Down the Long Hills (1968)

By 1968, when he wrote Down the Long Hills, Louis L’Amour was sixty years old, and secure in his position as our foremost writer of western novels. Instead of L’Amour’s usual tale of a heroic man who overcomes impossible odds, Down the Long Hills is a tale of two heroic children, ages seven and three, who overcome impossible odds. The dedication of the book contains a clue regarding this departure: “To Jody and Jonna, to Beau and Angelique, each of whom contributed something to this book.” I don’t know who Jody and Jonna are, but Beau and Angelique are L’Amour’s two children. Beau was born in 1961, and Angelique in 1964, making them—what do you know?—seven and three at the time L’Amour wrote Down the Long Hills. L’Amour was following the long tradition of authors who have drawn inspiration from, or who sought to entertain, their own children.

Down the Long Hills starts with an Indian raid that wipes out an entire wagon train, with the sole exceptions of Hardy Collins, age seven, Betty Sue Powell, age three, and a horse named Big Red. The children and Big Red escape by coincidence and good luck, but their predicament is desperate. L’Amour sees to it that Hardy starts out with a canteen and a knife, and the boy salvages some canned goods from the burned out wagon train, but that’s it. Oh, and also, because he builds fires in the days to come, he must have matches as well. Oh, and also a bowstring as it turns out, though that crucial item doesn’t appear until needed in Chapter 3. Hardy has a coat, but Betty Sue has nothing for warmth and, to make matters worse, the season is late. As Dolly Parton put it in one of her greatest songs, “I didn’t have a coat and it was way down in the fall.”

I cannot think of another Louis L’Amour where a horse plays as important a role, or has as fully-formed a personality, as does Big Red in Down the Long Hills. Big Red is formidable in every way: size, strength, loyalty, intelligence, stamina, and fighting spirit. Big Red is five years old, has been Hardy’s pet since its birth, and is now a full-grown chestnut stallion measuring over seventeen hands. (We all know that horses are measured in “hands,” but what exactly does it mean? A hand is four inches, and the horse’s height is measured from the highest point of its withers, its withers being the ridge between its shoulder blades. Seventeen hands is 68 inches. That’s a big horse.)

Leaving the burned out wagon train, Hardy, Betty Sue, and Big Red plod west across the prairie. It isn’t so much a plan as just a direction. Hardy knows the wagon train was going that way, and he knows his father, Scott Collins, is waiting for him somewhere out yonder at Fort Bridger, at least a month away at the rate the wagon train was moving. That is sufficient for us to place the beginning of the story in the plains of southern Wyoming—a high and desolate country. Though never mentioned by name, we can be certain that the wagon train was following the Oregon Trail. L’Amour also tells us the year and month, though we have to wait until we’re halfway through the book for the information. It is 1848, mid to late September. Gold has just been discovered in California, but the Gold Rush and the Forty-Niners are a year away.

It’s a good set up. Two small children, alone in the wilderness, with winter coming on. Word of the wagon train’s destruction comes to Fort Bridger and Hardy’s father immediately sets off with two friends to find his son, if he is still alive. You would think that his father would have already been heading east to meet Hardy, but L’Amour explains that his father did not know that his son was with the wagon train until word came of its destruction.

Hardy proves very resourceful for a seven year old. Among other things, his father had taught him how to set snares and stalk game, how to build shelters in the woods, how to forage for blackberries, pawpaws, and hazelnuts nuts, how to fashion a fish trap, and how to make a bow and arrows. Hardy puts it all to good use, in the grand tradition of My Side of the Mountain and other tales of living off the land. And, Hardy has the formidable Big Red. So formidable is Big Red, in fact, that he is both an asset and a liability for the children. A Cheyenne Indian by the name of Ashawakie picks up the trail of Big Red and his two charges, and decides that he’ll have the horse for himself.

Things get increasingly complicated and perilous from there. After several days the two children ride up to a campfire, only to find that it’s occupied not by good folks eager to help the lost youngsters, but rather by two horse thieves who also form designs on Big Red. The children escape the outlaws and head off the trail, northward into the Wind River Mountains. They are now being sought by a war party of Cheyennes led by Ashawakie, the two outlaws, and Scott Collins’s search party. That’s not enough for L’Amour, though. He adds in a cantankerous grizzly bear and a pack of wolves as well. And, it being late fall and up in the mountains, it starts to snow.

How long could two children survive in such a fix? At first L’Amour is quite meticulous in counting the days and nights. After a week or so, though, time gets a bit more elastic. Piecing a rough timeline together, we can estimate that the entire story takes about three weeks. During that period Hardy is not only resourceful, but very lucky. Just before a blizzard shuts down the entire territory, he finds an abandoned miner’s dugout. A few days later, again desperate for shelter, he finds a cave by a creek with good cover. In both places Hardy finds crucial supplies, including fuel, cooking utensils and warm coats.

L’Amour wants us to feel the children’s danger and desperation, but of course we know that they are going to make it somehow. There’s no way L’Amour is going to let the kids die, and if he has to conjure up an abandoned miner’s dugout and a sheltered cave to keep them alive, then so be it. This is the problem all authors face in trying to create suspense when we are sure of the outcome. L’Amour solves the problem, at least in part, by creating a very worried father and several lesser characters whose survival is not at all guaranteed. Sure enough, things go badly for a number of them, including (spoiler alert!) the grizzly bear, both outlaws, and at least one of the Indians.

