yonder on the slope of Banded Mountain.”
“Kind of him,” Orrin said, and I agreed.
“We’ll do the same for him,” I said. “Where he lies we’ll put him down. What was
it pa used to say? ‘Where the chips fall, there let them lie.’ ”
Nell Trelawney stood up. “Are you going home now, Tell? It’s time.”
“I reckon,” I said, and we went to our horses together.
About the Author
Louis L’Amour, born Louis Dearborn L’Amour, is of French-Irish descent. Although
Mr. L’Amour claims his writing began as a “spur-of-the-moment thing” prompted by
friends who relished his verbal tales of the West, he comes by his talent
honestly. A frontiersman by heritage (his grandfather was scalped by the Sioux),
and a universal man by experience, Louis L’Amour lives the life of his fictional
heroes. Since leaving his native Jamestown, North Dakota, at the age of fifteen,
he’s been a longshoreman, lumberjack, elephant handler, hay shocker, flume
builder, fruit picker, and an officer on tank destroyers during World War II.
And he’s written four hundred short stories and over fifty books (including a
volume of poetry).
Mr. L’Amour has lectured widely, traveled the West thoroughly, studied
archaeology, compiled biographies of over one thousand Western gunfighters, and
read prodigiously (his library holds more than two thousand volumes). And he’s
watched thirty-one of his westerns as movies. He’s circled the world on a
freighter, mined in the West, sailed a dhow on the Red Sea, been shipwrecked in
the West Indies, stranded in the Mojave Desert. He’s won fifty-one of fifty-nine
fights as a professional boxer and pinchhit for Dorothy Kilgallen when she was
on vacation from her column. Since 1816, thirty-three members of his family have
been writers. And, he says, “I could sit in the middle of Sunset Boulevard and
write with my typewriter on my knees; temperamental I am not.”
Mr. L’Amour is re-creating an 1865 Western town, christened Shalako, where the
borders of Utah, Arizona, New Mexico, and Colorado meet. Historically authentic
from whistle to well, it will be a live, operating town, as well as a movie
location and tourist attraction.
Mr. L’Amour now lives in Los Angeles with his wife Kathy, who helps with the
enormous amount of research he does for his books. Soon, Mr. L’Amour hopes, the
children (Beau and Angelique) will be helping too.