He carries some gold out of Virginia City, Montana after going to Plummer [a notorious Western lawman who simultaneously operated a criminal gang] and telling him he was going to do it and did not want trouble. This wins him attention. He outguesses them by leaving his fine horses behind and riding out on a mule with a pack mule behind.
Perhaps have him come in on the stage [from] Placerville, arriving during depression(?). A Cornishman, returning to Virginia City, deal in a flash-back with his first arrival there and his meeting with his few friends on the banks of the Carson. He has made money and lost it, he has mined with other Cornishmen and he has been once back to his home, yet somehow this place to which he is going has meant more than any other. It was there he met the few boyhood friends he ever had, and it was there his father was killed and buried….
He is searching for something, something lost. He had believed it to be at home in Cornwall, only to find there was nothing there for him. The ways were different, the people different; now he returns to the Carson, remembering those few happy, carefree days beside the river.
There are those who remember him from the mining camps of California, from the Fraser. He has a reputation, known as a good miner, with an uncanny judgment of where to find ore, and a bad man to start trouble with.
What is the main plot of this story?
What are the sub-plots?
The background is the Comstock Lode. Nevada of the period 1850 to 1880. Mining, theatre, the three worlds of the mines, the luxurious living, the red light district.
The story concerns the men and women of this time and place. The winds, rains, snows, cold, hunger, and struggle against the Lode itself, the vast treasure it had to give, the untold suffering in getting it out. This must be not only the story of the Lode but of the American pioneer; what it cost to move west; who the pioneers were; what they did and became.
What is wealth? What does it represent to different people? One man’s hunger; his loneliness; the harshness of his struggle; his many defeats and set-backs; his return to the few days of sheer happiness beside the Carson.
Maybe the daughter of one of the girls he knew beside the Carson finds him.
READ digest of NIBELUNGENLIED.
Make this story DIFFERENT than anything I’ve done.
Trego returns to Carson looking for that lost idyllic time which he knows inside him he will not find….
His father has scoffed at him for being “soft” so he hides his sentimentality and his affection for the beautiful.
I’m pretty sure that Dad was actually thinking of Richard Wagner’s Der Ring des Nibelungen, rather than the epic German poem it was adapted from. The Ring is an interesting point of reference for a book that deals with the wealth and power that spring from mining. In 1978, and just about to begin writing, Dad planned a trip back to Virginia City. A week or so before heading out, he detailed some of his plans in a letter to Marc Jaffe, the editorial director at Bantam Books:
I have almost everything I need but am taking a quick flight to Reno to check with the Mackay School of Mines (I want maps of the workings) and to walk over the site again. My nephew [Richard Waldo, the son of Louis’s eldest sister] is meeting me there as he had a position with the telephone company there, Special Studies Engineer, whatever that is, and knows many people in the area. He’s a guy who would rather be writing or teaching and knows history. His mother published several books and a lot of other stuff. He’s taking three days off and we’ll go over the ground together. We will be at Harrah’s Hotel for those days, then back here….
My problem is an easy way in which to tie all the various elements together and I have an idea I will start it with five or six kids, children of people on a wagon train waiting at Truckee Meadows (nearby) to cross Donner Pass when the snows are gone. They become friends…later they all show up as adults at Virginia City during the boom….
Very likely this would happen because everybody went to Virginia City. I’ve a very good day by day diary for most of the years kept by a newspaperman named Alf Doten. Three very thick volumes covering from ’49 to ’03, but most of one volume at Virginia City…
The problem is there’s almost too much material. Every item is filled with color and excitement. I think using the kids, who go all different ways, that I can tie everything together through their loyalty to each other. One becomes a prostitute, one a miner and then a mining magnate (like Fair, Flood, O’Brien and Mackay, etc.).
In another letter, this time to a fan, Dad had a bit more to say about his trip:
I am busy researching other books as always and just returned from Virginia City, Nevada, where I checked out the area. I had not been there in more than 20 years and needed a new look.
While there I picked up maps of the area, of all the mines, a number of geological studies of the area and almost $400 in books, most of them technical stuff on the mines and mining and on the stock-dealings. I used to work in the mines myself, so I know what that’s like. And when I worked it wasn’t too different, although mining methods have changed somewhat since.
Dad began writing Comstock Lode in December of 1978 while on vacation with our family in Colorado. Before turning in on Christmas Eve he finished off a letter to his sister:
Tomorrow on Xmas Day I shall begin actual writing on the Comstock story. I have been re-reading Bryant’s WHAT I SAW IN CALIFORNIA to study his crossing of the Forty Mile Desert, which will be my beginning. After much thought I shall start with the kids. My reasons are several, one that the time period of the Comstock, which I wish to cover, is twenty years and I would like my people to be not too far along at the end of the story. If I start them as youngsters they can still be under forty at the end of the story, which is as I would prefer. If I should wish to do a sequel, which I doubt, the characters would still be available.
But I want to establish a boy and girl friendship beside the Carson River, one that will continue through the story. I want to give my protagonist a good bit of experience before he finally comes to the Comstock, the Fraser River gold rush, for example, which ruined a lot of people in many respects.
