The big man looked across the crowded room. He locked eyes with Voss, raised his chin in greeting, then started forward.

Otto Skorzeny had to weigh two-hundred and fifty pounds. He was over 50 yet still fit, his size only apparent when compared to the other men in the room. He towered over them. One cheek had been laid open in a saber duel, and the jagged scar began near his left ear and continued past the corner of his mouth. His most distinctive feature, however, were his eyes; a gaze so forceful it had always made Mike Fowler want to reach for a weapon.

“What are the chances this is a coincidence, eh?” Voss muttered.

“You want to get out of here?” Fowler was eyeing a route between the wall and the tables. They could push their way through to the French doors and then out to the street. The Land Rover was parked a half block away. Suddenly that was a lot farther than he would have liked.

Voss shook his head. “No. He has seen us. Let’s find out what he has to say.”

Mike didn’t like it, but if it came to violence, he would rather go at it face to face, than have enemies at his back.

Skorzeny had once been called the most dangerous man in Europe, and was known far and wide as the officer who had personally led the force that crash-landed gliders on a steep mountainside in the Apennines to free Benito Mussolini from the remote ski lodge where he had been imprisoned. He had also stopped Germany’s ally Hungary from surrendering to the Soviets by first kidnapping the Regent’s son and then threatening to destroy the Royal Palace with the force of infantry and Tiger tanks under his command. These were but two operations in a career that was still shrouded in secrecy.

From humble beginnings he had become famous as Germany’s expert on unconventional warfare and was rapidly promoted through the ranks of the Waffen SS. By accident or design he had been at the center of political maneuverings and violence from the annexation of his native Austria in 1938, to the conversion of Hitler’s Werewolves, commandos he had trained to operate behind Allied lines as terrorists and saboteurs, into a mechanism that allowed important Nazis to escape Europe after the war. It was suspected that he had also recruited many of these same men into a network of agents reporting to the CIA and the BND, West German’s intelligence agency.

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Price US $32.00 · CA $44.00

ISBN979-8-217-30246-8

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From SKYRINGWATER.COM - Historical Characters

Engineer, commando, fixer, fall guy, Otto Skorzeny was a ruthless chameleon and self promoter. While much of his story is legend, there is no doubt he participated in some of most dramatic political events of the mid 20th century ... and to many in the intelligence world there was always the fear that he was often the most visible gear in a much larger machine.

Hitler’s Most Dangerous Man

Born in Vienna in 1908, Otto Skorzeny studied engineering at the Technical University of Vienna. While there he joined Burschenschaft, a German-nationalist fraternity and became an accomplished fencer, engaging in fifteen formal duels. The tenth left a scar that ran the length of his left cheek --- a mark that would define his appearance for the rest of his life. He joined the Austrian Nazi Party in 1931. On March 12, 1938, the day Austria was annexed by Nazi Germany, he distinguished himself by stopping what could have been a political disaster. Racing to the Presidential Palace with a group of paramilitaries, he was able to prevent another group of Austrian Nazis from shooting President Wilhelm Miklas.

After Germany’s invasion of Poland, he was rejected by the Luftwaffe for being too tall and, at thirty-one, too old. Instead, he joined the Leibstandarte SS (Adolf Hitler’s personal military guard), serving in the campaigns in France, the Balkans, and the Soviet Union. In December 1942, shrapnel from a Soviet artillery rocket struck him in the back of the head. Recovering in Berlin he was given the job of studying British commando methods and developing a similar German unconventional warfare unit for Germany. In April 1943 he was placed in command of the SS’s first dedicated commando training unit, Amt VI-S.

Three months later Hitler summoned him to the Wolf’s Lair. Mussolini had been deposed and imprisoned by the Italian government, and Hitler wanted him found and rescued. Along with a dedicated team he spent the following weeks tracking Mussolini across Italy as the Italians moved him from location to location --- from the island of Ponza, to La Maddalena, then a hotel at 6,500 feet on the Gran Sasso massif in the Apennines.

On September 12, 1943, he joined a glider assault on the hotel led by Major Harald Mors and the Fallschirmjäger paratroopers. Mussolini was recovered without a shot being fired. Ever aware of the advantages of celebrity, Skorzeny posed for the cameras and insisted on crowding aboard the small Fieseler Storch that flew Mussolini to safety. Hitler awarded him the Knight’s Cross and promoted him the following day.

Tito, Horthy, and Operation Greif

Further operations followed in rapid succession. In May 1944 he led an attempt to capture Josip Tito, commander of the Yugoslavian partisans. Tito, however, escaped. In October 1944, with Hungary teetering on the edge of surrender, Skorzeny kidnapped the son of Hungarian Regent Miklós Horthy in Budapest and ultimately threatened the castle with a detachment of troops reinforced by Tiger tanks to force Horthy’s abdication. In December 1944, during the Battle of the Bulge, he commanded Operation Greif, sending English-speaking German soldiers in American uniforms behind Allied lines to spread confusion. The rumor was that Skorzeny himself was leading a team to assassinate Eisenhower. He was not, but the Supreme Commander had to move under heavy guard for weeks. At the end of the war Skorzeny calmly surrendered to American forces.

Die Spinne — The Spider

While awaiting a West German denazification hearing in 1948, three men in American Military Police uniforms entered the Darmstadt internment camp, and announced they had orders to transfer Skorzeny to Nuremberg. The men were actually former SS officers. He hid out on a Bavarian farm, then in Salzburg, then briefly in Paris --- where he was photographed at a café on the Champs-Élysées. The picture caused a riot of 1,500 French Communists outside the newspaper’s offices. He retreated to Spain, where he was able to set up an engineering consultancy in Madrid. From Madrid he organized Die Spinne --- The Spider --- the escape network that moved former SS men out of Europe through Spain, Switzerland, and Italy to Argentina, Paraguay, Chile, and the Middle East. The operation was financed in part by funds reportedly stolen from the Reichsbank.

Skorzeny traveled regularly between Madrid and Buenos Aires, where he served as an advisor to Juan Perón. Simultaneously he was working for Reinhard Gehlen, the ex-Nazi running a good deal of the CIA’s communist bloc operations. In 1952 Gehlen sent him to Egypt to advise General Mohammed Naguib’s newly modernized military. Once there he recruited former SS and Wehrmacht officers to train Egyptian army units and Palestinian volunteers in commando tactics aimed at Israel. He also contacted the CIA station chief’s office in Madrid to report his Egyptian connections, offering to keep the Americans informed. He was simultaneously working for Nasser and reporting to the CIA ... or perhaps he was playing both sides against an unknown middle.

In 1954 Skorzeny married Countess Ilse von Finkenstein, a well connected opportunist and associate of Hjalmar Schacht, the financial genius who had kept Germany afloat in the interwar years. The marriage gave Skorzeny access to a tier of financial and industrial respectability beyond what his SS record provided. Together they marketed their abilities to any number of nations. Skorzeny, in particular, had a flamboyant quality that made him extremely attractive as a subcontractor for the intelligence services: He looked and acted the part of a storybook villain. He was the perfect fall guy if something went wrong.

Too Many People Had Too Much to Lose

By 1961 Skorzeny was operating across the entire landscape of the Cold War and the conflicts in the developing world. He was a known figure to most intelligence services, an advisor to Arab and South American governments, and the godfather of the exile networks that connected former Nazis across three continents. In 1962 he continued to play the field by providing Israeli intelligence with information on the former Nazi rocket scientists working for Egypt’s ballistic missile program, the same men he had helped place in Egyptian service years earlier. The man who had trained Palestinian commandos to raid Israel helped Mossad dismantle the weapons program those raids were intended to support.

While Otto Skorzeny’s wartime record is quite well documented, the full extent of his post war exploits may never be known. Too many people, in too many places, had too much to lose. He died in Madrid in July 1975.

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ISBN979-8-217-30246-8

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Near the end of Skyring Water arms dealer Mike Fowler and covert operative Nicole De Maes are each issued a “sterile,” High Standard HDM by the CIA. The HDM was a purpose-built assassination weapon, a .22 LR semi-automatic developed in 1943 for the Office of Strategic Services. Based on the High Standard Manufacturing Company’s Model HD target pistol, it was modified by engineers at Bell Laboratories to incorporate a unique suppressor running the length of its ported barrel. The result reduced its report to roughly 20 decibels, about the sound of a polite cough. Approximately 2,600 were built between October 1943 and March 1944 and referred to as “Impact Testing Machines” one the necessary paperwork.

The HDM used a 6¾-inch barrel inside a 7¾-inch suppressor tube, giving it an overall length of around 14 inches, and an empty weight of 47 ounces. It used 10-round detachable magazines. Sights were a fixed blade and a square-notch rear. If extreme silence was required the HDM/S or HD-MS model, allowed the user to lock the action closed preventing the slight mechanical noise the action made when cycling.

Francis Gary Powers and the U-2 Incident

After the war the remaining stock of HDMs passed from the OSS to the CIA and equipped American clandestine operations for the next four decades. CIA U-2 pilots carried HDMs in their survival kits, theoretically to allow a downed pilot to quietly survive off of small game. On May 1, 1960 Francis Gary Powers was shot down over Sverdlovsk. During Powers’ trial in Moscow that August, his HDM was used as evidence. The Russians called it a “spy pistol” … and it truly was.

It was that event, and his later friendship with Sue Powers, Gary’s second wife, that inspired Louis L’Amour to write his Cold War Thriller Last of the Breed.

Skyring Sound · Chilean Patagonia

Since before the end of WWII a secret compound on Skyring Water has been waiting for a mysterious cargo to arrive. While the nearby Argentinians and Chileans innocently go about their business a hidden group, the Invisible Reich, infiltrates governments and international organizations. When the time finally comes, the compound will be ready for its intended use. It is an event that could change history ... or bring it to a climactic end.

Seno Skyring, Skyring Sound, or Skyring Water, lies in southernmost Chile. An inland sound running east to west for fifty miles between the mainland’s Brunswick Peninsula to its north and Riesco Island to its south. The water was deep and brackish, the lake-like body fed by glacial rivers from the icefields to the west and joined to the Strait of Magellan by a chain of constricted channels: most notably the Fitzroy Channel at its eastern end which leads into Seno Otway, and then the Jerónimo Channel which connects to the Strait.

The countryside is best described as steppe with low rolling hills in the east, opening into broader sheep pasture along the northern mainland shore. To the west the land rises sharply into glacier-cut mountains, and there the coast becomes a tangle of fjords and dead-end inlets running off into uninhabited country. Winds can be furious, the weather, unpredictable. Settlements along its shores are minimal. Río Verde, the only thing that passes for a town, contains a few dozen English-style frame houses and a police post on a gravel road that runs a hundred kilometres south to Punta Arenas. The nearby estancias (ranches), Estancia Skyring, Estancia Fitz Roy on Riesco Island, and a handful of others, are enormous and extremely isolated.

A Novel of the Cold War
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SkyringWater

From the sun-baked plazas of Barcelona to the frozen channels of Patagonia — a thriller where the Second World War never truly ended

By Louis L’Amour · Beau L’Amour

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PriceUS $32.00 · CA $44.00

ISBN979-8-217-30246-8

Over four hundred years have passed since Francisco Pizarro landed upon the coast of Peru and found himself on the threshold of a great civilization. To the almost penniless conquistador it represented nothing more than a land to be looted. Pizarro, like most men of his time and many of ours, possessed no consciousness of history, no awareness of art. That he was facing a new world which in many ways surpassed the greatest civilizations of the old, he failed to realize. He had come to find gold, to return to Spain laden with treasure, and from the first his only idea was to find the easiest path to success. The path he chose was the bloodiest possible, and he took it without hesitation.

Much has been written of his conquest. How he found the empire of the Incas in the midst of a civil war, and by treachery and deceit succeeded in kidnapping the Inca and slaughtering many of his unarmed followers, is well known. Perhaps Atahualpa got what he justly deserved, for he himself had just secured supreme power in Peru by overthrowing his half-brother and putting many of his relatives to the sword, and no doubt it was his treachery and ambition that had as much to do with the down-fall of the Inca empire as anything done by Pizarro. Regardless of cause, a great civilization tottered and collapsed; a civilization in many ways unique in the history of the world.

So far, the exact origin of the Inca civilization in Peru, like that of the Aztec in Mexico, is shrouded in mystery. There is no doubt that both were founded upon previous civilizations conquered by them, but how great these civilizations were or where they originated is equally unknown. There are many fanciful theories to account for their development, but these are scarcely credible to the historian, and have arisen for the most part in the minds of over-imaginative individuals without accurate knowledge of their subject. That the Aztec and Inca civilizations developed in ignorance of each other is evident, for both were in possession of knowledge that would have been of great value to the other, and neither seems to have made any effort to reach out beyond what might be described as their normal sphere of influence.

On the shores of Lake Titicaca are ruins that Peruvians admitted were much more ancient than the advent of the Incas, and these seem to have furnished the latter with models for their subsequent architecture. But whatever their origin, the Incas built a civilization that in many ways surpassed the greatest of those in the eastern world, and which will bear study by the student of political science and economics as well as the antiquarian. Their history is all the more marvelous when one realizes that it extends backward no more than two and a half centuries before the coming of Pizarro, while their political institutions would seem the result of both thought and experience beyond anything capable of realization in that short space of time.

