the Shadow Riders (1982) (20 page)

Mac went back inside, glanced at the torn curtain, then looked over at Mrs. Atherton. "Thanks, ma'am," he said softly.

About Louis L'Amour

"I think of myself in the oral tradition - as a troubadour, a village taleteller, the man in the shadows of the campfire. That's the way I'd like to be remembered - as a storyteller. A good storyteller."

It is doubtful that any author could be as at home in the world recreated in his novels as Louis Dearborn L'Amour. Not only could he physically fill the boots of the rugged characters he wrote about, but he literally "walked the land my characters walk." His personal experiences as well as his lifelong devotion to historical research combined to give Mr. L'Amour the unique knowledge and understanding of people, events, and the challenge of the American frontier that became the hallmarks of his popularity.

Of French-Irish descent, Mr. L'Amour could trace his own family in North America back to the early 1600s and follow their steady progression westward, "always on the frontier." As a boy growing up in Jamestown, North Dakota, he absorbed all he could about his family's frontier heritage, including the story of his great-grandfather who was scalped by Sioux warriors.

Spurred by an eager curiosity and desire to broaden his horizons, Mr. L'Amour left home at the age of fifteen and enjoyed a wide variety of jobs including seaman, lumberjack, elephant handler, skinner of dead cattle, assessment miner, and officer on tank destroyers during World War II. During his "yondering" days he also circled the world on a freighter, sailed a dhow on the Red Sea, was shipwrecked in the West Indies and stranded in the. Mojave Desert. He won fifty-one of fifty-nine fights as a professional boxer and worked as a journalist and lecturer. He was a voracious reader and collector of rare books. Mr. L'Amour's personal library of some 10,000 volumes covers a broad range of scholarly disciplines including many personal papers, maps, and diaries of the pioneers.

Mr. L'Amour "wanted to write almost from the time I could talk." After developing a widespread following for his many adventure stories written for fiction magazines, Mr. L'Amour published his first full-length novel, Hondo, in the United States in 1953. Every one of his more than 100 books is in print; there are nearly 200 million copies of his books in print worldwide, making him one of the bestselling authors in modem literary history. His books have been translated into twenty languages, and more than forty-five of his novels and stories have been made into feature films and television movies.

His hardcover bestsellers include The Lonesome Gods, The Walking Drum (his twelfth-century historical novel), Jubal Sackett, Last of the Breed, and The Haunted Mesa.

The recipient of many great honors and awards, in 1983 Mr. L'Amour became the first novelist ever to be awarded the National Gold Medal by the United States Congress in honor of his life's work. In 1984 he was also awarded the Medal of Freedom by President Reagan.

Louis L'Amour died on June 10, 1988. His wife, Kathy, and their two children, Beau and Angelique, carry the L'Amour tradition forward.

A Special Interview With Louis L'Amour

New York City - July, 1982

Q: The film based on The Shadow Riders is a very exciting event. Of the films that have been made from your novels and stories, which are the ones you've liked the best?

A: I think Hondo is my favorite of all time, probably because it followed my story more closely. I think they all would be better off if they did that. I understand the motion-picture business enough to know that they cannot shoot a story exactly as it's written, and many times they have to trim them considerably because some stories would take eight or nine hours of film to shoot completely. So they do have to make cuts, but I don't think the basic story - at least in my stories - should be changed at all. I think they should cling to it. In Hondo they did, so it was a better picture, and there've been several others when they did. I wish this was done a little more often.

Usually now they query me on it. They ask me about changes, they suggest changes.

Q: You actually visited The Shadow Riders set?

A: Yes, I was on the set and watched it being filmed. In fact, it was suggested that I be a participant, that I be one of the comancheros in it, and they even had a costume for me. Unknown to me, they'd gotten a costume and had it all ready for me, but I backed out.

Q: Do you think they'll ever get you onscreen in one of your films?