I believe, and I do not think it has been done before, that my protagonist will be a Cousin Jack, a Cornishman. Many of them because of their previous mining experience in Wales became the superintendents of the mines. I have known many of them and some were disliked because of their great clannishness. When [one] got a good position in the mines he always had a “cousin Jack” to bring over and set into a good job. Many of them, as you know, settled around Grass Valley.
I want to follow the careers of several people in this story, and [by] starting them as a bunch of kids who came together on the Carson during the rest after crossing the Forty Mile Desert I have a unifying situation.
My father left behind many other notes on Comstock Lode; most of them follow the plot and characters of the existing novel fairly closely. However, there is one last bit that may be worthy of comment. In a number of places, Dad mentions the issue of the value and volatility of mining stocks. This came no doubt from a story he told me about how some of the miners he knew in Arizona would entertain themselves by starting rumors about the quality of the ore that they had seen while working in various mines. A hint dropped to a stranger in a bar or a faked argument between miners that others were allowed to overhear could cause values to tumble or spike. It was amusing and ironic, however, because these were men who would never hold a mining stock. They were common laborers playing pranks on the sort of brokers and speculators who would, within two or three years, lead the financial world to ruin in the great crash of 1929.
Beau L’Amour
July 2020
Bantam Books by Louis L’Amour
NOVELS
Bendigo Shafter
Borden Chantry
Brionne
The
Broken Gun
The Burning Hills
The Californios
Callaghen
Catlow
Chancy
The Cherokee Trail
Comstock Lode
Conagher
Crossfire Trail
Dark Canyon
Down the Long Hills
The Empty Land
Fair Blows the Wind
Fallon
The Ferguson Rifle
The First Fast Draw
Flint
Guns of the Timberlands
Hanging Woman Creek
The Haunted Mesa
Heller with a Gun
The High Graders
High Lonesome
Hondo
How the West Was Won
The Iron Marshal
The Key-Lock Man
Kid Rodelo
Kilkenny
Killoe
Kilrone
Kiowa Trail
Last of the Breed
Last Stand at Papago Wells
The Lonesome Gods
The Man Called Noon
The Man from Skibbereen
The Man from the Broken Hills
Matagorda
Milo Talon
The Mountain Valley War
North to the Rails
Over on the Dry Side
Passin’ Through
The Proving Trail
The Quick and the Dead
Radigan
Reilly’s Luck
The Rider of Lost Creek
Rivers West
The Shadow Riders
Shalako
Showdown at Yellow Butte
Silver Canyon
Sitka
Son of a Wanted Man
Taggart
The Tall Stranger
To Tame a Land
Tucker
Under the Sweetwater Rim
Utah Blaine
The Walking Drum
Westward the Tide
Where the Long Grass Blows
SHORT STORY COLLECTIONS
Beyond the Great Snow Mountains
Bowdrie
Bowdrie’s Law
Buckskin Run
The Collected Short Stories of Louis L’Amour (vols. 1–7)
Dutchman’s Flat
End of the Drive
From the Listening Hills
The Hills of Homicide
Law of the Desert Born
Long Ride Home
Lonigan
May There Be a Road
Monument Rock
Night Over the Solomons
Off the Mangrove Coast
The Outlaws of Mesquite
The Rider of the Ruby Hills
Riding for the Brand
The Strong Shall Live
The Trail to Crazy Man
Valley of the Sun
War Party
West from Singapore
West of Dodge
With These Hands
Yondering
SACKETT TITLES
Sackett’s Land
To the Far Blue Mountains
The Warrior’s Path
Jubal Sackett
Ride the River
The Daybreakers
Sackett
Lando
Mojave Crossing
Mustang Man
The Lonely Men
Galloway
Treasure Mountain
Lonely on the Mountain
Ride the Dark Trail
The Sackett Brand
The Sky-Liners
THE HOPALONG CASSIDY NOVELS
The Riders of High Rock
The Rustlers of West Fork
The Trail to Seven Pines
Trouble Shooter
NONFICTION
Education of a Wandering Man
Frontier
The Sackett Companion: A Personal Guide to the Sackett Novels
A Trail of Memories: The Quotations of Louis L’Amour, compiled by Angelique L’Amour
POETRY
Smoke from This Altar
LOST TREASURES
Louis L’Amour’s Lost Treasures: Volume 1 (with Beau L’Amour)
No Traveller Returns (with Beau L’Amour)
Louis L’Amour’s Lost Treasures: Volume 2 (with Beau L’Amour)
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 re-created 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.
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 a 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, miner, and officer in the Transportation Corps during World War II. He was a voracious reader and collector of books. His personal library contained 17,000 volumes.
Mr. L’Amour “wanted to write almost from the time I could talk.” After developing a widespread following for the many frontier and adventure stories he wrote 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 120 books is in print; there are more than 300 million copies of his books in print worldwide, making him one of the bestselling authors in modern 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. His memoir, Education of a Wandering Man, was a leading bestseller in 1989. Audio dramatizations and adaptations of many L’Amour stories are available from Random House Audio.
The recipient of many great honors and awards, in 1983 Mr. L’Amour became the first novelist ever to be awarded the Congressional 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.
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