At its greatest, the Inca empire extended over thirty-five degrees of longitude, from Central Columbia, Brazil, and the Argentine. The width has been variously estimated, but was entirely disproportionate to the length. However, the Inca empire was very nearly one-third as large as the United States after the conquests of Topa Inca Yupanqui and Huayna Capae, grandfather and father respectively of Atalhualpa. The former led his armies across the frightful desert of Atacama, one of the most desolate, waterless wastes in the world, and penetrated to Southern Chile where he fixed the boundary of the empire at the Rio Maule. His son, Huayna Capae, probably as great a commander as his father, marched northward along the mountains, and crossing the equator, conquered the powerful kingdom of Quito.

To the student of history and human affairs, the empire of the Incas presents a series of amazing contradictions, and heterogeneous mixture of the barbarous and civilized, the highly-developed and the immature. The system of government was unique, a powerful centralized monarchy which functioned for the good of the whole, sitting at the head of the most highly regimented civilization so far known on this globe. It was a civilization where poverty was unknown, where cooperation rather than competition was the rule, and where people lived in a state of tranquillity unequaled in any other country or time. The Inca was constantly at war along the borders of his empire, but these wars seem to have caused scarcely a ripple on the placid waters of demestic life.

The land was divided into three parts; one to the Sun, one for the Inca, and the third for the people. As each new conquest was effected, division was made there also. At a certain age a young man was required to marry, and was immediately allotted a portion of land for the duration of his life. All the land was worked by the people, and proceeds from the land dedicated to the sun went to the temples, the priesthood, and the granaries where the grain was kept for public use during periods of famine. From the Inca’s portion grain was given to provide for his relatives, and usually a part of his portion was also placed in the public granaries. Additional potions of land were given to every couple for each child, the amount given for a son being double that given for a daughter. The soil was divided each year, and the amount of land given was in proportion to the number of the family. The curacas, or minor nobility, were also given land in the same manner, although a portion more commensurate with their position.

The Lands of the Sun were cultivated first, and then land belonging to widows, orphans, and the very old, with special attention to the land of soldiers away at wars. People then worked their own land, although they were expected to assist each other in any emergency. Lastly, the lands of the Inca were cultivated, and this was usually attended to with great ceremony, and made an occasion for much excitement and pleasure, when people came to their tasks dressed in their best, and usually worked singing. Garcilasso de la Vega relates that a man was hanged for cultivating the land of a curaca, a near relative of the Inca, before that of the poor. Other work was provided for in much the same manner.

Laws of the Inca empire were very few, simple, and strict. Death was the penalty for burning a bridge, and any offense against the communication system was punished severely. Theft, murder, adultery, blasphemy against the Sun, or malediction of the Inca were also punished by death. Other serious crimes were the destruction or moving of landmarks, house-burning, or diverting a neighbor’s water to one’s own land. A decision in any case must be given in five days (modern courts could learn from that law) and magistrates were investigated at frequent intervals.

There probably has never been a more efficiently administered government known to history, and in every avenue of approach one finds the same thoughtful preparation to meet every need, and to provide for the people through every emergency. Naturally, in any empire of such size, and particularly in regard to length, it was necessary to have rapid and efficient system of communication.

The roads of the Incas probably have never been surpassed, not even by the Romans, for here the constructors were faced by every possible difficulty. Chasms, breath-taking in their depth, were bridged, roads were cut from solid rock, tunnels were frequent and at times ravines were filled with solid masonry. Stairways were hewn from rock, and the builders maintained an approximate width of twenty feet over many miles. Portions of this great highway may still be seen, a road that was probably from fifteen hundred to two thousand miles in length. A system of posts was arranged, and at intervals along the road were post-houses where several runners waited. These men, chosen for their speed and fidelity, had but a short distance to cover in each case, and messages were often carried one hundred and fifty miles in a day by this method.

Each new conquest was consolidated by methods far in advance of those practiced by any other people. The local chieftain or curaca was taken to Cuzco with his family, and often a friend or two. Here they lived among the Inca nobility and were required to learn the language and adopt the customs. The Quichua dialect the language of the court and capital, was introduced, and teachers provided to give instruction to all. The armies of the Inca destroyed as little as possible, and needless cruelty was punished by death. Other far-sighted policies were introduced and in a short time instead of a rebellious subject state, the conquered land became a portion of the empire with interests and allegiances in common.

It is impossible in the amount of space available here to give anything like a thorough study of the Inca regime, and only a cursory glance has been given at various customs. That the Inca retained many barbarie habits of life is unquestioned, and artistically their development had only begun, but politically they had attained an efficiency unsurpassed by any modern country. Nor was any government so fitted to stand the test of time. That it failed in a major emergency was due to a series of causes, many of them springing from outside the land itself. The mistake of Huayna Capac in leaving his power divided between two sons was perhaps the greatest fault, which was a striking deviation from the usual custom, and the resulting civil war not only left the empire weakened but handicapped any effectual resistance. The treachery of Pizarro resulting in the kidnapping of Atahualpa, and the brutal slaughter of his unarmed companions was a contingency that could scarcely be foreseen.

All other empires ruled by force of arms, the Inca alone administered his conquests in such a manner that force was no longer needed after the first struggle was won. In less than three hundred years some thirteen Incas conquered the long strip of rugged country along the western coast of South America, constructed cities, temples, and roads, provided an excellent system of communication, brought peace and contentment to their people, and unbelievable wealth to themselves.

What might have happened had Pizarro reached Peru on his first attempt while Huayana Capac was still in power one can only guess; what might have happened had the Inca defeated the conquistadors and gone on to still greater achievements is likewise a matter of theory. In time no doubt his people would have been rumors of other lands, and other peoples. All that is speculation. The development of what might have been a great force in human affairs was nipped in the bud, and the Inca empire was shattered and broken, looted by the conquistadors, its temples torn down, its wealth taken away, its marvelous system of terraces, irrigation, and aqueducts neglected and ruined.

Now, there is little that remains. The ruins of Cuzco, the still finer and better preserved ruins at Machu Pichu. Some fragments about Lake Titicaca, and sections of road, bridges, and galleries that remain behind as mute testimony to the greatness and strength of a vanished empire.

Theories and more theories have been advanced to prove this people came from other lands. They have been found to resemble the Chinese in many of their customs, still others are like the Chaldeans. Probably the most logical theory is that they were merely an indigenous civilization developed in the natural course of events. Their past is wrapped in mystery, and what they might have become, we will never know. We know them only as a people who carried the torch of early civilization for awhile, and then lost it before the onslaught of a more efficient barbarism.

Question 6 - Why were you and your father drawn to the aftermath of WWII rather than the war itself?

Ha! We weren’t — at least not at first. Dad had written “The Goose Flies South” in the late 1940s with a resurgent fascist movement in South America, probably inspired by Juan Perón’s Argentina. Then Skyring Water used a German U-boat crew fleeing what they feared would be trial for war crimes — but that was just a way to get them to Chile so the treasure could be introduced.

Most of the fascination with what happened in the aftermath of WWII was mine, and it nearly all sprang from research on this book. As I studied up on arms dealers I realized what an incredible opportunity the transition from WWII to the Cold War had been. Everybody was modernizing and the war was over so there were surplus weapons everywhere. At the same time Europe’s power in the world was in severe decline — colonies were breaking away, new countries had armies, and they required weapons. I wanted to present Anton Voss as a man who was always thinking ahead, a three-dimensional chess player. So having him take advantage of the Cold War and that era of extreme decolonialisation was a slam dunk. It was only at that point that I realized how the end of WWII kept echoing for a long, long time.

Question 7

The relationship between Mike Fowler and Anton Voss is built on trust strained by history. Was that dynamic consciously explored?

No. It grew out of the fact that one of the treasure hunters in the original draft was the captain of the U-boat, and he was both underdeveloped and his role waned as the story went on. Attempting to fix that, and to build a more complete backstory for the treasure, the character of Anton Voss grew to staggering proportions — he’s easily the most interesting and complex person in the story. Mike Fowler has learned to trust Voss with his life, but can he? Voss always has more than one agenda running, always deeper layers than anyone can see. Is he a tragic hero, a villain, a trickster?

I like playing with the untrustworthy father/son, mentor/mentee dynamic — the ways that love and loyalty are tested between men. I dealt with it a bit in the Law of the Desert Born graphic novel, but here the question runs deep. Maybe it’s because I had such a good relationship with my own father that I always wondered what it would be like otherwise. The only element of my father that exists in Voss is a question that every child of a Depression-era and/or WWII-era father wonders about: how much did he compromise to survive, what secrets did he take to the grave?

Get tickets at the Nashville Film Festival Website

James Kettleman returns to the Montana frontier he once fled, taking the name of the notorious killer who raised him. In the crosshairs of a range war involving a female rancher, he is forced to decide what his ultimate legacy will be.

BASED ON THE NOVEL BY LOUIS L’AMOUR

Starring:

Writer/Director
Ryan Whitaker

PRODUCER
Ken Carpenter

PRODUCER
Mark Pentecost

PRODUCER
Jerilyn Esquibel

PRODUCERs
Josh Holloway
Beau L’Amour

PRODUCER
Ari Novak

executive PRODUCER
Mark Pentecost

PREMIERING AT
NASHVILLE film FESTIVAL
09.25.26

JUST ADDED - SECOND SHOWING!
Sunday, September 27th

Ben Nighthorse Campbell, who represented Colorado in the House of Representatives and the Senate, as both a Democrat and a Republican, died on Dec. 30, 2025. In this May 31, 1987 “Sunday Morning” report, Campbell, a member of the Northern Cheyenne tribe, a former judo champion, rancher, and jewelry maker, talked with Robert Pierpoint about his political reputation as a maverick, and of adjusting to life in Washington. "CBS Sunday Morning" features stories on the arts, music, nature, entertainment, sports, history, science and Americana, and highlights unique human accomplishments and achievements. Check local listings for CBS Sunday Morning broadcast times.

James Kettleman returns to the Montana frontier he once fled, taking the name of the notorious killer who raised him. In the crosshairs of a range war involving a female rancher, he is forced to decide what his ultimate legacy will be.

BASED ON THE NOVEL BY LOUIS L’AMOUR

Starring:

Writer/Director
Ryan Whitaker

PRODUCER
Ken Carpenter

PRODUCER
Mark Pentecost

PRODUCER
Jerilyn Esquibel

PRODUCERs
Josh Holloway
Beau L’Amour

PRODUCER
Ari Novak

executive PRODUCER
Mark Pentecost

PREMIERING AT
NASHVILLE film FESTIVAL
09.25.26

Writers Who Actually Were There

There have been a fair number of thriller writers with actual experience in the field of espionage and clandestine operations. The most well known is probably Ian Fleming, author of the James Bond novels, but John le Carré, and Graham Greene were all veterans of various stages of the Cold War. Of the more recent crop of writers Jack Carr, Brad Taylor, Jason Matthews, Charles McCarry and I.S. Berry, are stand outs in the post Cold War era.

Neither my father nor I ever got any closer than a couple of degrees of separation from this world — and that’s definitely a good thing — but we have had a few connections that gave us some insight into the type of people that make up that world. I’ll start off with Dad…

Shanghai & A Nice Bordeaux

If true, my father’s personal introduction to the world of espionage may have been a character he met in China in the 1920’s or 30’s by the name of Haig. According to the story, Haig was some sort of British intelligence asset, a man with all sorts of connections who kept his superiors informed (or not, depending on whether he had other agendas) of happenings in the underworld and the war-torn interior. Louis may have sublet Haig’s Shanghai apartment (described as being in a narrow alley off of Avenue Edward VII) while the man was up country on some sort of assignment. This could also be fiction. In Dad’s early life fact and fiction cross paths rather often. For a more in-depth examination of this phenomenon read Louis L’Amour’s Lost Treasures Volume One.

Better documented is the attempt my father made to join the Navy in some sort of intelligence capacity at the onset of World War Two. Though he lobbied hard and had some good connections, he was turned down because he did not have the required college education. That lack might very well have held him back when it came to dealing with navy protocol and the way sensitive information was processed. But I suspect it was a loss for the war effort because he had a fair amount of knowledge related to the Far East, as well as experience dealing with the waterfront’s working class and criminal underworld … the sort of ungentlemanly knowledge that is often very useful.

Getting back into unverified territory, there is a story that, in the run up to the D-Day invasion, Dad was approached about a mission where he would be flown into Switzerland to meet with some sort of agent. His appearance was similar to the man the agent was supposed to contact and, in order to be convincing in the role, he was required to know a great deal about wine. There was a crash course that included a good deal of wine tasting and history, but then the mission fell through and he was sent back to his unit and the daunting job of organizing the staggering number of vehicles headed for the Normandy beaches. It is worth noting: For a guy who wasn’t really interested in any type of alcohol, Dad did know a great deal about wine, especially the vintages from the 1930s and ‘40s … That may not be evidence, but it’s something.

Louis’s Brother Played in the Big Leagues

Louis’s brother Parker, on the other hand, played in the big leagues, accruing an extraordinary amount of experience in the game of power politics and diplomacy. Parker Lamoore was born in Jamestown, North Dakota in 1897. He attended Jamestown College and served with the National Guard on the Mexican border in the months that followed Pancho Villa’s raid on Columbus, NM. That mission evolved into a deployment to France in the last year of WWI.