Sad to say, L’Amour lets us down with respect to one crucial element of the story. Hardy manages to steal a loaded derringer from the outlaws about halfway through the book. We all know about derringers, the tiny one-shot pistols that serve as vital props in so many Western movies. L’Amour was undoubtedly aware of the narrative rule that has become known as “Chekhov’s Gun;” if a gun appears in the first act, it must be fired by the third act. We can be sure, then, that Hardy is going to make his one shot count. So, at what crucial moment does Hardy fire the derringer? My apologies for another spoiler alert, but the answer is “Never.” He carries the damn thing around for days and never shoots it, never even draws it. What could L’Amour have been thinking? True, the children would already be deeply traumatized by their ordeal in the wilderness with or without firing a gun, let alone shooting someone. Still, L’Amour could have and should have found some use for the pistol.

We know of L’Amour’s penchant for name-dropping and historical references, and Down the Long Hills does not disappoint. Most of L’Amour’s novels take place after the Civil War. By setting this one in 1848, L’Amour gives himself the chance to drop the names of famous mountain men, including Jim Bridger, John Coulter, Joe Meek, and Osborne Russell, and to dip into early Mormon history with references to Porter Rockwell and Bill Hickman. We also hear about how Scott Collins taught Hardy survival skills during the years when Collins was an itinerant laborer and they lived in Wisconsin and Minnesota. In the process, Collins also read to the lad, and among other books and authors L’Amour name-drops Thomas Carlyle’s History of the French Revolution (published in 1837), Castle Rackrent by Maria Edgeworth (1800), Thaddeus of Warsaw by Jane Porter (1803), and Marmion by Sir Walter Scott (1808).

Being a native Minnesotan, I was delighted by the references in Down the Long Hills to the early history of my home state. Hardy describes one of his earliest memories, in which he sees Major Greenleaf Dearborn at Fort Snelling in Minnesota territory. Sure enough, a web search shows that Dearborn was the commanding officer at Fort Snelling from November 1841 to June 1843. Down the Long Hills takes place in 1848, when Hardy is seven, so Hardy could not have been more than two years old when he formed this memory. That’s something of a stretch, but one we can shrug off as poetic license. Other references are more problematic. Hardy remembers his father working in the “lumber woods of Rum River,” and converting a “flutter mill” to an “over-shot mill.” The Rum River was indeed one of the richest pine regions in Minnesota, but lumbering did not begin there until the winter of 1847-48, and then only in a small way. L’Amour’s timeline could still work if Hardy’s father had been lumbering on the Rum River in its very first season. But it isn’t at all possible that his father worked on a lumber mill on the Rum River during that time, because in the early years the raw timber was floated down the Rum River, into the Mississippi, and on to the falls at St. Anthony at Minneapolis for milling. There was no milling at the source, because there was no way to transport the milled lumber. Also, there’s no way that Collins could have taken Hardy with him into a lumber camp in the deep of winter in Minnesota.

It is churlish, perhaps, to raise such cavils even as L’Amour throws a bone to my native state. References to Minnesota are few and far between in L’Amour’s oeuvre. But cavils are part of the fun. And here’s another one. Big Red is a central character in Down the Long Hills, and the horse has been Hardy’s beloved friend, protector, and pet for years. Yet in all of Hardy’s memories and flashbacks of his time with his father, and in all their time learning to survive in the woods of Wisconsin and Minnesota, there is no reference to Big Red. It’s more than an oversight. It’s hard to imagine how Big Red could fit into such a narrative, given the hardscrabble life that Collins and son eked out during those years. L’Amour has created a back story for Hardy and his father that has no mention of, or room for, Big Red.

So, yes, as with almost all L’Amour westerns, there are plot holes and discrepancies in Down the Long Hills; including the matches and bowstring and miner’s dugout and the rest that magically appear when needed, the inconsistencies and errors in the back story. Otherwise, though, it’s a tightly written story. L’Amour skillfully weaves four separate threads of narrative together, with the children, the searchers, the outlaws, and the Indians all meeting up in the last few chapters. Well done, Louis. I’ll bet your kids loved it.

And, of course, we get a handful of nicely turned phrases and a few nuggets of the Code L’Amour, including:

“She fussed more than a jaybird over a garden snake.”

“. . . long brown hills tawny as the flank of a sleeping lion.”

“. . . ever since he was knee-high to a grasshopper.”

“You could not war against the wilderness; to live in it one must become a part of it, make oneself one with the trees and the wind, the streams and the plants, the cold and the heat, yielding always a little, but never too much.”

“The quality of the eyesight is often of less importance than the selectivity of the brain behind the eyes. From the hundreds of patterns and the shadow-play of sunlight and storm, the conditioned eye is quick to choose that which is different, or seems different. Just as the eye of the trained tracker can see a disturbance in the dust invisible to the casual eye, so anything that does not fit, that does not belong, is quickly seen by the man trained to the wilderness.”