A: Oh, I think they will. That particular time I just wasn't ready for it. It was very hot and the costumes were hot, and I preferred not to.

Q: Many in the cast of the movie had also appeared in the film The Sacketts that was made from The Daybreakers and Sackett - Sam Elliott, Tom Selleck, Ben Johnson, Jeff Osterhage. Is there a pool of actors out there in Hollywood that loves to make Westerns?

A: Well, as a matter of fact nearly all the actors want to make Westerns, and nearly all the actresses, but there is a special group who prefer them. Tom Selleck definitely does. He likes a Western very much, and he can do anything in my book. Sam Elliott also likes it, and he's a very good character. Katharine Ross, who also can work in almost anything, likes it also. And, of course, Ben Johnson - he is the epitome of the cowboy and the Western man. He was a cowboy, he was a rodeo hand, he's been the whole thing all the way along, and he knows cattle and horses like very few men alive these days.

They had a great crew and a great cast in The Shadow Riders, and some of them were people who had worked in The Sacketts, and some of them had worked in The Cherokee Trail in the one-hour version that was made by Walt Disney based on the beginning portion of that book. It was really fun working with them and fun being out there seeing it. I was on the set when two or three of the most dramatic moments occurred - when they blew up a cantina, for example. They also had a wagon that they blew up and smashed to pieces, which was exciting.

Q. Your novel takes place primarily in Texas and the Travens are a proud Texas family. A very rich and detailed sense of Texas comes through clearly in the book. Did you draw heavily from your own personal experiences and travels there?

A: Well, I've spent a lot of time in Texas. Actually, I first came into Texas when I was sixteen, and I came in at Fort Worth and went on west through Weatherford, Mineral Wells, Ranger, Breckenridge, Cisco, Abilene, and on out to Lubbock. I worked around there for a while, but at one time or another I've been just about all over Texas.

Texas is such a large state that it has many different varieties of terrain and of foliage, which most people don't realize. The Panhandle is very flat, very level, and has short grass plains. In East Texas down by the Gulf Coast there's a lot of timber. Up in the northeast corner there's what they call the Piney Woods area, and this is a very heavily timbered area, with a lot of swamps on the Sulphur River and Caddo Lake; but down along the Gulf Coast there are patches of wood, patches of thicket, and some pretty good-sized timber, but a lot of it is smaller.

Then, of course, there are the long islands that parallel the Gulf Coast - Padre Island, for example, and St. Joseph Island, which is right opposite the place where I had the Travens. And my novel Matagorda takes place in that area. These are long, long, very narrow islands, like long sandbars, that parallel the Coast and protect it to some extent from the bad storms of the Gulf - the hurricanes - although the hurricanes have broken through. There was a town called Indianola, which I wrote about in Matagorda, and Indianola was twice wiped completely off the map. And of course Galveston was once practically wiped off the map. Then they built the Galveston seawall to protect them, and since then it's done a pretty good job.

Q: The whole Gulf area, which you concentrate on in The Shadow Riders, seems to be such a special area.

A: It is. It's completely different. There are some long, beautiful beaches there and heavy, big sand dunes and, in some places, a lot of forest behind them. In the area I was writing about, there were. Some of that forest has been burned over or cut over, but you find some large timber and lots of very thick brush.

Some of the early brushpoppers among the cowboys were from that country and also from what's called the Big Thicket, which is some distance from there but is the same kind of terrain to some extent. Down in that country are the longhorn cattle, and this is where the cattle business really originated. People usually think of West Texas with regard to the cattle business; that didn't happen until later. The real longhoms came out of East Texas, right down along the Gulf Coast. They lived back in that brush. They were wild animals, fierce as they could be, and the cowboy chasing them had to wear leather chaps and leather jackets because he had a horse that was trained to follow a steer. When a steer charged into the brush, the horse went after him. Many a cowboy lost an eye or lost an arm.

Q: How did the Travens come to Texas?