Following the war, Parker moved to Washington DC and managed the 1918 campaign of North Dakota congressman George Young. Not too much later he became Secretary to the Sergeant-at-Arms of the Capitol, the chief law enforcement and operations officer for the House of Representatives. In that same period, he also wrote for the Washington Post and pursued a degree at George Washington University. This combination of practical behind the scenes political management mixed with journalism became the formula for the rest of his career.

By the early 1920s Parker had taken a job with the Daily Oklahoman in Oklahoma City. That led to a position as Secretary to Oklahoma Governor Martin Trapp. In 1926 he was involved in the state’s prosecution of the primary defendants in the “Osage Reign of Terror” — the systematic killing of Osage Tribal members for their oil rights documented in David Grann’s book (and Martin Scorsese’s movie) Killers of the Flower Moon. It was one of the most notorious murder plots in US history.

It was also in this period that Parker became closely acquainted with Patrick J. Hurley, an Oklahoma attorney, political operator, and future Secretary of War. Some of Hurley’s contemporaries in the administration were Dwight Eisenhower, George Patton and Douglas MacArthur. Eventually, Parker moved from being the Washington correspondent for the Oklahoma Times to become the political editor for the Scripps-Howard news organization. At the time Scripps-Howard was one of the two largest newspaper chains in America.

With the onset of World War Two Parker re-entered military service as a Captain in army intelligence at the Port of New Orleans. Before long he was promoted to Lt. Colonel and Director of Intelligence. It was a critical position, but soon Parker had moved back into civilian life acting as Pat Hurley’s press liaison once Hurley took on the job of being Roosevelt’s roving representative, a man charged with America’s most sensitive diplomatic missions. Together they traveled to Teheran, for the first “Big Three” conference in 1943, then on to Moscow and Karachi.

Following the war Parker and Pat Hurley were sent to Chungking, China to mediate between Chiang Kai-shek’s Nationalists and Mao’s Communists, a mission that failed rather dramatically. Parker then covered the “Four Powers” conferences for Scripps-Howard. These were meetings in London (1945), Moscow (1945), Paris (1946), and New York (1946-47) where the diplomatic battleground of the Cold War was formed. During that time, he also worked in Egypt and Saudi Arabia. Eventually, Parker ended his career as Chief Editorial Writer for Scripps-Howard, the organization’s most senior writing position. He died in 1954.

Silicon Valley, the CIA, and Remote Viewing

Louis’s sister also had a connection to the world of classified information, though not one as dramatic as her brother. A schoolteacher, and then principal, she gave up her career after she got married. Much later in life she went back to work accepting a job as Executive Secretary for an obscure think tank in Northern California. This turned out to be the Stanford Research Institute, the organization that pretty much founded Silicon Valley. Early on SRI accepted a contract to work with the Office of Naval Research and then the Air Force, as well as making breakthroughs in computer technology. Eventually, around the time she retired, this evolved into investigations into psychic spying for the CIA … the now famous remote viewing program.

Victor Dikeos, the FBI, and Scotland Yard

While Parker may have been an inspiration, and occasional mentor, by the 1970s Louis’s growing success allowed him to meet others of similar notoriety.. There were plenty of politicians, military men, and a couple of Directors of the CIA but, of course, the most interesting were those who had actually operated behind the scenes rather than simply being highly visible administrators. The first of these is a man who was very close to our family who occasionally worked for a now rather notorious agency … though not the CIA. If he was involved in clandestine operations, they remain secret. However, just about every country he visited had a rather sudden change of government. At a guess, he was not involved in bringing down regimes. It’s more likely that he may have been doing an in-depth analysis of the capabilities of the many locations the US government considered imminently unstable.

Another was Victor Dikeos, who was Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for Security throughout the mid 1970s. In the early 1960s he had developed the case against a senior State Department officer who had been blackmailed into passing classified documents to a Polish spy. By the 1970s he was working to shift his department’s mission to include terrorism in addition to its traditional counter-intelligence role. As a kid I can remember some of Victor’s stories about the morass of competing intelligence agencies within the US government in the 1970s. Henry Kissinger, if I remember correctly, put his trust in the navy … perhaps over his own people. The situation was kind of a mess.

Jim Newman was a well known financial broadcaster in Los Angeles but in the mid 1970s had briefly moved to Washington DC. Somewhere along the line he introduced my parents to some of the top guns at the FBI including Clarence Kelley, the director, who had just gotten married. My mother very kindly offered to throw a party for the couple the next time they were in LA … probably not recognizing how that invitation might snowball.

Arriving in town for the International Association of Chiefs of Police the guest list associated with the Kelley party grew and grew, eventually hitting 56 people. Many were associated with the FBI but there was a contingent from Scotland Yard as well as a number of Hollywood types, notable among them Quinn Martin, producer of the FBI TV series, who was just about to retire. Everyone got a thorough FBI background check and security was posted around the house. My mother pulled dinner off without a hitch, becoming a hero to the rank and file for being sure that all the drivers and security men got fed as well.

That was more of a police or counterintelligence event than one that dealt with covert operatives, but it did put me on the edge of something considerably more nefarious about a dozen years later.

The Iraqi Super Gun and Checkpoint England

My mother and I had just arrived in England and were making our way through customs when some agency, possibly MI-5, decided I looked suspicious. I probably did. I was sporting a beard that occasionally caused people in LA’s Persian community to address me in Farsi. I was also arriving from Vienna and the Berlin Wall had just come down a couple of months before. A lot of people, no doubt with intentions that were both good and bad, were walking into Germany and Austria and then disappearing into the west.

Mom had gone on ahead of me. But I was pulled out of the customs line and interrogated for about an hour while someone, or a number of someone’s, watched from behind a pane of one-way glass. The questions didn’t tell me much about what I was suspected of … I think they were just trying to see if I’d lose my cool and say something stupid. On the other side of the customs barrier my mother was in a panic, but had no way to find out what was going on. Technically, I had yet to enter the country.

The amusing thing was that we were headed to dinner with Jock Wilson. One of the attendees from that party so many years earlier, he was the former head of Scotland Yard’s Special Branch. Jock laughed and explained that there was a major operation underway … but he couldn’t tell us what it was.

Later on, he admitted that had been the day when British Intelligence began to close in on the operation later known as the “Iraqi Super Gun.” This was a gigantic stationary cannon Saddam Hussain was building to bombard Israel. Ordered up as individual components, many elements had been manufactured in the United Kingdom. Its design took a good deal of inspiration from a similar gun the Nazis had built to lob explosive shells at England and the designer, Gerald Bull, was soon found murdered in his Brussels apartment … it’s pretty easy to imagine which agency might have killed him.

The POW Film, the Porsche, and the SIG 226

That was probably my closest brush with international intrigue, but I have known a few others involved in that world. For a number of years, I worked with a man who I believe had been an Army reconnaissance pilot. There was a story circulating, one of those unverified but exciting tales, that in the run up to the Bay of Pigs fiasco, he actually landed a small plane on a beach in Cuba to pick a downed airman from his unit. Like many who operate on the periphery of the intel world he had retained certain contacts, and I met several of them.

In one case we were asked to carefully wash a roll of movie film supposedly containing pictures of American POWs still held in Vietnam. The story was that the film had been smuggled out by a man who had to swim a river and thus the canister, and the film, was full of silt. This was indeed the case and, if the story is true, the film really required better treatment than it was able to receive in my little darkroom. That said, the film I washed appeared to me to be very old. If it was evidence, it came from the era of the Vietnam War and did not prove that the prisoners were still alive post conflict. Maybe it proved certain people were alive after their reported deaths … maybe it proved nothing at all. Those people are gone from my life and there’s no way to tell.

“Mycroft,” the CIA Couple, and the Iranian Revolution

Not too much later I was introduced to the man who became the model for Anson Fordyce in Skyring Water. In this case he was very upfront about having worked for the CIA. He was still young but had retired to go back to school pursuing a graduate degree in a certain aspect of science. My friends and I jokingly nicknamed him Mycroft after Sherlock Holmes’ (smarter) brother.

Working on my father’s biography brought me into contact with a number of people who had a background in espionage. One of the great mysteries lurking in Dad’s story are the questions of how long he spent in China, and the number of times was he there. The jury is still out but in trying to track down some of the clues he left behind I met some very interesting people and got access to some amazing information.

Although one of them passed away rather recently, I was friends for over twenty years with a married couple who were both CIA officers. They gave me a great deal of background on the sort of eccentric personalities you tend to find in the at the Agency and were truly generous when it came to sharing the people they knew in other businesses, like an engineer who had worked for Eugene Stoner while he was developing the AR-10 and AR-15 rifles, as well as other retired Agency contacts. Additionally, we shared an amusing history, an acquaintance with Hollywood make-up genius Michael Westmore.

I met Westmore while I was working on a Showtime Production about the life of J. Edgar Hoover. Westmore’s company created the prosthetic aging “appliances” that allowed actor Treat Williams, playing the title role, to age some 50 years. While it wasn’t well known at the time, Westmore had previously been involved making disguise kits for CIA operatives. Usually, this was intended to rapidly change the officer’s appearance just enough to not be recognized.

In the case of my friend something more significant had been required. In the aftermath of the 1979 Iranian revolution, he had been forced to go into hiding and was unable to exit the country. The unique challenge, however, was that he was something like 6’ 7” and looked a bit like Sean Connery. Westmore was consulted and ideas were passed on to the CIA contacts in Teheran. I’m guessing they figured that if the Iranians were so on the ball that they could recognize his face in a crowded airport the jig was up no matter what … so the trick was to hide his most recognizable feature, his height. The plan that Westmore devised was for the local agents to obtain a wheelchair, cut out most of the seat so that my friend could fold himself into the hole, sitting as low as possible. Then they would fabricate fake thighs and cover it all with blankets and such to keep anyone from seeing that a third of his body was crammed down below the level where the seat was supposed to be.

Luckily, before he had to brave the endless lines of people trying to escape through the airport while doubled over like a contortionist, some other avenue of escape opened up. This was right around the time period the Canadian Six, part of the US Embassy staff, were exfiltrated while pretending to be a film crew, an adventure popularized in the movie “Argo.” I don’t know how my friend got out, but clearly there was more than one Hollywood connection to these various operations!

The Krulaks, DuBarrier, and the Shanghai Files

While doing general research on the place and time I caught wind that the once classified Shanghai Police Special Branch files were not quite as classified as they used to be. After some finagling, I was finally able to get the complete set, which had been handed over to the American Strategic Services Unit (a transitional agency between the wartime OSS and the soon to be formed CIA) by Shanghai’s Nationalist Chinese garrison commander. These were then taken over by General Charles Willoughby, General MacArthur’s intelligence chief (a minor character in Skyring Water) and eventually transferred to the CIA.

One night I was discussing these files and the slow pace of my biography research with General Charles Krulak who, around that time, was the Commandant of the Marine Corps. He suggested that I speak with his father who had been an intelligence officer while stationed in Shanghai with the 4th Marines in the late 1930s. That led to a wonderful interview covering Lt. General Victor Krulak’s relationship with the Municipal Police as well as the intelligence agencies belonging to the British and the French. Even better were Krulak’s amazing photographs of Shanghai, and the Japanese assault on the city in 1937. By paying off the crew of a tugboat Victor Krulak had been able to get a number of pictures of the unique Japanese ramp-bowed landing craft. These photos went on to become the inspiration for the Higgins Boat, the LCVP, that enabled the Normandy Invasion among others.

Even before I met the Krulaks I had begun a correspondence on the same subject with Hilarie DuBarrier (AKA Harold Barrier) a once famous, and infamous, stunt pilot, mercenary, and spy, who spent the latter years of his life in Monaco.

DuBarrier was a contemporary of my father’s having been born in North Dakota in 1906, the first white child born in an area mostly populated by Sioux. He learned to fly, palled around in Paris with Hemingway, Man Ray, and Louise Bryant and, when Mussolini invaded Ethiopia he offered to fly for Emperor Haile Selassie. He was captured by the Italians, escaped, then turned up in Spain spying for Franco’s forces against the Soviets.

Moving on to China he attempted to sell aircraft, supposedly volunteered for Chiang Kai-shek’s air force but may have been spying for the Japanese … or the French … or someone … or everyone. It’s kind of unclear. He was arrested by the Kempeitai (the Japanese Security Service), tortured, and held for three years. His silence is credited with saving the French network he was working with and indirectly enabling the escape of a number of American pilots held prisoner in Vietnam. The French awarded him with a Volunteer Combatant of the Resistance Cross so, whatever he was doing, it was valuable to them.

After the war he briefly worked with the OSS then wrote for Newsweek doing a good deal of work on Southeast Asia. He attended the 1955 Geneva Summit as an advisor to the Vietnamese delegation. His 1958 piece in The American Mercury was reportedly the first description in American media of atrocities under Diem’s police state. He then drifted hard to the right, writing for American Opinion — the John Birch Society magazine — and other far-right publications for the rest of his career. From 1957 to 2002 he published his monthly newsletter H. du B. Reports from Monaco, where he had fled after allegedly being involved in a plot against de Gaulle.

