Galloway (1970)

When Louis L’Amour published Galloway in 1970 he was sitting on top of the world, having been a best-selling writer for more than fifteen years. Fame and fortune were assured, and he was still cranking them out at the rate of about three novels per year. In the previous ten years his output had included eight westerns about members of the Sackett clan; Galloway was the ninth. We always tuck into a Sackett novel with particular relish, and Galloway does not disappoint us. Leaving aside one absolute whopper of an inconsistency, we judge Galloway to be one of L’Amour’s best Sackett novels.

The story concerns Galloway Sackett and his brother, Flagan, but despite the title Flagan is the primary character. Galloway is told in the first person by Flagan, though at times L’Amour slips into the third person to tell us what is going on with other characters. The brothers are scouting for a place to settle on the southern slope of the San Juan Mountains of Colorado, which has some of North America’s most spectacular scenery. All the Sackett boys need to do is wrest control of a share of the the range from the large, lawless Dunn family.

The story starts with Flagan on the run from a band of Apaches. They’ve caught him, stripped him, bound him, and staked him out on an anthill, but he escapes nonetheless and hightails it into the mountains. There he survives on his cunning and backcountry skills for more than a week, eluding Indians and fighting off wolves. Staggering down the mountain at the end of his strength, he is knocked off his feet twice by Curly Dunn, who is riding by apparently at random. Flagan crawls into a hole to recover, but he has contracted pneumonia. It looks like he isn’t going to make it, but he is found and rescued by a local lass who lives nearby with her father. Her name is Maighdlin, which is certainly one of the strangest names of any L’Amour heroine. If you look it up, you’ll find out that it is an obscure Irish variant of Madeleine, but the real question is why L’Amour springs this on us at all. No sooner do we read the name and start guessing at its pronunciation than L’Amour himself shortens it to Meg, and we never hear her full name again.

Interspersed with Flagan’s fight for survival, L’Amour gives us updates on Galloway. He is looking for Flagan while scouting the country, and in doing so he meets Nick Shadow. Shadow is a stock L’Amour character: a gentleman badass who has left the trappings of civilization behind to make it in the wide open west. Shadow throws in with Galloway and they go off together and find Flagan. Adventures follow in a series of typical L’Amour set pieces, including a cattle drive and stampede, a crooked card game, fist fights, a lost cache of gold.

We’ve seen all that before, but L’Amour also gives us a couple more exotic plot twists. About half way through the book an old Indian rides up to the Sacketts’ place and introduces himself as Powder Face, the leader of a band of twenty Indians who live up in the mountains. L’Amour goes all in with the Noble Savage description: “He was the shadow of a man who had been great. I mean in a physical way. The bones were there, and the old muscles showed how once they had stretched the skin with power, and the look was there yet, in his eyes and in his carriage. He was a proud man.” Powder Face has come down from the hills to ask for help because he doesn’t see a future for his people. This gives L’Amour the chance to riff on one of his familiar themes; the clash of civilizations, the inevitability of westward expansion, and the loss of the Indians’ way of life. Flagan hires the entire band on the spot, solving his labor shortage and salving the guilty consciences of his white readers with a single stroke.

The second unusual plot twist is the sniper duel that Flagan fights in the last few chapters with one of the Dunns’ hired killers. Most of L’Amour’s westerns end with a straight up shootout between gunfighters, but two out of the last three chapters of Galloway are devoted to a long-range game of hunt-and-be-hunted up in the mountains. Dunn’s man gets lead into Flagan, but Sackett wins out, with a little help from a wolf that has been following him around since Chapter One. Besides being a good plot device, the duel provides a satisfying counterpoint to the beginning of the book. At both ends, Flagan is alone in the wilderness, fighting for his survival with little more than his grit and wits to see him through.

And what of the girl? L’Amour usually gives us something to work with when it comes to his heroines, but all we ever hear about Meg Rossiter is that she is “a mighty pretty girl” with “wide eyes and lips parted.” That doesn’t give us much of a picture, but we learn over time that she has a quick temper and a sharp tongue, that she is an incorrigible flirt, and that she is an incredibly bad judge of character. Not only does she fall for the sadistic Curly Dunn, but she also accepts visits from the psychopathic sniper who is trying to dry gulch Flagan. Given these flaws, we have to look hard for Meg’s winning qualities. Does it count that she is a good cook? More likely, her appeal arises because she is the only female character in the entire story. We hear a reference to the storekeeper’s wife at one point, but otherwise it’s Meg Rossiter or nobody. By contrast, I counted twenty-three men with names and/or spoken lines, making the male-to-female ratio in Galloway even more lopsided than usual for a L’Amour novel. The body count, on the other hand, is low; I counted just six dead.