A: The Travens came to Texas from Kentucky, actually. They had settled there before the Civil War. And, of course, in my story the two boys - Dal, who fought for the South, and Mack who fought for the North - are returning home after the war. There was no friction between them because they fought for opposite sides; they were people who thought you should fight for what you believe. And they believed in opposite ways, so they fought in opposite ways, but once the war was over they dropped their animosities and came back home together.

After the war, as in every war, the armies broke up and the men started going home. In those days it wasn't organized like it is now: the discharge of soldiers is usually pretty carefully organized now, and they're released to go home at intervals. Then, the whole army was just suddenly turned loose, and they were given a horse and a gun by orders of Abraham Lincoln - the Southerners were, at least - and they started back home.

Well, in the South there was nothing; it was desolate because most of the plantations had been devastated and a lot of the houses burned down. The property there would eventually be of great value, but at that time it wasn't, and there was no help to be had. The slaves were gone because they'd been freed, of course, and there was no other help to be hired and no money to pay them with even if you could have gotten help. So a lot of these young men just broke off and went west rather than fight that very difficult fight of being in poverty for a number of years before they got back on their feet. They went west to try to find what they could out there - in the cattle business or in gold mining or in whatever.

Some of these men, of course - the worst of them - became outlaws. There were others, who'd never fought in the war actually, but who'd fought along the fringe of the war, like Jesse James and the Quantrill Raiders. They didn't really take sides in the war, they just took advantage of it to raid and to rob, and a number of such men banded together and headed off across Texas. Then there was another group of very legitimate men who didn't believe the war should have been lost and wanted to fight again and didn't want to live under the Union, so they went south to join Emperor Maximilian in Mexico and fight with him.

Q: This would be a character like Colonel Ashford in The Shadow Riders?

A: Yes. Only Ashford had serious deficiencies in his character. He had a picture of himself as doing that sort of thing, but actually he didn't have the nobility, he didn't have the strength of character to do that. Secretly he was a small man at heart and something of an outlaw, a misfit - I don't mean a man who was against the Establishment, just a man who had something wrong inside, who was kind of rotten inside, but it hadn't showed itself yet.

Q: Was it unusual for families to be split right down the middle the way Mac and Dal were?

A: All over the South and the North it was the same way, principally in states like Kentucky and Virginia and Ohio and Pennsylvania. You found people from Pennsylvania and Ohio riding south to join the Confederate army, and you found people from Virginia and Kentucky and even from Tennessee riding north to join the Union army, and it was a great split. Slavery, with most of them, was not the issue. In the South it was mostly states' rights and the right to do what they wanted to do, regardless of the federal government. There were a lot of questions and issues there. It was far from a simple thing, far from a simple war.

Q: There's the very powerful scene when Mac and Dal come upon the little girl and the little girl asks if Mac is her daddy. There were a lot of men who didn't come home from that war. How did that affect the women and the families?

A: Well, it left them pretty desolate. In many cases they had been struggling along, eking out an existence on small ranches or farms, hoping for the husband to get back and just waiting for that day. And then when he didn't come back, of course, they had to readjust completely, and many of them just didn't make it. Some of them went back to relatives, some of them struggled, some of them married someone else eventually, but they had to find a way for themselves, and it was far, far from easy because in those days a man and a woman were a team. On a ranch or on a farm each one had specific duties and things to be done, and if you lacked one or the other you were crippled, you were really crippled, because a woman couldn't do it all and neither could a man.

Q: You seemed to have a lot of fun as you were writing about Uncle Jack Traven.

A: I did. I enjoyed him very much. Uncle Jack Traven was one of the black sheep of the family. He was kind of a wild character who took off on his own. There were a lot of Jack Travens around at the time. They were fellows who basically were good men, but they had gone off the deep end a little bit and maybe shot the wrong fellow or rustled a few head of cattle when they needed to get drunk or something like that.