The Friend Who Understood It All

Lastly, for around 40 years I’ve had a close friend who operated on the edges of the world Skyring Water. Beginning with clandestine missions with First Force Recon during the Vietnam War, then a long period in domestic Law Enforcement before ending his career as the Head of the International Police Mission to Iraq ... and then doing the same job in Pakistan. If I have any sense of what these operations are like both on the ground and at the administrative level it is through him. So, thank you, and bless you, buddy. It’s been way way too long!

In a continuation of our conversation with Beau L’Amour regarding the thoughts and process of bringing his father Louis L’Amour’s last unpublished novel to life. Here are questions 4 and 5 of an 11 question series.

Welcome Beau L’Amour . . .

Question 4: You did a tremendous amount of research — tell us about that.

With Skyring Water I had to learn everything! Facts about the arms trade, SCUBA diving, Helmet and Dress diving, submarines, marine salvage, physics, sailing, various weapons, cars, 1950s technology, all the locations, etc. The most interesting part was talking to the wonderful people who had done many of these things, intelligence officers, SEALS, sailors, submarine commanders. It was an absolute blast.

The greatest find, the people who really made the story what it is, were CIA officers, a married couple, who not only helped me understand the type of person who went into intelligence work but also hooked me up with a dozen other contacts, from a wonderfully generous physicist to an engineer who had designed firearms for Stoner and Armalite.

I did a lot of the later footwork on The Haunted Mesa with Dad — scrambling around back roads and talking to locals. I researched some details on Last of the Breed. As a child I went along on a lot of Dad’s research trips, many of which were more like inspiration trips, revisiting places he had known but wanted to get a fresh look at.

The biggest concern was that this mid-20th-century world — Europe and Latin America — is distant from our own, yet there are still people who remember it. So I had to try to get every detail right.

Question 5: Publishers strongly discouraged crossing genres. What does Skyring Water reveal about the creative risks Louis wanted to take?

The discouragement of crossing genres hit Dad at exactly the time he first wanted to break out of writing westerns. By the late 1950s he had a dozen modestly successful westerns under his belt and was chafing to expand.

This was the era when he began many of the unfinished stories in Louis L’Amour’s Lost Treasures, wrote The Walking Drum (which wasn’t published until the ‘80s), wrote Skyring Water, and conceived of Last of the Breed.

However, it was also the time when the proliferation of paperbacks forced publishers and bookstores to create a better way of organizing everything. Racking books by category became common, and thus a writer’s work could only be found in the section for “his” genre. Every paperback was identified with a label — Science Fiction, Mystery, Western — on the spine. Trapped in the western section, the only option for Dad to work in another genre would have been to write under another name, something he really didn’t want to do. He was very clear about creating a Louis L’Amour brand that truly meant something. But with a young family to take care of, he had to make some hard decisions.

In the end he buckled down and wrote westerns, yet at the same time he slowly worked to expand the genre. The last stage of this evolution was Last of the Breed. Skyring Water would have been the final step — a similar story but with little or no connection to the west. This is the main reason I held off: I wanted to make it the fitting end to a plan that he laid out long ago.

. . . Beau L’amour

MORE TO COME!

Despite the fact that the western story is the only distinctively American contribution to the world’s literature, it has been categorized and largely ignored by the critics. Nonetheless, it has today through the medium of the published novel, the short story, motion picture and television the largest audience of any form of literature anywhere, any time.

Undoubtedly there are writers in the field who do not write well, and others who may write carelessly, but this is true of all forms of literature, and by and large I believe the craftsmanship of the average writer of western stories, to say nothing of sheer story-telling ability, is far superior to that of any group with the possible exception of some of the writers of mystery or crime fiction.

What is impressive to the writer of the western story is the amount of sheer factual information essential to the writing of a good western novel. The possession or acquisition of such knowledge becomes increasingly imperative as the reader becomes more knowing, more travelled, and more critical.

Aside from a knowledge of the history of the west (with many aspects and differences in different locales) one must in addition know the weapons of a period when weapons were undergoing rapid change and improvement. He must know something of the comparative ranges, calibres, and general capabilities of the rifles and pistols as well as their magazine (if any) capacities. He must also know the terrain. North Dakota, for example, is far different from Arizona, Texas, or even Montana. Occasionally writers make serious errors because of such lack of knowledge and their total of readers dwindle accordingly for authenticity has an odor even the unknowing can sense, and nothing reveals itself more rapidly.

Oddly enough, as a time when the western novel is widely read and translated into nearly all languages, the western novelist suffers from the fact that his work is criticized, if it is noticed at all, by critics who make it a matter of pride to know nothing about westerns and express an active dislike for them.

This preposterous situation has resulted in some very amusing situations. For example, a well known writer with success in another type of novel decided to attempt the western, and in so doing was immediately acclaimed by most of the critics and reviewers. The story he had written was one that every pulp western writer had written at least once, and in each case had written it better. Yet the critics, knowing nothing of the field, accepted it as a fine bit of Americana.

To understand the western man and write well of him one must understand not only the canvas against which he played out his life, but the traditions and influences, both sociological and psychological that made him what he was.

Each man is a product of his times and his environment, and no man’s actions can be properly understood when he is studied out of context. Today, a man who habitually carries a gun and uses it, on occasion, against other men, is definitely psychopathic, but to the western man of the period immediately following the War Between the States the pistol was at once a weapon, a tool, and a court of law.

The pioneers who blazed their trails west were the sons and grandsons of men who had blazed other trails, who had fought Indians, renegade white men, and who had fought wars for freedom and to protect that freedom. The gun was, at least in the wilder-areas, an accepted part of costume. Moreover, it was the weapon of the gentleman, replacing the rapier as a means of settling disputes.

No part of the American world of early years was more than a few days travel from the frontier, and most men, no matter where they lived in the Colonies or in the early years of independence, might be expected to use a gun for protection at some time or another in their lives. In the period between the settlement of the eastern coastal areas and the Civil War few men travelled anywhere who did not carry a pistol somewhere about their persons.

A coward was despicable not only for his cowardice but because he was a serious danger to a community or party of travellers who might at any time be called upon to defend themselves. The failure of any man might expose the entire group to destruction.

It is a very simple thing for a fat, well-fed, police-protected citizen to sit back in his chair and decide that anyone known as a gunfighter must have been a psychopath or juvenile delinquent. He was, as a matter of fact, nothing of the kind. His ability during the earlier years was respected, sought after and necessary.

Over a period of some years through old mining camp and cow camp newspapers, historical records, coroners’ reports and the like, the present writer has accumulated the brief biographies of 1189 men who might be termed gunfighters or gunmen. These men were all known pistol experts...in a few cases they had shot nobody, killed nobody, but this was understood to result from restraint or lack of immediate necessity and not lack of either the courage or ability to do so.

Many a man who went west never had occasion to use a gun in man-to-man combat just as many a soldier has gone into battle without actually killing anyone...or at least, anyone he knows of. Yet there were times when the ability to use a gun was essential, when a community could not have lasted without the gunfighter.

The pacifist, to be successful and remain unharmed must face opponents who are either equally pacifistic or are susceptible to the force of public opinion. Public opinion in the west demanded that a man defend himself and his good name against all comers, and if he proved unwilling to do so or cowardly he was forced to leave the community or be relegated to a position similar to that of town drunk.

The great period of the gunfighter lay in those years following the Civil War and up to about 1910. (The last stage hold-up in the United States was as late as 1916, and there were at least two in that year, one in Yellowstone Park, the other near Charleston, Nevada.) After a study of those years the wonder is not that so many men were killed in gun battles but that many more were not killed.

In 1866 there were vast herds of unbranded cattle on the plains of Texas. In Kansas there was a railroad coming into being, and that railroad could carry beef to the markets of the east.

The men who drove the trail herds north over the prairies to Texas were usually from sixteen to twenty-six years of age, with only a minority running beyond those years. (One of the very first, if not the first rail boss to take a herd from Texas to Kansas was but nineteen.) They were men who had emerged from one of the bloodiest and bitterest of all wars, and who had in many cases grown up fighting the Comanche, the Kiowa, and the Arapaho.

In other words they were young in years but seasoned by fighting and responsibility. These were no juvenile delinquents for all their youth, they were men, doing a man’s job in a man’s world, and working side by side with other men. Responsibility was expected of them, and readily accepted.

No Texan ever believes he has been whipped by anyone and most of the Texans who started north with the trail herds did not believe they had been defeated in the late war. For months upon the trail they battled Indian raids, stampedes, dust, hail and rain storms, herding one of the wildest and most dangers creatures ever to be domesticated anywhere, the longhorn steer. By the time these men reached the trail towns along the railroad, such as Dodge, Abilene, Ellsworth, Newton, Caldwell or a half dozen others they wanted whiskey, they wanted women, and they wanted to blow off steam.

And who was running the gambling? Selling the whiskey? Or wearing the badge? In most cases a former Union soldier, or at least a man of Union sympathies. The wonder is that so few were killed.

The gunfighter was nothing new to America. He did not burst suddenly from the womb of a lawless society, but was shaped and bred by American tradition, and an honorable tradition it is. The men who drove the trail herds and the men who awaited them at the trail’s end were lineal descendants of such men as Stephen Decatur who, if memory serves me right, killed six men in duels before being killed himself in a gun duel. And by a brother officer and distinguished Naval commander, James Barron.

Commodore Bainbridge, who seconded Decatur in this duel had fought several duels himself. Richard Somers, another of our early Naval heroes fought three gun duels in one morning. Oliver Hazard Perry fought a gun battle with Captain Heath, of the Marine Corps. Andrew Jackson had killed his man as had that fiery old war horse, Thomas Hart Benton. And do not forget that Alexander Hamilton lost his life in a gun battle with Aaron Burr. Yet nobody has suggested that any of these were psychopathic killers.

Without doubt Stephen Decatur was as feared in duelling circles as were Wild Bill Hickok or John Wesley Hardin. His very presence was sufficient excuse for the calling off of a duel when it was feared he might take part.

Coming west into a wilder and more dangerous world where the pistol was an essential tool as well as a weapon (one might be called upon to kill an attacking steer if caught afoot or to shoot one’s horse to keep from being dragged to death by a foot caught in the stirrup) the usual restrictions on duelling were forgotten. The formal duel carried out according to a particular code was abandoned for the fast draw and the immediate shooting.

In the west men were often strangers to each other, tempers were apt to be short, and no time was wasted in arranging a formal shooting. Moreover, a man’s word was his bond in a world where cattle deals were often consummated without legal papers and without any actual count. Under such a code to be called a liar was the worst of insults. In a world where so much business depended upon physical courage in the face of danger one dared not be called a coward without immediately challenging the name-caller.

Bringing to the west an accepted code of conduct, the men who brought that code found conditions intensified by the very nature of the country and the men. The very environment demanded that every man be a fighting man to some degree, for any stage driver or passenger, cattle driver, cattle buyer, or buffalo hunter might be called upon to fight to defend his life. A man was judged by his associates as to how he conducted himself in a “difficulty”.

To be called a coward or a liar was not only an insult to one’s pride, but a threat to his very existence, to fail to resent such an insult with a weapon was to become an outcast in both a social and business sense.

A man might be a bully, a thief, a drunkard, a wife-beater or even a murderer and still be accepted in the rough society of the frontier, but a coward or a liar was wanted nowhere.

The men who came to the west were men from every environment, from all nations, and from every social class. Such men might have a fine education or none at all, but one trait they shared was the willingness to break all ties and venture into a new land, under new rules of living.

The weak, degenerate, or the incapable could not and did not last, for it was a country in which the fit could survive and only the fit. Moreover, western writers are sometimes held up to scorn because the good men were good and the bad men bad ...actually, such was more often than not the case. There were no restraints on a man who wished to be bad, and any evil in his character could be given free rein. Consequently, the line was much more sharply drawn than in contemporary society with the laws, social restrictions, and regulation. In such a society, where the gun was an article of dress, some men were naturally more skillful in its use than others.

This did not make them psychopathic killers or men of evil intent, and few men were gunfighters by choice, and usually those few did not last long. Give golf clubs to a hundred men and one of them may turn out to have that certain knack, that natural coordination that makes for the fine player. So, give one hundred men each a pistol and one is sure to possess that certain something that enables him to draw faster and shoot straighter than the other.

Yet to fire a gun accurately and to get it into action quickly were the least of the attributes of the gunfighter. Most essential was the ability to stand looking into a blazing gun and return the fire coolly and accurately. Few men possessed this latter ability.

Myron Angel, in his History of Nevada tells of a meeting between a bad man known as Vance from Montana and a very able citizen called Irish Tom Carberry. Vance had challenged Carberry, and the latter being unarmed was advised by Vance to go get a gun. Carberry was not the man to hesitate and did just that. Vance spotted him returning and opened fire. Carberry continued to walk toward Vance as the latter fired, and when at a distance Carberry deemed proper, he stopped, laid the barrel of his pistol across his left forearm and shot Vance dead.

From my own collection of material I could provide more than a thousand of such instances of cold, calculated nerve, but many a man who was notoriously fast with a gun failed in the test when called upon to shoot back at a man who was shooting to kill. It was once remarked to a western man that so-and-so could and had shot a crow on the wing, the western man asked coolly, “Did the crow have a gun?”

