Louis Shalako: Why I Love Louis L'Amour. Louis Shalako.

Thursday, June 12, 2025

Why I Love Louis L'Amour. Louis Shalako.

He loved the stories.

Louis Shalako

Why I Love Louis L’Amour.

I love Louis L’Amour books and stories. I like the highly-romanticized version of the American West, which is only half myth. Some of it might even be real. And a lot of the rest is bullshit—

We’ll talk about that some other time.

I suppose it’s the action, the adventure, the escape into a world where the moral questions are easy enough.

It’s good versus evil, no mistaking that.

One must assume the characters are engaging, the women beautiful, the villains are clearly the villains. The landscapes in the background speak for themselves.

Louis L’Amour is one of the few authors that can regularly bring a tear to my eye. This is when the male character arrives in town, immediately goes for the most beautiful girl in town, and often noting that he’s going to have to buy a cow—for the milk, right, like when they marry, settle down, and have lots and lots of children. That’s pure romance, and even men like a little romance once in a while.

This is the character with a bag of peach pits and cherry pits and apple seeds to plant when he gets his own spread…a hard worker, someone with a dream, a story to tell, and not afraid of a fight.

Coming from an interesting background, not without its hardships, L’Amour had one hell of a resume.

From Wikipedia:

“Louis Dearborn LaMoore was born in Jamestown, North Dakota, on March 22, 1908, the seventh child of Emily Dearborn and veterinarian, local politician, and farm equipment broker Louis Charles LaMoore (who had changed the French spelling of the name L'Amour). His mother had Irish ancestry, while his father was of French-Canadian descent. His father had arrived in Dakota Territory in 1882. Although the area around Jamestown was mostly farm land, cowboys and livestock often traveled through Jamestown on their way to or from ranches in Montana and the markets to the east. Louis played Cowboys and Indians in the family barn, which served as his father's veterinary hospital, and spent much of his free time at the local library, the Alfred E. Dickey Free Library, particularly reading the works of 19th-century British historical boys' author G. A. Henty. L'Amour once said, (Henty's works) enabled me to go into school with a great deal of knowledge that even my teachers didn't have about wars and politics.

After a series of bank failures devastated the economy of the upper Midwest, Dr. LaMoore and Emily took to the road. Removing Louis and his adopted brother John from school, they headed south in the winter of 1923. Over the next seven or eight years, they skinned cattle in west Texas, baled hay in the Pecos Valley of New Mexico, worked in the mines of Arizona, California and Nevada, and in the sawmills and lumber camps of the Pacific Northwest. It was in colorful places like these that Louis met a wide variety of people, upon whom he later modeled the characters in his novels, many of them actual Old West personalities who had survived into the 1920s and 1930s.

Making his way as a mine assessment worker, professional boxer, and merchant seaman, Louis traveled the country and the world, sometimes with his family, sometimes not. He visited all of the western states plus England, Japan, China, Borneo, the Dutch East Indies, Arabia, Egypt, and Panama, finally moving with his parents to Choctaw, Oklahoma in the early 1930s. There, he changed his name to the original French spelling L'Amour and settled down to try to make something of himself as a writer.”

Something has been said about the Social Darwinism of some of his later books. It’s not unlikely he would be a conservative, a Republican. It went with the terrain. These were hardy, independent, self-reliant people who had overcome all odds, (those who didn’t die young), which is a recurrent theme of his stories after all. The fact that they’re not preachy or beat the reader over the head with it, is what helps to make them readable in the first place. I doubt if he had much sympathy for the truly criminal or the irresponsible or the just plain no-accounts.

Louis was not a lazy man and neither am I.

One of his more popular titles is the book and film entitled Shalako.

In a kind of tribute to a writer of what was, essentially, pulp, my name is Louis Shalako. If a name has any power, and I believe that it does, this is a great name and a wonderful homage to Louis L’Amour. Louis is of course French, and the Zuni Shalako is a celebration of the winter solstice, a time of rebirth, renewal, and consequently, great magic.

It is also a tribute to myself.

It’s very symbolic, but in a sense, I have remade myself. I wanted to make a few changes and so I did. All I ever really wanted to do, was to write pulp—genre fiction, ladies and gentlemen. I doubt if L’Amour set out to sell 200 million copies, that’s a ludicrous proposition. What he said, was that he would ‘try to make something of himself as a writer’. You have to admit, the gentleman was very successful. And imitation is the sincerest form of flattery.

It’s interesting that his father Anglicized the name but Louis changed it back.

L’Amour means love in French. This is pure deduction, but this is why the man changed it back. Louis loved the world he saw around him, the people, the places, and the times he lived in. He love the land and its history. It was his own form of tribute, far more so than LaMoore, if we think about it.

In that sense, he is a kind of inspiration to us all.

As a very wise man once said, love your customer.

And if you don't love something, you're going to hate everything, and that is no way to be, which is just plain miserable.

***

A bizarre anecdote. My uncle Ed ordered a sign to go out in front of the family business. When the sign arrived, it read E.S. Ambrose, Monuments. Authorized dealer for Rock of Ages. (A brand-name of the time, from a big quarry up in Quebec. He sold tombstones.) The correct spelling was Ambroise. About as French as you can get, right. But Sarnia was an English speaking town in Ontario. Ed being Ed, instead of boxing it up and sending it back, (at his own expense no doubt), he decided to live with it, although he’d probably still have the correct name on his driver’s license and stuff like that.