Don’s hatred follows him at the end—faces him in ruins—
In late 1982, as Dad’s work on The Lonesome Gods began to wind down, he wrote the following in a letter to his good friend, Joe Wershba, who was a producer at 60 Minutes:
At the moment I am completing THE LONESOME GODS, not happy with it, but that is chronic with me with a book I am completing. This one took off at a different tangent, however, and some of the things I wanted in it never arrived.
During the writing of the book, Dad mentioned in his journal that he felt that his protagonist had stayed a boy longer than he intended. We can see even more clearly what he meant when he talked about the story taking off “at a different tangent” in this excerpt from a 1981 letter to Kathlyn Beucler Hays, an old friend from his Oklahoma days:
Now I am going to write the book, with much Indian lore, much history, much off the record history, much natural history and many legends all woven into one intricate tapestry of about 700 pgs. It will cover the period roughly from 1860 until 1940 or so, and will have flashbacks and the Indians. It will be called THE LONESOME GODS….
This was right before Dad started work, and it’s interesting to see how this description only somewhat resembles the version of The Lonesome Gods that was finally published. I would have loved to see what he might have done had he found a way to continue the narrative up through 1940 (interestingly, right around the time of the death of my maternal grandfather, the California land developer). But, of course, it is also clear that—given that the basic premise of the novel is about Johannes coming to terms with his mother’s family—the narrative is absolutely over when Don Federico is bested, Elena vindicated, Don Isidro disgraced, and Alfredo dead. Regardless of any additional plans, my father discovered that those events would signal the end of the story whether he liked it or not.
In my recent rereading of The Lonesome Gods, I discovered a couple of personal references that I had forgotten or perhaps never noticed before. The first is the mention of seashells:
My father looked around at him. “When we get down a little further,” he said, “you can see the old beach line along the edge of the mountains. There are sea shells there, some as thin as paper, and they almost crumble in your hands.”
As a child, I hiked through that very spot with my father and picked up a number of shells, some so bleached and thin that you could see differences of light and darkness through them. I carefully mounted them in a jewelry box that, in all likelihood, is still packed away somewhere in my parents’ house. That was years before my father wrote The Lonesome Gods, so it’s entirely possible that my box of shells actually inspired those lines.
Other childhood memories relate to a piece of land we owned in the Tehachapi Mountains. The character of Doug Farley makes the first mention to it during the wagon trip across the desert: “Maybe it’s that pass when we get to the mountains or that spooky country off to the north, in the Tehachapis.” The other time it comes up is when Ramon, the old Indian from the mysterious tribe, says, “We found a small hollow among the hills where there were two springs. Below the hollow was a stream.” These comments describe our property and share aspects of both the “Jeremy Loccard” fragment in Louis L’Amour’s Lost Treasures, Volume 1 and, more tangentially, The Californios.
“Jeremy Loccard” seems to be a Western horror story, but if you read more closely it is really science fiction. From Dad’s notes, which I discuss in depth in Lost Treasures, Volume 1, it is clear that the story was going to be about some sort of interdimensional portal in the area close to our acreage. In The Californios there is a character, much like Ramon, who is also the survivor of a tremendous earthquake, one that may or may not have occurred in this universe or reality.
Our Tehachapi property was a funky collection of shacks and cabins, fieldstone terraces, and odd little gardens along a creek backed by about 160 acres. We bought it in the early 1970s, right around the time my mother’s family had to sell their property at La Quinta. It was a beautiful little piece of land with a hanging valley situated up the hillside behind the house, where those two springs were hidden. In my junior high and high school days, it was a wonderful place to visit—though it was definitely off the beaten track and difficult to maintain. After a series of break-ins and a catastrophic flood, we were forced to demolish the buildings, and by the early 1980s we had moved on and bought another piece of property in southwest Colorado.
As Dad suggests here and elsewhere, the area was a bit spooky. Maybe it was just that we were so far back in the hills that no one would ever know what went on. Maybe it was something else. As I mentioned in my commentary on “Jeremy Loccard,” there is something strange about the California mountains and deserts. Maybe it’s those Lonesome Gods.
On that note, I want to point out one last reference from my father’s work to the idea of “lonesome gods”; that is, ancient gods who have been ignored yet still play a role in the lives of those who believe in them. The following fragment was intended to become a short story, one that had no connection whatsoever to the novel you have just read:
When Miguel stepped into the door of the shop on Rodeo he had no idea that he was resurrecting an authentic god. All he wanted that day was shelter from a brief shower, and all he wanted of life was to be a waiter and wear a red coat with gold braid. The tastes and ambitions of Miguel were simple indeed. From the tiny village in Chiapas he had made his way north to the City of the Angels, and in that city he had become a bus-boy.
Each evening he moved among the fabulous creatures who ate in the restaurant and gathered up their dishes. He replaced linen and silver, placed bread and water upon the tables, and he never raised his eyes to look at the god-like celebrities whom he served.
Not in the farthest reaches of his imagination could he find envy for them…they were as beyond him, as out of reach in the caste system of the restaurant, the maitre d’. Yet he wanted to be a waiter, and as he worked, he dreamed.
On the day when he encountered the god of his people he was hurrying south from the Santa Monica bus. The quick rush of rain caught him and he stepped quickly into the doorway.
He glanced quickly around. Strange stone faces peered at him, weird masks from Papua, gods and emperors from Thailand, Greece, India, Rome. He had never been in such a place before, and was not interested. Here in the City of the Angels he had seen much that he did not understand, but Miguel did not ask questions. Much had always been beyond his comprehension, and he did not stop to try to understand now.
As he turned his head he caught a glimpse of a familiar figure in gray stone…it was carved from granite, a strange face that seemed to be made of twisted stone rope, or snakes. Of all within this room it alone he recognized. Dimly, he remembered hearing the name once in his native village. It was the figure of Tlaloc, the Aztec God of Rain and Thunder.
Throughout my young life, one of my favorite places to visit was the Harry Franklin Gallery in Beverly Hills. It was a cabinet of curiosities—dim, dramatically lit, and packed to bursting with a riot of African masks, New Guinean canoes, alabaster amphorae, and Roman jewelry dating from the time of Christ. The narrow storefront was full of the sort of spooky and fascinating things that make a child’s imagination run wild. Harry, his wife Ruth, and their daughter Valerie were our dear friends, and Valerie ran the gallery for a number of years following her father’s death.
This is one of three times their store appears in a Louis L’Amour story. My dad transported the store to Hawaii to play a role in the short story “The Hand of Kuan-Yin,” and it also showed up in “The Wheel of Life,” a television series proposal contained in the “Samsara” section of Louis L’Amour’s Lost Treasures, Volume 1.
In this case, not only does the store appear at its real-life location in Beverly Hills, but the image of the “lonesome god,” Tlaloc, is an actual item that my father bought from Harr
y in the 1960s. It is a thousand-year-old, six-inch stone figure, and to this day it hangs on the wall of my office.
Beau L’Amour
April 2020
To the Applebaum boys
Stuart and Irwyn
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
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
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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