Braggarts and show-offs lasted no time at all, for careless talk had a way of leading to Boot Hill, and the west was notoriously impatient of those who could not back up their talk with action. The history of the west is filled with stories of men who were weighed in those balances and found wanting.

With each battle the gunfighter became more sure of himself and a better judge of what to expect of other men. Yet these men were careful. They understood guns and did not indulge in fancy gestures, gun twirls or spinning. All this is from a later time when a pistol is a decoration rather than a weapon or a tool. When a western man drew a gun he drew it only to shoot, and he shot only to kill.

Let’s get one thing straight: the .44 or .45 calibre pistol was never considered either a toy or an ornament, nor was it invented for shooting at bottles or old tin cans. It is impractical for killing deer or buffalo, although it has been used from a horse for the latter purpose. It was created simply and honestly for the sole purpose of killing men.

It was manufactured to fill a need for a last resort weapon that could be brought into use quickly, and it was designed and intended to kill men.

This the gunfighter understood. A drunken cowhand might shoot out windows or lights in some outburst of enthusiasm after his long days on the trail, but the gunfighter did not draw his pistol until it was needed in a much deadlier game. And some of the most dangerous of them all such as Bill Tilghman, Jeff Milton, Jim Gillette, John Hughes, and John Slaughter drew them rarely indeed.

About such men as Wild Bill Hickok, Ben Thompson, Boone May, Mysterious Dave Mather, Pink Higgins and Capt. Bill McDonald there was no nonsense. If a man wore a gun they took it for granted he was big enough to use it, and if he drew a gun they understood that he was not drawing it to pick his teeth or stir his coffee. Consequently they shot first and asked questions afterward.

Western stories showing a western town terrorized by some so-called “gun” (no man was ever called a “gun” or a “fast gun” in the west) are a lot of nonsense.

In many of these stories, the butcher, the baker and the banker are frightened of some would-be badman who has come to town. This is pure hog wash for the simple reason that the banker had probably been a buffalo hunter or a freighter or cattleman before he started banking, the town doctor had been an Army surgeon to whom guns were no stranger, and the lawyer an Indian fighter. They would have fought for the privilege of running such a would-be badman out of town. I can list fifty cases where townspeople lynched such men and went back to work with no more excitement than that caused by a rabid wolf or a run away horse. A rough country calls, sometimes, for rough measures.

This is not to say that the west was filled with heros. The men of the west faced trying situations as a part of their everyday life. What troubles they had, they accepted readily and asked no help. I offer in evidence the total defeat of the Jesse James gang at Northfield, Minnesota (by grocers, doctors and druggists) and the equally disastrous defeat of the Dalton gang of outlaws at Coffeyville, Kansas, by businessmen of the town.

Even the bravest of men are subject to
moments of fear (or good judgment!)

Even the bravest of men are subject to moments of fear (or good judgment!), and Billy Brooks was such a case. He was at the time, marshal of Dodge, a known gunfighter reputed to have shot thirteen men in his first few weeks on the job. His courage then and after was an accepted and demonstrated fact, but there was one day in Dodge when a hard-bitten old buffalo hunter named Kirk Jordan came after him with a .50 calibre Sharpe buffalo gun and Brooks got the better part of valor and left town.

Who were the gunfighters? Ben Thompson was supposedly English by birth, by profession a gambler and occasional peace officer; King Fisher was at first an outlaw, then a cattleman and deputy sheriff; Luke Short was a gambler; Pink Higgins a cattleman; John Wesley Hardin was a cowhand, cattleman and gambler; Chris Madsen was born in Denmark, a soldier in several armies, buffalo hunter, army scout and peace officer; John Slaughter was a successful rancher and sheriff; Wild Bill Hickok was a buffalo hunter, gambler and a town marshal; Jim Levy, probably the only Jewish gunfighter, was a gambler.

Ed King was a soldier, and Joe Phy, who neither smoked nor drank, was a gambler; Billy the Kid (I have talked to five people who knew him personally) was a cowhand, gambler and outlaw, but he was no dirty little killer as he has been called, and no juvenile delinquent. He was a product of his times and his society who was quick with a gun, long on nerve and short on sympathy for those who tried to kill him.

Jeff Milton was a Texas Ranger, border patrol officer, Wells Fargo guard and for a time chief of police in El Paso when it was really rough ...he was also the son of a governor of Florida and a descendant of John Milton, the poet. Bat Masterson was a buffalo hunter who became a sheriff, a gunfighter who became a newspaperman (and despite the TV show Wyatt Earp never taught him anything about guns...Bat was a skilled hand with a gun before he ever met Wyatt). Earp himself was a peace officer, occasional gambler, a deacon in the church, and at the end a successful real estate man.

More often than not the gunfighters were respected men in their communities, many were dedicated peace officers who gave their years and their lives to make the country safe for others for small pay and less appreciation.

A man could live in a town filled with gunfighters and never see one to know him just as thousands who now life in Hollywood have never knowingly seen a motion picture star. However, the west as it actually was cannot be equalled by any motion picture or television story, much of it is simply beyond belief.

Commodore Perry Owen, sheriff in Holbrook, Arizona, went one day to arrest Andy Cooper, a wanted man whose real name was Andy Blevin. He went to the door of the family home and announced his purpose. When the shooting was over, Andy was dead, Mose Roberts was dead, a brother of Andy’s was dead, and another wounded. Three killed and one wounded, and Owen didn’t get a scratch.

Old John Selman, reputed to have killed twenty-three men, among others killed Bass Outlaw and John Wesley Hardin (Albert B. Fall defended him at his trial) was himself killed by George Scarborough, who was killed, probably by Kid Curry.

Langford Peel killed Eldorado Johnny and was himself killed by John Bull.

Luke Short killed Charlie Storms and long-Haired Jim Courtright; Pete Gabriel, shot five times by Joe Phy, killed him with one shot and then lived a number of years in good health.

The west is so filled with the material of saga and heroic tale that a writer scarcely knows where to begin. Thermopylae was no more heroic a defense than the 28 buffalo hunters at Adobe Walls against seven hundred or more Indians. Or the defense of Forsythe and his men at Beecher’s Island against the attacking Indians of Chief Roman Nose. The famous run at Marathon was child’s play compared to the ride of Portugee Phillips, two hundred and thirty-five miles through thousands of Sioux Indians and a raging blizzard, for help at Fort Laramie.

A western writer must know not only western history, but the plants and animals of the area he would write about, something of tracking and how they travelled in the west, nor can it all be had in books of western history. One must ride the country and know it as it still is in many places, he must talk to the old timers, many of whom are still alive. In doing this last one must be careful or some old timer may confuse what he has himself read with something remembered...perhaps without realizing it.

Occasionally there is a writer who attempts the western with a curb-stone mentality. Having lived in a community where the police officer is on call, the idea of self-administered law is beyond him. His thinking is simply not western.

When a man crossed the Mississippi his world exploded. The horizons seemed to vanish to the outer limits of the world, and he then grew up very fast to meet the needs of a much bigger, wider and more splendid world . . . or he ran for home with his tail between his legs.

A wagon train usually figured to make about fifteen miles a day. Occasionally one would do as much as twenty-eight, but that was extremely rare. Eleven to eighteen miles seems to be about average in the journals I have read, yet occasionally they managed but a mile or two.

By the time a man has travelled nearly a thousand miles at such a rate the west suddenly begins to look very big indeed, and many western travellers described their experiences in seafaring terms, for the prairies seemed boundless as the ocean itself.

If a man had trouble with another man he could expect no help. Usually there was no law at hand, and if he did call upon the town marshal for help he would be considered a coward. A man was expected to saddle his own broncs, fight his own battles, and often as not, cook his own grub.

Why is the western popular? Because it shows every worthwhile man what he would like to be; independent, free, and capable; because the man on horseback has always been a romantic figure from the knight in armor to the bedouin of the desert; because the man of the west represents all that is best in the American spirit, the love of freedom and the willingness to fight for it; the open frontier that is a part of our heritage; the challenge of that frontier; the longing for the freedom of riding horseback into wild country...it is adventure, it is romance, it is history.

And the men of the west? Unless you shoot them they live forever. Bill Tilghman was a peace officer into his seventies, Wyatt Earp died in 1929, Jeff Milton and George Coe in 1947, but the story of which they were a part will live forever, and many a novel acclaimed by literary critics of today will be forgotten while the westerns ride on. It is interesting to remember that of all the writers acclaimed by the literature of Shakespeare’s time, by the intellectuals of the time, only Sir Philipp Sydney is remembered and Shakespeare, who wrote for the despised popular theater, is very much alive.

For the novels of the west there may be occasional dark years, but for a good western story there is no sunset!

Visit LOUISLAMOUR.COM for more!

Date: July 13

Time: 7:00pm - 8:00pm (MST)

Location: The Poisoned Pen Bookstore

4014 N Goldwater Blvd

Scottsdale, AZ United States

Beau L’Amour discusses

Skyring Water

https://store.poisonedpen.com/item/hB2UM6Mk2YE4C3k6BpFI5Q

Ryan Pote discusses

The Ghost City

https://store.poisonedpen.com/item/BQmk5nUNoKEAugfuACaWyw

Hosted by Don Bentley

Four Branches Bourbon will be on hand with a free pour for attendees!

Beau L’Amour. Skyring Water (Random House, $32.00).

Louis and Beau L’Amour present a collaboration across time, an epic novel of Cold War suspense, as a pair of unlikely heroes, a woman without a name, and the undefeated agents of the Third Reich find themselves locked in a deadly race to control the greatest secret of the 20th century.

1961. The world is on the brink of nuclear war. Walls are dividing East and West. Empires are crumbling. And in Barcelona, chaos is unleashed when a rogue officer of the East German STASI attempts to blackmail a pair of struggling arms dealers. The secret—30 tons of stolen gold hidden in an icebound wilderness at the end of the world.

Mike Fowler is a former Navy salvage diver and OSS assassin. Anton Voss is an expatriate German scientist whose past grows darker the closer anyone looks. Once they might have been enemies, yet the two share an inseparable bond; they have saved one another’s lives. But all of that is put at risk when Mike discovers Anton standing over a midnight visitor with a gun in his hand.

Now they’re on the run, allied with gangsters, pursued by the CIA, Israeli intelligence, and a shadowy cabal bent on creating an invisible empire. The trail leads from the rain-soaked docks of Marseilles to the futuristic towers of Caracas and the ruins of a secret island laboratory in Argentine Patagonia. The only way for Mike Fowler to save his oldest friends, and the woman he loves, is to unlock a decades-old mystery buried in his partner’s Nazi past . . . before it destroys them all.

Includes a special postscript by Beau L’Amour detailing the history of the original unpublished manuscript and the process of collaborating with his father both before, and after, his passing.

America’s master of western fiction, the late Louis L’Amour has also thrilled readers with his work in the adventure, crime, and science fiction genres. There are more than 300 million copies of his books in print around the world.

Beau L’Amour | Penguin Random House

Beau L’Amour is a writer, art director, and editor. He has written and produced several films, including USA Network’s The Diamond of Jeru. Since 1988 he has been the manager of the estate of his father, Louis L’Amour.

Ryan Pote. The Ghost City (Penguin, $30.00).

An ancient secret hidden in a forgotten city holds the key to modern riches in this exhilarating sequel to Blood and Treasure.

Once you’ve made your first ten billion, what’s more money? What any billionaire really wants isn’t money, it’s power, and Shan Zhang has the perfect plan to achieve that. The discovery of a manuscript from the renowned explorer Marco Polo leads to an ancient city buried under the snows of Antarctica. Within that city lies the key to a forgotten technology that will transform modern society, but that transformation may cause the deaths of millions.

Professional treasure hunter and adventurer Ethan Cain is working on the Mekong River in Vietnam when the massive waterway suddenly goes dry. It’s a stunning ecological disaster. One that Ethan can’t ignore. His quest for answers will lead him to Zhang and ultimately a confrontation from which only one of them will emerge.

Ryan Pote | Penguin Random House

Ryan Pote is a twelve-year veteran Navy helicopter pilot who was part of a joint interagency special operations task force deployed throughout Central and South America combating drug cartels and transnational criminal organizations. After being medically separated, he investigated prototype aircraft development programs for six years with the Department of Defense. Before the Navy, he lived and worked in Hawaii as a SCUBA diving instructor and a lab assistant conducting microbiological research for Shell Oil. He has a masters degree in History and lives with his wife and kids in Maine.

He was, in his own estimation, one of the four ugliest men in Kentucky, the other three being his brothers.

Yet, if there is not today a statue of Sam Stubbs in Washington, D.C. there should be. If there is not, in his home town of Boonesboro, Kentucky, a memorial to the amazing Stubbs, then the proud citizens of that lovely state should hang their heads.

For, in the long roll of our national heroes there is listed no more valiant soul, nor a more inspiring story than that of the little known Sam Stubbs, a gnarled and ancient farmer who shouldered his musket and went to fight for his country.

Sixty-three years old and the father of six children Stubbs had reached that time of life when a man might think more of a warm fire-side than of campaigns in rain and cold, more of his fertile acres and growing sons than of bursting shells and a bayonet charge. Yet within the heart of this frontier Achilles there beat a heart that was eternally young. Like Tennyson’s Ulysses he might say:

“Death closes all; but something ere the end,
Some work of noble note, may yet be done . . . .”

