacks forced almost every one else off the racks in the Western sections. L’Amour himself comprised the other half of this successful strategy. He dressed up in cowboy outfits, traveled about the country in a motor home visiting with independent distributors, taking them to dinner and charming them, making them personal friends. He promoted himself at every available opportunity. L’Amour insisted that he was telling the stories of the people who had made America a great nation and he appealed to patriotism as much as to commercialism in his rhetoric.
His fiction suffered, of course, stories written hurriedly and submitted in their first draft and published as he wrote them. A character would have a rifle in his hand, a model not yet invented in the period in which the story was set, and when he crossed a street the rifle would vanish without explanation. A scene would begin in a saloon and suddenly the setting would be a hotel dining room. Characters would die once and, a few pages later, die again. An old man for most of a story would turn out to be in his twenties.
Once when we were talking and Louis had showed me his topographical maps and his library of thousands of volumes which he claimed he used for research, he asserted that, if he claimed there was a rock in a road at a certain point in a story, his readers knew that if they went to that spot they would find the rock just as he described it. I told him that might be so but I personally was troubled by the many inconsistencies in his stories. Take Last Stand At Papago Wells (Fawcett Gold Medal, 1957). Five characters are killed during an Indian raid. One of the surviving characters emerges from seclusion after the attack and counts six corpses.
“I’ll have to go back and count them again,” L’Amour said, and smiled. “But, you know, I don’t think the people who read my books would really care.”
All of this notwithstanding, there are many fine, and some spectacular, moments in Louis L’Amour’s Western fiction. I think he was at his best in the shorter forms, especially his magazine stories, and the two best stories he ever wrote appeared in the 1950s, “The Gift of Cochise” early in the decade and “War Party” in The Saturday Evening Post (6/59). The latter was later expanded by L’Amour to serve as the opening chapters for Bendigo Shafter (Dutton, 1979). That book is so poorly structured that Harold Kuebler, senior editor at Doubleday & Company to whom it was first offered, said he would not publish it unless L’Amour undertook extensive revisions. This L’Amour refused to do and, eventually, Bantam started a hard cover publishing program to accommodate him when no other hard cover publisher proved willing to accept his books as he wrote them. Yet “War Party” possesses several of the characteristics in purest form which I suspect, no matter how diluted they ultimately would become, account in largest measure for the loyal following Louis L’Amour won from his readers: the young male narrator who is in the process of growing into manhood and who is evaluating other human beings and his own experiences; a resourceful frontier woman who has beauty as well as fortitude; a strong male character who is single and hence marriageable; and the powerful, romantic, strangely compelling vision of the American West which invests L’Amour’s Western fiction and makes it such a delightful escape from the cares of a later time—in this author’s words from this story, that “big country needing big men and women to live in it” and where there was no place for “the frightened or the mean.”
Trap of Gold
Wetherton had been three months out of Horsehead before he found his first color. At first, it was a few scattered grains taken from the base of an alluvial fan where millions of tons of sand and silt had washed down from a chain of rugged peaks; yet the gold was ragged under the magnifying glass.
Gold that has carried any distance becomes worn and polished by the abrasive action of the accompanying rocks and sand, so this could not have been carried far. With caution born of harsh experience, he seated himself and lit his pipe, yet excitement was strong within him.
A contemplative man by nature, his experience had taught him how a man may be deluded by hope, yet all his instincts told him the source of the gold was somewhere on the mountain above. It could have come down the wash that skirted the base of the mountain, but the ragged condition of the gold made that improbable.
The base of the fan was a half mile across and hundreds of feet thick, built of silt and sand washed down by centuries of erosion among the higher peaks. The point of the wide V of the fan lay between two towering upthrusts of granite, but from where Wetherton sat, he could see that the actual source of the fan lay much higher.
Wetherton made camp near a tiny spring west of the fan, then picketed his burros and began his climb. When he was well over 2,000 feet higher, he stopped, resting again, and, while resting, he dry-panned some of the silt. Surprisingly there were more than a few grains of gold even in that first pan, so he continued his climb and passed at last between the towering portals of the granite columns.
Above this natural gate were three smaller alluvial fans that joined at the gate to pour into the greater fan below. Dry-panning two of these brought no results, but the third, even by the relatively poor method of dry-panning, showed a dozen colors, all of good size.
The head of this fan lay in a gigantic crack in a granite upthrust that resembled a fantastic ruin. Pausing to catch his breath, he let his gaze wander along the base of this upthrust, and right before him the crumbling granite was slashed with a vein of quartz that was literally laced with gold!
Struggling nearer through the loose sand, his heart pounding more from excitement than from altitude and exertion, he came to an abrupt stop. The band of quartz was six feet wide, and that six feet was cobwebbed with gold.
It was unbelievable, but there it was.
Yet even in this moment of success, something about the beetling cliff stopped him from going forward. His innate caution took hold, and he drew back to examine it at greater length. Wary of what he saw, he circled the batholith, and then climbed to the ridge behind it, from which he could look down upon the roof. What he saw from there left him dry-mouthed and jittery.
The granite upthrust was obviously a part of a much older range, one that had weathered and worn, suffered from shock and twisting, until finally this tower of granite had been violently upthrust, leaving it standing, a shaky ruin among younger and sturdier peaks. In the process, the rock had been shattered and riven by mighty forces until it had become a miner’s horror. Wetherton stared, fascinated by the prospect. With enormous wealth there for the taking, every ounce must be taken at the risk of life.
One stick of powder might bring the whole crumbling mass down in a heap, and it loomed all of 300 feet above its base in the fan. The roof of the batholith was riven with gigantic cracks, literally seamed with breaks like the wall of an ancient building that has remained standing after heavy bombing. Walking back to the base of the tower, Wetherton found he could actually break loose chunks of the quartz with his fingers.
The vein itself lay on the downhill side and at the very base. The outer wall of the upthrust was sharply tilted so that a man working at the vein would be cutting his way into the very foundations of the tower, and any single blow of the pick might bring the whole mass down upon him. Furthermore, if the rock did fall, the vein would be hopelessly buried under thousands of tons of rock and lost without the expenditure of much more capital than he could command. And at this moment, Wetherton’s
total of money in hand amounted to slightly less than $40.
Thirty yards from the face, he seated himself upon the sand and filled his pipe once more. A man might take tons out of there without trouble, and yet it might collapse at the first blow. He knew he had no choice. He needed money, and it lay there before him. Even if he were at first successful, there were two things he must avoid. The first was tolerance of danger that might bring carelessness; the second, that urge to go back for that little bit more that could kill him.
It was well into the afternoon, and he had not eaten, yet he was not hungry. He circled the batholith, studying it from every angle, only to reach the conclusion that his first estimate had been correct. The only way to get to the gold was to go into the very shadow of the leaning wall and attack it at its base, digging it out by main strength. From where he stood, it seemed ridiculous that a mere man with a pick could topple that mass of rock, yet he knew how delicate such a balance could be.
The tower was situated on what might be described as the military crest of the ridge, and the alluvial fan sloped steeply away from its lower side, steeper than a steep stairway. The top of the leaning wall overshadowed the top of the fan, and, if it started to crumble and a man had warning, he might run to the north with a bare chance of escape. The soft sand in which he must run would be an impediment, but that could be alleviated by making a walk from flat rocks sunken into the sand.
It was dusk when he returned to his camp. Deliberately he had not permitted himself to begin work, not by so much as a sample. He must be deliberate in all his actions, and never for a second should he forget the mass that towered above him. A split second of hesitation when the crash came—and he accepted it as inevitable—would mean burial under tons of crumbled rock.
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