Things run in pairs in Galloway, giving a general sense of superfluity. There are of course not one but two Sacketts with lead roles. In addition to Nick Shadow, there is also a second gentleman badass, Parmalee Sackett. “He was an educated man. Those flatland Sacketts had money. They were well-off, and Parmalee had been to school and all. It never affected his shooting, though, so I reckon school is a good thing to be wished for.” At one point Shadow and Parmalee trade poetry over the campfire while the Sackett brothers listen, rapt. Other than the poetry smackdown, though, there is no reason why the story needs both Shadow and Parmalee. There are also two fistfights, with one of the beatings delivered by Flagan and the other by Logan Sackett, who rides in to help with the family troubles. Dunn brings in a pair of hired guns, one of whom serves no purpose at all because he rides out of town before the shoot-out at the end.

Though there are many spare parts in Galloway, L’Amour’s most profligate use of extras is the Dunn clan itself. Old Bull Dunn has six sons (though there are no female Dunns whatsoever). Flagan and Galloway each kill one of them in gun battles, and Flagan wings another. The sadistic Curly survives the tale, but he gets beaten up by Flagan in Chapter Ten and is badly injured after tangling with Galloway in Chapter Fourteen. The old man, Bull Dunn, takes a whupping from Logan Sackett. The remaining two Dunns are uninjured but spooked. Early in the book L’Amour builds up Rocker Dunn as the most dangerous of the crew—he has several killings in his past and rumor has it he rode with Quantrill during the Civil War—so we make a mental note that Flagan will have to deal with him eventually. L’Amour drops it though, and in the end it is Rocker who talks sense into Old Bull and gets him to ride off. Knowing L’Amour’s tendency to leave loose ends untied, we are tempted to assume that he simply forgot that he had set up Rocker earlier in the book.

As always, L’Amour loves to drop names and historical references, and Galloway has several. We’ve already noted the reference to the Quantrill gang, the notorious band of renegade Confederates who terrorized Missouri and Kansas during the Civil War. We hear briefly about Henry Plummer, a sometime lawman who turned outlaw and was hanged in Idaho by vigilantes in 1864. L’Amour tosses off a reference to Tim McCluer so casually that we almost didn’t look him up; but it turns out he was an early settler of some note in the area. My favorite historical reference, though, is to the famous Texas Ranger Bill McDonald. Rocker Dunn misquotes him as saying “There’s no stopping a man who knows he’s in the right and keeps a-coming.” The actual quote is “No man in the wrong can stand up against a fellow that’s in the right and keeps on a-coming.” But what makes the reference so satisfying is that McDonald was a Texas Rangers from 1891 to 1907, making it impossible that Rocker Dunn could have misquoted him some fifteen years earlier. L’Amour obviously doesn’t care; the quote is too good. So good, in fact, that L’Amour uses it in at least one other novel, Conagher from 1969.

L’Amour also serves up several literary references, as is his habit. We hear about Ma reading the Bible, Sir Walter Scott, and The Pilgrim’s Progress to the boys back in Denney’s Gap, Tennessee (a fictional place, as far as I can tell), and Shadow makes reference to Edgar Allan Poe. Meg gets in on the act, too, telling Flagan about Tennyson’s Idylls of the King. Although it doesn’t count as a literary reference, Galloway also contains this sentence: “There’s a saying that when guns are outlawed, only the outlaws will have guns.” Although L’Amour is sometimes given credit for coining this classic NRA rallying cry and bumper sticker, the phrase was already in circulation before Galloway was published, including in a publication in 1968 by the Christian Nationalist Crusade, an anti-Semitic, white supremacist organization. L’Amour might have helped popularize the phrase, but he didn’t coin it.

Galloway clearly takes place during the summer months, because the cattle drive is stinking hot, and because Flagan and Galloway plant crops up in the hills. But what is the year? The historical and literary references give us what few clues L’Amour leaves. Tim McCluer came into the country in 1875, so the Sacketts must have come later than that. Not too much later, though, considering that the country is presented as wide open and unsettled. Further, the reference to Edgar Allan Poe reads, “He knew a lot of poetry by that fellow Poe who’d died about the time I was born.” Poe died in 1849, and if we make that the year of Flagan’s birth then he would be twenty-six when Tim McCluer arrived in the San Juan Mountains. Considering that Flagan and Galloway are youngsters out to make their fortunes, we had better put the action in Galloway some time around 1876 or 1877, else the boys will be too old, or, as Garth Brooks puts it, “I’m much too young to feel this damned old.”

Flagan and Galloway aren’t the only ones whose age is suspect. What about Bull Dunn? Let us suppose that Rocker is the oldest of his six sons, and that Rocker finished riding with Quantrill in 1864 at the age of twenty-two, making his year of birth 1844. Let us also assume the Bull Dunn got started on his family at twenty-two; that would put his year of birth 1822. If these guesses are close, then Bull Dunn is about fifty-five when Galloway takes places. Taking age into consideration, then, he puts up a pretty good fight in his barroom brawl against Logan Sackett, one of the toughest Sacketts of all.