Stubbs heard the call to arms in October of 1812. In his own words, “I was, like another Putnam, ploughing in my field - but I unharnest the old dapples, swung my knapsack, shouldered my old gun that had killed me forty-five deer the three months past, and marched away for headquarters.”

Those were dark days for the armies of the United States but for Stubbs they were rejuvenation, a vacation after years of felling trees and ploughing the stubborn soil. He took to war as a Beagle takes to rabbits, and the hardships of which others complained were as nothing to the hardbitten, silver-haired frontier farmer who waddled along tirelessly on his short bowed-legs, neither his good humor nor his readiness for combat weakened in the face of adversity.

There was no preliminary training. Four days after joining up he was facing the enemy at Queenstown in the command of Colonel Van Rensselaer, a capable officer who had served under Wayne, and on the fifth day they crossed the river to attack the Red Coats in Canada.

“. . . it liked to have proved a bad job for us, with the opposite shore lined with Red Coats as thick as bees upon a sugar maple, but after a few shots our brave Colonel moved in among them, while I and the rest followed at his heels, and drove them up a steep bank. We got a fair footing and stuck up the American colors.”

However, in the attack Colonel Van Rensselaer was wounded four times and the command fell to Captain Wool. Followed by Sam Stubbs and a few other rugged souls they stormed the steep heights by scaling a cliff believed impassable. Atop the cliff General Brock and his staff gathered about a battery that over-looked the scene below. The Appearance of the Americans was such a surprise that Brock and his staff barely escaped capture. Once on the plains they gathered a force and began repeated attempts to recapture the heights.

The first attack was thrown back, and in the second, led by General Brock himself, the General was killed. A fine officer, his loss was a severe shock to the British, and the attack collapsed.

Yet the American success was short-lived. Only six hundred of the militia and half that many regulars had crossed the river, and of the others few had the mighty heart of old Sam. Officer after officer went down to the river and urged the remainder of the army to cross, but the untrained, poorly disciplined militia, frightened by the firing and the dying, refused.

The President, they maintained, did not have the power under the Constitution to order them outside the limits of the United States, and they refused to cross the river to help the comrades they had cheered only a few minutes before. Standing on the opposite bank they watched the British troops form up, saw the American forces overwhelmed by numbers, driven back foot by foot to the cliff’s edge, then down the bank. At the water’s edge, when no one would row a boat across to help them, they were forced to surrender.

Musket balls whistled like a northwest wind
through a cane-brake!

Sam Stubbs tells the story in a letter to his brother Ephran. “But we were now in our turn unfortunate, for one half of our army was on the other side of the river, nor would the cowardly dogs come over to assist us when they saw the d---d Red Coats cutting us up like venison. The enemy now doubled their numbers while every shot diminished ours; in truth, they got the better of us, and again got possession of their batteries, although we let fly showers of buckshot and ball into their teeth and eyes Ah, the poor Yankee lads, this was a sorry moment for ye! They dropped by brave companions like pigeons, while their balls whistled like a northwest wind through a cane-brake!

“Our Commander ordered a retreat, but nature never formed any of our family for runners, so I waddled along as well as I could behind; but the Red Coat villains overhaul’d me and took me prisoner!

Only five feet tall and amazingly ugly, the British believed they had captured some sort of a freak. Little did they guess the mighty heart that beat within the grotesque little Kentucky rifleman!

I was determined I wouldn’t give up the chase,
so at ‘em again!

“As for me, I expected they’d kill and scalp me, but after staring at me as if I had been born with two heads, and inquiring of what nation I was, and from what part of the world I came, their Colonel ordered me liberated, who said to me ‘Old Daddy, your age and odd appearance induces me now to set you at liberty; return home to your family and think no more of invading us!’ This I promised him I would do, but didn’t mean so, for I was determined I wouldn’t give up the chase, so at ‘em again!”

These were sad days for the American forces. The Regular Army was capable enough, although poorly commanded in the upper echelons, but the militia had, for the most part, no stomach for fighting and less discipline. Despite defeat and hardships, despite mud, rain, cold and bitter fighting, Sam Stubbs flamed high. This was as nothing to the back-breaking toil and monotony of working a frontier farm. This was, Sam declared, the first good time he’d had in years!

With Van Rensselaer’s force a thing of the past, and the fighting shifted to other areas, Sam shouldered his musket and joined General Dearborn’s army. On the 27th of April, 1813, he was present at the capture of York, and was caught in the explosion that blew up the powder magazine and killed General Zebulon Pike, discoverer of Pike’s Peak. Sam escaped with his life although minus a good section of scalp.

“I ‘scaped with just my life you might say, for a stone as big as your fist struck me on the head and knocked off a piece of my scalp as large as your hand! But faith, this I didn’t mind much, but waddled on with the rest over dead bodies as thick as cow slops, and soon got possession of the town.”

It needed a Daniel Boone, a Davy Crockett
or a Sam Stubbs to equal them.

Always in the thick of the fight, his good humor and spirit always high, Sam Stubbs was worth a regiment. In his youth he had served his apprenticeship at casual Indian fighting, and knew a bit about fighting in the woods. Moreover there was a natural shrewdness about the old man that matched his indomitable spirit and combined to make him a first-class fighting man. His skills were needed because the British were using Indians and it needed a Daniel Boone, a Davy Crockett or a Sam Stubbs to equal them.

“. . . so that I got but one shot at one of their copper-colored sanups, whose heels I soon made too light for his head, and would have scalped him but my captain wouldn’t allow it.”

When there was a lull in the fighting following the capture of York, Sam Stubbs refused to lie about in idleness waiting for action. Shouldering his old musket he tramped miles through the forest to join General Browne. With a force of about 3,000 Browne crossed the Niagara, captured Fort Erie and marched toward Chippewa where they encountered Riall with an equal force.

“For my own part,” says Sam Stubbs, “I climbed a sturdy oak where I assure you I did not suffer my old Bess to grow cold, for when I saw an Indian creeping like an alligator upon his belly, I gave him the contents in full, and made him hug the ground to sum purpose. I’m sure I killed fifteen of ‘em in fifteen minutes, and should have been glad to have fleeced them; but the New England men don’t approve of scalping.”

Wherever the fighting was thickest there Sam Stubbs might be found. The little old man from Kentucky was undaunted by enemy or hardship. Nor was he only a sharpshooter, for when the occasion demanded he was always in the midst of the hand to hand fighting. “We took twenty pieces of artillery from ‘um; one I took, faith, myself alone with the bagnut.”

When the army went into winter quarters Sam Shouldered his musket and marched off home, planning to resume work on the farm which demanded his attention. He had not quite reached home when word came that the British were about to attack New Orleans. Without hesitation Sam changed course and headed with alacrity for this new zone of action.

Now came the greatest event in old Sam’s life for he was made a Corporal.

No general ever wore his rank with such pride as old Sam. He as a Corporal! “As I never held office before it made me feel kinder queer at first; but I soon learnt my duty and the grate responsibility attached to my office.”

…to Sam that meant that he must win
the war practically single-handed.

Sam Stubbs, sixty-four years old by now, and living at a time when that was considered a much greater age than it is today, was really living. He had been given a position of responsibility and to Sam that meant that he must win the war practically single-handed. That he did not do so cannot be considered his fault. He tried.

There had been sporadic fighting before Sam’s arrival but now the hour for the Battle of New Orleans was approaching. The defense line organized by General Andrew Jackson ran along the edge of the Rodriguez Canal from the levee to the forest, through the woods and into the swamp. Earthworks had been thrown up in the open ground, but through the forest wound two rows of logs, the space between this double line filled with earth.

The force that Jackson mustered for the defense of New Orleans was as strong as that of any army ever gathered of equal numbers, and none of them had ever fought under one banner before. As Sam Stubbs marched to take his lace he saw them gathering for the fight. They were men who knew nothing of close-order drill, nothing of spit and polish. They had learned their fighting by applying it on the frontier. Such men as Sam Stubbs, younger than the valiant little Kentuckian, but schooled in the same wilderness ways.

On the right, near the levee, a company of the New Orleans Rifles, a howitzer and some dragoons, sailors from the Carolina and a battery of guns. Then the bright splash of color formed by a battalion of Louisiana Creoles in their personally designed uniforms, a gay, flaunting picture of pride and courage.

Beyond them Dominique You, Beluche, and the swarthy, hard-bitten crews of LaFitte’s pirate ships, with their long guns. These last were veteran fighting men, victors in many a bloody sea battle for whom war held no terrors. The rest were a mixed lot of companies and battalions of free blacks, San Domingans, and some French soldiers who had faced these same British soldiers before when they had served under Napoleon.

Carroll’s Tennessee Riflemen, in their buckskin or brown homespun hunting shirts, then more sailors and guns and John Adair’s Kentuckians. Knee-deep in swamp-water, were Coffee’s Tennesseans. Sam Stubbs formed up with Adair’s Kentuckians, standing at last among men of his own kind, men born to the long rifle, deer-hunting and Indian fighting.

The army that Packenham brought to capture New Orleans were largely veterans of Wellington’s army, men seasoned to combat in the continental manner, and victors upon many a field.

The battle before them promised nothing to equal the Peninsula Campaign, and appeared to offer an easy victory.

In the north, around Niagara, whatever the valor of some units and occasional individuals, the army of the Americans had shown itself untrained, undisciplined and poorly led. Packenham was in no way prepared for what lay ahead.

They fell like blades of grass before a scythe…

Sam Stubbs crouched behind the log parapet and stared at the long line of the advancing British, brave men totally unprepared for the kind o conflict that lay before them. Sam Stubbs was a man who never fired a shot until sure of his target, a man who had never had powder or ball to waste and therefore must make every shot count. The men on his right and left had grown up to the same hard life and the same rigorous demands on their marksmenship. The weapons each man carried were his own, and had often meant the difference between survival and death, not only death for themselves but of their families as well. Those weapons were treated with respect cared for with tender, loving hands. And now the advancing army was to discover what this meant.

According to eye-witnesses they fell like blades of grass before a scythe. Sam Stubbs told of it in a letter to Ehpran. “About the break of day, they bold as hungry wolves, advanced toward our entrenchments, led on by their foolish officers, up to the very muzzles of our guns. I could have dropped them as easy as a flock of benumbed turkeys on a frosty morning but I picked for those with frog-paws on their shoulders and the most lace on their frocks.

“Aye, the Corporal did his duty that day, I warrant ye. Some of the foolish red coats penetrated our lines where they were bayoneted or taken prisoners; many fell mounting our breast-works; others died on the works themselves.

“The roar of artillery was incessant, while a rolling fire was kept up from our muskets. Ah, my men performed wonders! For an hour and a quarter the enemy kept up their assault, nor did they falter until almost all their officers had fallen. They then retreated leaving one thousand five hundred to two thousand, killed, wounded or prisoners. ON our side the loss was confined to twenty men. I lost but one out o four company!”

He had won rank on the field of battle.

This was Sam Stubbs, Corporal Sam Stubbs, if you will, and the little Kentuckian then shouldered his Old Bess and trudged away home, back to his plough and the dapples, but a prouder happier man who had fought for his country in his declining years, and had won rank on the field of battle.

The End

Beau’s Notes:

LANDS OF ROMANCE was a magazine published by some of the same group of Oklahoma City publishers that printed Louis book of poetry, Smoke from this Altar. It had hoped to become a competitor to National Geographic but, unfortunately, lasted only a few years. The Passionate Rebel was one of a series of articles that Louis wrote for LANDS OF ROMANCE during the days when he was first struggling to make a living as a writer. Back then, Louis was billing himself as a writer of adventure stories, and building a reputation as someone who had both studied about, and traveled in many exotic environments. The LANDS OF ROMANCE series gave Louis a terrific opportunity to build that reputation.

“In the mind of his youthful protégé,
Rodriguez found an alert intelligence
singularly eager to acquire his own
philosophy of liberty and freedom.”

It is December 12, 1801, in Paris. Today all the world has its eyes upon the cathedral of Notre Dame where the light of a thousand candles flickers across sparkling facets of a myriad of precious gems. Surrounded by attendant cardinals the pope is seated, waiting. He has come all the way from Rome for this moment, the crowning of a former Corsican clansman as Emperor of France. It is a scene of grandeur and splendor, a scene such as the world has not witnessed in many years, and in the audience are the great and near-great of a score of nations. But at the appointed instant, with characteristic boldness, the sallow-featured soldier seized the crown from the pope and placed it upon his head with his own hands!

A low murmur sweeps through the gathered crowd, and men shift uneasily. But it was only what might have been expected, and altogether in keeping when one remembers that Napoleon Bonaparte had literally lifted himself by his boot-straps from an unknown Corsican youth to a position as the most powerful figure in the world of his time. It was a gesture typical of the man, and an indication of what might be expected.

Standing in the crowd that witnessed the coronation was a young man of twenty-one, his brow already deeply furrowed, his large, black, piercing eyes missing no detail of the impressive ceremony before him. But strangely enough, he was less interested in the pomp and grandeur than in the enthusiasm of the immense crowd, and watching the little Corsican he remembered his own unhappy country, already stirring with resentment at the harsh rule of Spain.

Who knows but what in that moment, as a silent spectator, he recalled the remark of Baron Humbodlt that the time was ripe for Venezuela to assert herself? Or the remark of Bonpland, who said that the revolution itself would produce a worthy leader? Who knows but what in that instant Simon Bolivar realized that he, himself, might be the man?

If destiny ever directed the course of any individual toward a particular goal, that man was Simon Bolivar. The descendant of Biscayan conquistadors, Bolivar was left an orphan at the age of seven, and shortly after was put in the hands of a tutor, one Simon Rodriguez, an ardent disciple of Rousseau. In the mind of his youthful protégé Rodriguez found an alert intelligence singularly eager to acquire his own philosophy of liberty and freedom. Once again a noble mind had found material worthy of its efforts, and as Anaxagoras taught Pericles, as Aristotle taught Alexander, so Rodriguez taught Bolivar.

The young Venezuelan had already been concerned in the abortive revolution of 1797 at the time he witnessed the coronation, and already the ideas of liberty and freedom were taking their place in his thoughts to the exclusion of all else. The early death of his bride of less than a year gave added impetus to his political ambitions, and he threw himself into his work with an added fervor and interest. He returned to Venezuela, but shortly after was sent to London to represent the Supreme Junta -- Assembly -- of Caracas. Although the Junta was still strongly royalist, Bolivar took advantage of his opportunity to present the case of Venezuela to Lord Wellesley, but was severely reprimanded.

It was at this time he met General Fransisco de Miranda, a veteran of the American War of Independence and the French Revolution, a native of Venezuela, and an enthusiastic patriot. Miranda, once the favorite of Catherine of Russia, was a free-lance agitator in the cause of liberty, and a soldier of recognized ability, having won the attention of Napoleon. He had been thoroughly trained in the European school of war, and had acquired the European attitude of mind. Miranda was to bring to the revolution in Venezuela something it needed badly, a disciplined mind, and one skilled in the military arts.

“Despite the failure of the first republic, it was
anything but a failure for Bolivar himself . . .”

Revolution Was in the Air. Authority was trembling

The story of the first republic of Venezuela is largely the story of Miranda. Bolivar was yet too young, too inexperienced in the arts of war and statecraft to occupy anything but a subordinate position, but it was largely due to his enthusiasm that Miranda was prevailed upon to make the attempt, and it was Bolivar who set the stage for the drama that followed.

Revolution was in the air. Authority was trembling under the combined assaults of Voltaire, Rousseau, Montequieu and Tom Paine, and the South American colonies were restless under laws far more rigorous than those that inspired the revolt of the North American colonies. Moreover, they had the two excellent examples of France and the United States as evidence of what might be done.

But Miranda, for all his ability was not the man to lead the impulse and erratic Venezuela to liberty. The man who had reviewed the Prussian guards, who had served with the most finely disciplined armies in the world, found himself the commander of a band of passionate individualists, enthusiastic for the cause of liberty but undisciplined, untrained, and fiercely jealous. Yet despite this Miranda led them to victory of Valencia, and it was there that Simon Bolivar first stepped to the front as a hero of the day. But also followed by several bitter defeats at the hands of Monteverde, a royalist naval officer who opposed Miranda.

The first republic failed, and with it Miranda lost heart. His dream of leading his people to freedom was not to be realized. But if he failed, the fault was not his. The people of Venezuela were not ready for revolution. They wanted liberty, but the enthusiasm and ambition of other nations had not come to them. Each defeat was followed by wholesale desertions as the Venezuelans lost heart, believing that each disaster, however small, was the end of their hopes. The poorer peasants and Indians sided with the Royalists almost to a man, and Boves, the leader of the fierce, hard-riding Haneros, angered at what he considered an affront, joined the royalists, and proved the most dreaded enemy of the armies of the republic.

To make matters worse the country was shaken by a frightful earthquake that all but destroyed several of the principal cities, and proved a formidable argument in the months of royalist priests who assured the frightened natives that it was the wrath of heaven itself to punish their temerity in fighting against enthroned power. Bolivar did good work in counteracting the arguments of the priests, and succeeded in stemming the tide to some extent. But the time was not ripe, and under cover of the earthquake Monteverde advanced rapidly, taking Barquisimeto, San Carlos, and Valencia.

The revolution failed, and the first republic fell with the capitulation of Miranda at La Victoria. Bolivar, who had been in command at Puerto Cabello, an important seaport, lost the city through armed resistance from within the town and continued desertions from his half-hearted followers, anxious to escape before the republic had actually collapsed.

Despite the failure of the first republic, it was anything but a failure for Bolivar himself, for he emerged from the ordeal with a knowledge of military tactics acquired under the skillful guidance of Miranda himself, and the hardships and suffering clarified his thinking and enabled him to shed much of the sophistry that had hedged his ideas. The end of the first republic found Bolivar the commanding figure that was to impress itself upon the history of the continent.

Impressing the congress of Nueva Granada with the necessity of freeing Venezuela if they were to remain free themselves, Bolivar was given command of a small and comparatively unimportant outpost, but leading his men to battle, he won five battles in five days, opening an extended portion of the Magdalena to navigation. Following this success he defeated a large enemy force at Cucuta after a bloody battle and marched on to drive a royalist force from the important town of Pamplona. Granted greater power by congress, he continued to wage war through western Venezuela, and success continued with him.

“His great dream of one united nation Colombia, was never to be realized, for despite his own Gargantuan efforts, his wisdom, oratory, and politics, . . . “

Venezuela, Columbia, Ecuador, Peru and Bolivia
owe their freedom to the Liberator

It must be recognized that Simon Bolivar was undoubtedly one of the great military commanders of all time, and it is doubtful if Napoleon himself could have equaled the Venezuelans success under the same circumstances and conditions. At one time in Venezuela he won six pitched battles, covered a distance of 1,200 kilometers, destroyed five hostile armies, captured fifty pieces of artillery, and three ammunition depots, conquering all western Venezuela in less than ninety days!

There can be no comparison between Bolivar’s crossing the Andes and Napoleon’s famed march over the Alps. Following trails that at times almost faded from sight, that skirted seemingly bottomless chasms where the slightest misstep in the damp soil would send one hurtling to destruction, and over heights where icy winds chilled the ragged army to the bone, Bolivar crossed the Andes and swept down from the heights to new victories and greater successes. It was during these days that Bolivar was first given his title of Liberator, the one he prized above all others.

His great dream of one united nation Colombia, was never to be realized, for despite his own Gargantuan efforts, his wisdom, oratory, and politics, it was to be lost through the petty jealousy of smaller men and the bickering of factions and parties. But during his years of triumph few men have followed an ideal so closely, or remained as steadfastly true to an ethical standard. In the years that followed Bolivar marched from country to country, defeating army after army, and rising from his occasional losses with even greater power and ability. Venezuela, Columbia, Ecuador, Peru and Bolivia owe their freedom to the Liberator, for he recognized no boundaries of nation or group, fighting the battle of freedom wherever it happened to take him.

Unfortunately, he seemed unable to leave a stable government behind him. Time and again he established governments only to have them break into bitter dissension immediately after his back was turned, and time again they repudiated him, but he had only to appear on the scene and all was changed. With the death of Boves, the command of the Ilaneros fell into the hands of Paex, who was as ardently a patriot as Boves had been a royalist, and the hard-riding Ilaneros were unconcerned as long as there was fighting to be had. Paez was such a leader as they could appreciate, and they followed him to many republican victories. But few of Bolivar’s generals remained faithful. Daniel O’Leary, the Irish soldier of fortune being one of them who never failed, and Sucre, whom Bolivar came to love as a son proved almost as able a general as his superior and unfailing in his loyalty.

Thee Liberator ignored all offers of remuneration for his services, refused dictatorships and presidencies with equal carelessness, and time and again reiterated his desire to lead armies to victory in the cause of freedom. More than that he did not want.

Bolivar was a great speaker, and his speaking and knowledge of law and government gave ample evidence of his wide knowledge of books and affairs. In his style and quotations he shows the same predilection for the classics, and especially Plutach’s Lives that has characterized many another great man. In his earlier years his enthusiasm and spirit had at times overwhelmed his judgment, but with maturity, accompanied by the hardships of bitter campaigns, battles, and long marches, his enthusiasm became tempered with a fine judgment of men and a very real political skill.

In the name of the Bunker Hill Monument Association, he was addressed in the following terms by the committee, composed of Daniel Webster, J. H. Perkins, and Joseph Story:

“When we read of the enormous sacrifice of personal fortune, the calmness in difficult situations, the exercise without misuse of a power greater than imperial power, the repeated refusal of dictatorship. The simplicity of your republic in habits and the (??) to the constitution and law which so gloriously distinguished the career of Your Excellency, we believe that we see the image of our venerated Washington. At the same time that we admire and respect his virtues, we feel moved by the greatest sympathy to pay equal homage to the hero and Liberator of the South.”

There are many distinguished names in the list of those who have fought for the cause of liberty, but there are none that can hold a greater place than that of Simon Bolivar. Perhaps all this is best expressed in one of the many tributes on the elaborate monument to him in the city of Cartagena;

Bolivar, favorite of fortune
Disdained its attraction,
Consecrated his repose and all his life to his patria:
Intrepid soldier,
Expert leader, victor of a hundred battles,
He freed his country, gave her laws,
And submitted himself to them.

BEAU’S NOTES: The following is an unfinished set of notes for a talk Louis was going to give to a group of teachers about Education and Parenting.

The exceptional child is not always the child with the exceptional mind; he is only rarely the child with exceptional opportunity; he is most often the child with incentive or exceptional environment at home.

Often the best students make the most commonplace individuals.

In the first place let me say that the most common mistake is to believe that a child gets its education at school.

The basic fundamentals of all education, of all moral training, and of all conditioning for human life begin in the home.

There is no way in which a parent can delegate responsibility for a child’s upbringing and education. That belongs to the parent and the parent alone.

If a child is to profit by the education it is to get in school, the foundation for it must be laid in the home.

The first and most important thing is example, the second is incentive.

Books do not contain all knowledge and wisdom, but they contain most of it, and few people have access to other sources.

Much of what parents are inclined to believe is knowledge is only opinion or attitude.

There is no such thing as conscience without training; respect for law; for one’s fellow man; for one’s country; for the rights of others, these begin in the home and no where else.

No one has a right to have a television set in his home unless he has a library.

Responsibility for his own actions as well as for the rights of others

Love does not mean pampering; responsibility is the most important lesson a child can learn, responsibility for his own actions as well as for the rights of others and of property.

A child’s rights must be respected; he must be dealt with fairly; he has every right to as much consideration as any adult, and every bit as much responsibility as any adult. The idea that because one is a child that one is not responsible is a lot of nonsense.

Children are logical if you give them a chance to be.

For Louis’ own story of his education, read the book!

Shortly before his death, Louis L'Amour completed writing his most unique adventure story: a personal reflection on his lifelong love affair with learning.

In this, his most personal book ever, L'Amour writes of growing up in Jamestown, North Dakota, of the parents who instilled in him a love of the printed and spoken word, and of his decision to leave school at fifteen to make the world his classroom. While his contemporaries attended high school, L'Amour skinned cattle in Texas, worked as a circus roustabout and a mine caretaker, won small-town prizefighting exhibitions, hoboed across Texas on the Southern Pacific, and shipped out to the West Indies, England, and Singapore as a merchant seaman. Wherever he wandered, his pockets were always bulging with books.

Sound Effects cutting is absolutely the most exciting part of the show. For the first time it begins to sound like the final product, the scenes come to life in a completely new way, and the acting jumps into focus in a very exciting way. Paul is a really great effects editor (and dialog editor!) and an added pause in the actors delivery or using the sound effects to make it sound like he’s shifting in his chair can really complement what the actor was trying to do. If an actor loses focus in the middle of a sentence (which happens occasionally when they look to see what the next line is) sometimes something can be placed in the environment, a car passing, an animal acting up, that would have distracted the actor in reality ... all these things help.

Many times the way a sound effect is created has nothing to do with the reality you are working with. One of our main sound effects for the oil derrick was an old lathe we found in a local gunsmith’s shop. We ran it as slow as possible and let a screw driver ‘clink, clink, clink,” across it as it turned and that became the sound of the turning of the pipe. Recorded correctly it sounded HUGE. The same man, let us record some of his rifles ... we needed a good sounding, wood stocked, Winchester bolt action for John Lacklan. John would have had a Winchester Model 70 but there was an interesting extra click in the action of a Winchester 54 that the gunsmith had and stuff like that makes all the difference.

In the end we cut in every single effect separately. That way each sound or piece of the sound can be individually controlled in the mix. The sound of a machine gun might include a high level gunshot to get the “bang,” a low level gunshot to capture the echo, the sound of the action of the gun being manually racked so that it’s level can be independent from the gunshots, and the sound of an empty shell being ejected and then hitting the ground or other empty shells already on the ground. That series of effects is then repeated over and over for each bullet the machine gun shoots ... and it works better if you don’t use the same gunshot effect for every time the gun goes off.

Above is a scene showing off the ambiance and other sound effects!