We know when we read a Sackett novel that we can look forward to hearing about others in the clan. Our cup runneth over, then, when we find on a single page of Galloway references not only to Flagan and Galloway, but also to Tyrel, Tell, Logan, Orlando, and Parmalee Sackett. Some might see that as a bit self-indulgent by the author, but at that point in his career L’Amour had earned the right. The references to other Sacketts is not the only self-referential aspect of Galloway. Some of the action in the book takes place in the fictional town of Shalako. The word “Shalako” is of Zuni origin, and refers to a series of dances and ceremonies conducted at the winter solstice. L’Amour published a novel in 1962 using “Shalako” as both the title and the name of the lead character, and the novel was adapted into a movie in 1968 starring Sean Connery and Brigit Bardot. Around that time, L’Amour started including the following paragraph in “About the Author” at the end of his novels:

“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, when it is constructed, it will be a live, operating town, as well as a movie location and tourist attraction.”

L’Amour’s vision for Shalako was never realized, but his decision to place Galloway there shows the extent to which L’Amour was willing to shill for the idea at that point in his career. L’Amour himself winks at this transparent ploy, with Flagan at one point musing, “how Shalako came to be, I had no idea.”

We’ve noted a few of L’Amour’s trademark inconsistencies already, and finding them is one of the pleasures of reading him closely. I said at the start of this essay, though, that Galloway has one absolute whopper. Only three years before Galloway came out, L’Amour published The Sky-Liners, another book that features Flagan and Galloway Sackett. There being two brothers, it makes sense that each should get his own book, but the same brother, Flagan, is the lead character and narrator in both books. By the end of The Sky-Liners, Flagan is all ready to settle down and marry Judith Costello. How is it, then, that L’Amour has him sparking Meg Rossiter in Galloway? Moreover, the timelines are completely inconsistent. We determined, from a close reading of The Sky-Liners, that the action there must have take place in 1878 or 1879, which is at least two years after the action in Galloway. Further, Flagan and Galloway Sackett are twenty-four and twenty-three, respectively, when The Sky-Liners takes place in 1878 or 1879. Yet we have determined, above, that Flagan must be around twenty-seven in 1876 when Galloway occurs. Why didn’t anyone at Bantam Books point this out to L’Amour before Galloway went to print? Maybe someone did, and L’Amour just didn’t care. If so, then he was taking a pretty dim view of his readers. We don’t mind a few loose threads here and there to liven up our reviews, but L’Amour should have known better than to publish two novels within three years that are so completely inconsistent.

But perhaps I expect too much. Perhaps it is enough for the L’Amour fan simply to enjoy each tale as he tells it, and Galloway is a pretty good one. Besides, it’s full of L’Amour’s trademark writing, including some nice descriptions of the natural surroundings:

“The desert had run out behind me.”

“Wild and weird were the snow-covered peaks around me, dark the gorge where I shuddered over my fire. . . . A wind, cold and raw, came down the canyon.”

“The wind sang a broken song among the sentinel trees.”

We also get some philosophical musings within the general framework of the Code L’Amour:

“How much can a man endure? How long could a man continue? These things I asked myself, for I am a questioning man, yet even as I asked the answers were there before me. If he be a man indeed, he must always go on, he must always endure. Death is an end to torture, to struggle, to suffering, but it also an end to warmth, light, the beauty of a running horse, the smell of damp leaves, of gunpowder, the walk of a woman when she knows someone watches . . . these things, too, are gone.”

“I had lived long enough to know that nothing lasts forever, and men torture themselves who believe it will. The one law that does not change is that everything changes, and the hardship I was bearing today was only a breath away from the pleasures I would have tomorrow, and those pleasures would be all the richer because of the memories of this I was enduring. It was not in me to complain of what had happened. A man shares his days with hunger, thirst and cold, with the good times and the bad, and the first part of being a man is to understand that. Leastways, I had two hands, two feet and two eyes, and there were some that lacked these things.”

“I like my fellow man, but I also realize he carried a good measure of Old Nick in him and he can find a good excuse for almost any kind of wrongdoing or mischief. . . . A man who starts imagining that others think good because he does is simply out of his mind. I’ve helped bury a few who did think that way . . . nice, peaceful men who wanted no trouble and made none. When feeding time comes around there’s nothing a hawk likes better than a nice, fat, peaceful dove.”

Finally, L’Amour lards up Galloway with plenty of his trademark homespun sayings and turns of phrase. Among my favorites:

“Knee-high to a short sheep.”

“There’s a saying in the mountains that if you harm a cricket his friends will come and eat your socks.”

“The only thing she wanted from me was distance.”

“The coffee was hot, and black as the hinges of hell, but it tasted good.”

“Talk never scratched any hides.”

And, of course, there are the references to men who “move like a cat.” L’Amour uses the phrase twice to describe men in Galloway, and, to our delight, he also employs it once to describe a horse.