In The Diamond of Jeru, ambiance is a much more important element than it has been for us in the past. Borneo. Jungle. Rivers. A town in a foreign country. The voices on the sidewalks are Malay and Chinese, British and Australian. The cars are Land Rovers and Bedford Trucks. The birds are different, the insects are different, the weather is different! We went out of our way to purchase authentic Borneo bird calls from Cornell’s Macaulay Library. Other recordings of wildlife are as legitimate as we can make them including the sounds of gibbons, and orangutans. Of course we are more attentive to getting the dramatic values right and would never compromise a scene’s emotional integrity just to get the sound effects right but we try to use the right stuff when it fits with the scene and the other effects.

Why did we of all people
put a man on the moon?
Because space is
the new frontier . . .

We live in a peculiar time. We are all like the White Queen, asked to believe six impossible things before breakfast.

Beau’s Note: “In the later years of his career, Louis always hated the fact that westerns could not be considered literature but, somehow, writing about any other period of history seemed to carry literary weight.

For example if one writes a story about the Alamo or the Civil War, it is an historical. If one writes a story about a time ten years later in which cattlemen and Indians appear, it is western.”

How do I write a story? I take one or more characters, put them into an historical situation and let them react to it. It is a simple as that.

What must be remembered is that all history did not concern kings, queens, generals and presidents. I am concerned with people, how they lived, how they worked, what they ate, what they thought, what they were and what they did. Admitted, I choose, as all dramatic writers do, the exciting moments, the moments of great trial, of decision, of accomplishment or attempts to accomplish.

I do write of selected people; for these people selected themselves.

Beau’s Note: A big theme is Louis’s life and work was that Americans, and westerners especially, were a “chosen people” because they chose themselves ... they selected themselves to come to America, move west, invent, discover, develop.

The men who moved west were sometimes poor, sometimes misfits, sometimes younger sons of noble families of Europe or old families in America, sometimes adventurers; some looked for adventure, some for wealth, some for homes.

The point is they chose themselves. Nobody said: go! Each said, I will go. Others who were just as poor, just as brave, just as adventurous, did not go...yet these did.

Each man at that point in his life stepped out of the crowd and said, I am going. And he went.

Often it was discussed for weeks, even months within the family. Neighbors came in, arguing for and against. It was a big decision. But they went. The frontiers of America were pushed deeper and deeper into the land by individuals, not by armies.

A man squatted on land; the Indians killed them, the grasshoppers or drought destroyed their crops, some died, some ran, some stayed. But enough stayed to build a nation where nothing had been before.

Why did we, of all nations, put a man on the moon?

Because space is the new frontier.

There is a record by a Canadian being very widely played now, a flattering record, but an honest one, too. He says that when there is a disaster, we are the first to come with help...why? It was the pioneer way.

They helped one another.

Not two hours drive from where we are today a ranch-house burned a few weeks ago. Before nightfall plans were underway for a big supper. People from all around brought food, and each one brought something to help that burned out family get started again. Food, blankets, clothing, furniture.

I have seen it happen several times, and in pioneer days it happened all the time. This was the way it was, and when our planes fly out with food for starving people, or medical supplies, we do it because that is the pioneer tradition.

You can ask what do I know about it? I live here now, in 1974.

Well, I’ve walked and ridden the trails. I’ve gone hungry, I’ve been half dead with thirst, I’ve been half-blinded in sand-storms, I’ve slept out in the snow in shelters I put together with my own hands. I’ve hunted and fished for meals and gone hungry when I wasn’t successful, I’ve fought to get a fire started with wet wood in the snow or rain.

But that is only part of it.

The men and women who came west had the feeling that they were living through a unique experience. Many of them could scarcely write, although on the whole the educational level of those who came west was as good or better than those who stayed. But even when they could scarcely write, they tried to write.

Many of their journals and day-books have been published; some have been sent to me in the mail; some stories I have resurrected from the newspapers and coroners’ reports of the time. I’ve read it in their own words. I’ve stood on the prairie where the long winds blow and seen the brown grass bend where their bodies lie buried. I’ve read their names on the markers, names of forgotten people, but people who died trying to build a nation.

Some say they were greedy. We live now in an age when to many writers all is dross, all is ugly, nothing was ever noble. Let me tell you, my friends, and I use a vulgar word to say it. That’s a lot of crap.

Those who came west were people; some were good, some bad, some indifferent. Most of them had a kind of strength or they would not have gone in the first place.

Many of them had no idea what they were doing.

Many did. Some understood the Indian and sympathized with him, some did not. As I said, they were people. The point is that they went out there and they kept going. Many more white men were killed than the Indians...there were more of them to kill...but they kept coming.

Many times five or six families failed on a place before one managed to stick it out. But they tried and many died trying.

Beau’s Note: He’s not talking about only being killed by Indians here, he’s talking about starvation, disease, and accident as well.

I’ve read their stories, and now I try to write them. Our histories give the children of our nation the dates, the generals, the laws, the mention of driving cattle, plowing fields, building boats. I give them the dust in their eyes, and the sweat and the tears. I tell you how they gathered buffalo chips for fires, drank alkali water, traveled the country mile upon mile, struggling through heat, cold, mud, rain and snow.

History is not simply facts and figures on a page, history is blood-shed and heart-ache it is cold and hunger, and it is striving, struggling to make a better people... hopefully, a better people.

There are guns in my stories, and there are gunfights and there is blood-shed. You don’t build the strongest nation in the world, and in many respects the noblest nation out of the wilderness in a couple of hundred years with panty-waists. It takes men with hair on their chests, and the kind of women, like a grandmother of mine, who could nurse her baby with a rifle across her knees.

Oh, they did it! I can give you fifty, a hundred stories.

Beau’s Note: “His style is changing here and I’m beginning to wonder if this was intended to be a speech or if he was writing down a combination of material from several speeches. Louis usually didn’t write things out this completely in preparation for a speech.

If sometimes things seem a bit over the top, please realize that you are reading things that were never made public. This is private material and it is possible that a decision was made not to release it. These notes were often a method that Louis used for working out ideas and discovering how he felt about various issues.”

I have said in one of my stories that a man who is called a hero is one who gets seen doing something that a brave man does as a matter of course.

Out there in those mountains and deserts, on those plains, out there there have been fifty, a hundred perhaps several thousand nameless Alamo’s and Bunker Hill’s. Men and women fought and died and their bodies became the dust that grew into wheat fields and cotton or potatoes, or grass for cattle. But each who died made it a little easier for those that followed.

We are so happy to announce a NEW NOVEL RELEASE from our good friends Douglas Preston and his daughter Aletheia Preston.

This is a quick message to let you know that their novel, PARADOX, Book 2 of the Cash & Colcord Series is published on April 21! PARADOX is the first novel in a new writing partnership featuring Father, Douglas Preston and Daughter, Aletheia Preston. It is the sequel to EXTINCTION.

Get ready for the ride of your life with Paradox:

A murder deep in the remote Flat Tops Wilderness, the body arranged ritualistically. Sheriff Colcord and CBI Agent Cash are thrust into a case that defies logic–and tests their resolve. The evidence is unfathomable, the crime scene eerie, and whispers of something older, darker, and deliberate echo through the towering mountains. As the two investigators dig deeper, they uncover a tangled web of ancient rituals, hidden motives, and a killer who is always one step ahead. Every clue only leads to more questions, every lead to more danger. And in a place where something in the woods seems to watch their every move, Colcord and Cash realize this isn’t just a murder–it’s a message. One they may not survive long enough to understand.

Douglas and Aletheia are now working on the third novel in the EXTINCTION series, entitled RESURRECTION, also featuring the team of Agent Frankie Cash of the Colorado Bureau of Investigation and Sheriff Jim Colcord of Eagle County, Colorado.

If you want to buy a special, limited edition, double-signed copy of PARADOX, click here.
https://store.poisonedpen.com/item/f9p-FNF8SlpJ9f4WIoB4Pw

If you want to buy a regular copy from your favorite online retailer, click here, then click through to the seller of your choice.
https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250413901/paradox/

If you want to check out Aletheia's Instagram account, click here.
https://www.instagram.com/aletheiapreston/

If you want to check out Aletheia's website, click here.
https://aletheiapreston.com/

Aletheia and Douglas are going on a limited book tour. Here are the venues!

Scottsdale, Arizona: Poisoned Pen Bookstore, April 21, 7:00 p.m. Emceed by Barbara Peters.
4014 Goldwater Blvd. 480-947-2974. This is a live event, so if you want to tune in and watch it live, or view it later on YouTube or Facebook, click the link below.
Event link: https://calendar.time.ly/9plshfqx/posterboard;event=78214988;instance=20260421190000?lang=en-US

Santa Fe, New Mexico: Collected Works Bookstore, April 23, 6:00 p.m. Emceed by Caroline Fraser.
202 Galisteo St. 505-988-4226
Event link: https://www.collectedworksbookstore.com/events-1/douglas-preston-aletheia-preston-paradox

Taos, New Mexico: Op.Cit. Books at Somos, April 24, 5:30 p.m.
108 Civic Plaza Drive. opcitbooks@gmail.com

Bozeman, Montana (Aletheia only): Barnes & Noble, April 26, 2:00 p.m.
2825 West Main St., A1. mgr2117@bn.com
Event link: https://stores.barnesandnoble.com/event/9780062200259-0

New York City: Barnes & Noble, May 6, 7:00 p.m.
Upper West Side, 82nd and Broadway, uwsevents@bn.com
Event link: https://stores.barnesandnoble.com/event/9780062200260-0

"We'd love to see you at a signing--please come!

All best,

Doug & Aletheia"

In a continuation of our conversation with Beau L’Amour regarding the thoughts and process of bringing his father Louis L’Amour’s last unpublished novel to life. Here are questions 2 and 3 of an 11 question series. Welcome Beau L’Amour . . .

2. How did the premise of this book first come about, and what spoke to you about it—both its promise and its challenges?”

The basic premise of the original draft was the same as Dad’s wonderful short story “Off the Mangrove Coast.” A group of guys go after a treasure and none of them can trust the others. What was poetic about Mangrove Coast, however, was that the treasure was tiny … and that raised the stakes, it was only a “treasure” if one guy could get it all. The story was excellent because it was simple. Skyring Water was born complicated and, as a rough draft, it had a lot of loose ends. On top of that the treasure was immense, to the point where getting rid of it, selling it, would have been more difficult than finding and recovering it. It was the sort of thing that made you a target … that made you a liability.

And, to a great extent, I had to face the same questions as Dad’s protagonists … how in the world do I deal with this terrifying thing I’ve discovered or created. It was a struggle that caused my father to set it aside, and it was something that took me a long time to figure out!

On the other hand, I was deeply interested in the character’s backgrounds and how their stories could be interwoven with each other and with world events. As I planned out a new draft, I decided to keep the time period the same, right around the time of my birth. I’m guessing that we are all fascinated by that world that we were born into yet barely remember. Writing this book was kind of an exploration of the time I came from … but the aspects of it my parents, thankfully, sheltered me from. I’m a big believer in a story’s power to tell you (the writer) what it wants to become, though sometimes you have to write a couple of drafts before it starts really communicating. That makes the writing an adventure. You write, the story talks back, you make realizations and incorporate them even though they were completely unplanned.

3. While working on SKYRING WATER, how did you decide what to preserve from the outline, and where to expand? Did your vision for the novel ever differ from Louis’s?”

There wasn’t really an outline. There was a finished novel that was pretty rough and that neither of us was happy with, then there were a number of conversations about what to do about it. What came out of those conversations was a set of goals … much more flexible than an outline. Later I developed a bullet list of elements I wanted to carry over: Southern Chile would be the most important location. A German submarine would be involved. There would be a mysterious and deadly treasure. Certain characters from the original would be preserved, some would be modified, others removed. The characters would be more deeply developed, the backstory, what got everyone there, would play a much bigger role. But initially, that was it.

Many of the interesting details I discovered along the way informed aspects of the plot. Dr. Thomas Payne, once of NASA, suggested the type of sub and gave me some early (Dad was still alive) hints about salvage. I spent some time in Barcelona. I toured the “Wilhelm Bauer,” the only Type XXI submarine still in existence. I met and spent a good deal of time with several men and women in the intelligence services. Slowly, ideas for the plot and the character relationships evolved. When I started writing a lot of the narrative assembled itself out of my having to face and solve (from the safety of a computer keyboard) the same problems as the characters. This was pretty much the way Dad worked, though he was much more efficient about it.

Probably the biggest change is the actual meaning of the “treasure.” I’ve never liked the “and they all became rich” sort of ending. I wanted something more and the genre, the Cold War Thriller, demanded something huge and existential. That took a lot of thought and research. I wanted something that could change lives for the better, but also … well, you get the idea.

. . . Beau L’amour

More to come!

GIVEAWAY ALERT! Want to win the ultimate adventurer’s prize pack? We’re celebrating the release of Skyring Water by Beau L’Amour and Louis L’Amour with a massive sweepstakes with Barnes & Noble! All you need to do is pre-order Skyring Water.

You’ll receive:

-Signed Copy of Skyring Water

-Ashland Leather Deluxe Passport Holder

-Black Pocket Compass

-$100 Barnes & Noble Gift Card

Sweepstakes ends June 1, 2026. Pre-order now!

https://tinyurl.com/39mu9y96