Louis L’Amour’s fame as our foremost writer of Western novels started with the publication of Hondo in 1953, when L’Amour was 45 years old. Until then, he had scraped together a living writing adventure stories, script treatments, and short novels, often under pseudonyms, and often for magazines and other pulp print media. He was good and he was prolific, but he labored in the obscurity and penury which is the lot of most writers.
Hondo was L’Amour’s big break, but it didn’t come easily. As is usually the case in these matters, it was the result of hard work, persistence, and a fair amount of luck. The 2019 edition of Hondo has a lengthy postscript by his son, Beau, which provides a terrific account of how a short story L’Amour had written, The Gift of Cochise, was optioned by Hollywood and turned into a movie starring John Wayne and Geraldine Page. In a blitz of self-promotion, L’Amour created a novelization of the movie for publication concurrently with release of the movie. Then, using that success as a hook, he locked up a deal to write four more novels under his own name with Ace Books. He was on his way. The postscript ends with a description of L’Amour’s decision, after Hondo had been nominated for an Academy Award for Best Story (the category is now Best Original Screenplay), to notify the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences that he might not be eligible for the nomination, because the movie was based on an earlier short story. As a result, the Academy withdrew the nomination. That must have hurt, but it was honorable, and canny as well, because it avoided any risk of embarrassment in the event that someone else were to bring the oversight to the Academy’s attention.
We are more concerned, however, with the merits of L’Amour’s works than their origins. Happily, the postscript also includes the complete text of The Gift of Cochise, which enables us to compare the original idea behind Hondo to the final product. The Gift of Cochise takes less than ten minutes to read. Ed and Angie Lowe make their home in Apache country with their two little children. Ed rides off to get supplies in El Paso, and dies when he steps in to help a stranger in a gunfight. The stranger, Ches Lane (renamed Hondo in the novel), rides out to find the widow of the man who saved his life. Meanwhile, Angie is just managing to hold her own against the Apaches because their leader, Cochise, admires her courage. Cochise decides she needs a man, though, and plans to pair her off with one of his warriors. Lane criss-crosses the country looking for Angie, fighting off Apaches, and growing steadily more gaunt and feral, until Cochise’s men finally capture Lane. He taunts them, until they let him fight one of the warriors rather than suffer death by torture. Lane defeats the warrior but spares his life, hoping to earn his freedom. Cochise ties him up, throws him across a horse, and dumps him at Angie's. It’s a terrific story, written with pace and economy.
Hondo keeps the basic concept of The Gift of Cochise, though much is changed. Angie is alone with her son at a ranch deep in Apache territory in Arizona (not the New Mexico of The Gift of Cochise). But rather than a decent man who goes for supplies, her husband is a bum who abandons her because he prefers the good life in town. Hondo Lane walks up to Angie’s place carrying his saddle, having lost his horse in a skirmish with the Apaches. We learn that he had lived among the Apaches for a while, and at one point had an Apache wife (or “squaw,” to use L’Amour’s word, which the PC police would forbid today), though conveniently she has died. Hondo stays at Angie’s for an overnight, does some work around the place, ruffles Angie’s feathers, gets acquainted with her six-year-old son Johnny, and rides off with one of her best horses.
Meanwhile, the Apaches are on the warpath, thought it is Vittoro rather than Cochise who leads them. We cut away from Angie and Hondo to the forty-seven men of Company C as they plod across the territory. Over the course of a few chapters we get to know the officers, scouts, and enlisted men of Company C, salty characters all. Then Vittoro surrounds them and wipes them out to a man. (The events concerning Company C are L’Amour’s additions, they aren’t depicted in the movie.)
OK, time for a sidebar to do some fact checking. Based on the text of the novel, we can place the action somewhere around 1874. The location is given as southeastern Arizona, and the 2019 edition includes a map by Alan and William McKnight, who made maps for several of L’Amour’s books. (I can’t find a reference for when the McKnights first started making maps for L’Amour, but I suspect that they joined the team fairly late in L’Amour’s career, perhaps around 1980, and that their maps for earlier novels were added to reprints rather than being included in the original novels. I would welcome any information readers can provide.) Although the U.S. Army and white settlers skirmished with the Apaches in Arizona off and on throughout the 1860s and 1870s and into the 1880s, the action in Hondo does not appear to be based on any specific historical incidents or individuals. Vittoro may or may not be named with reference to the Apache chief more commonly known as Victorio, but the historic Victorio lived more or less peacefully on reservations for most of the 1870s, and only engaged in the protracted fighting that became known as Victorio’s War in 1879-80. Moreover, most of that fighting was in New Mexico and Mexico, not Arizona. At no time in the Apache wars did the U.S. Army ever have a unit anywhere near the size of Company C defeated, let alone wiped out. In short, L’Amour is spinning a good yarn without regard to historical accuracy. However, we must remember that Hondo is a novelization of a movie script, so L’Amour would not have had control over the historical setting, and Hollywood notoriously pays scant attention to historical accuracy.
Now back to the story. Hondo rides off, leaving Angie and her son alone at the ranch in the middle of an Apache war—a plot development that is pretty hard to justify, but necessary to keep the story going. Hondo has a couple of run-ins with Ed Lowe at the fort, whales him in a barroom brawl, and ultimately kills him in self-defense out in the desert. On his way back to Angie, Hondo is captured by Vittoro, but after Hondo shows his courage in ritualistic hand-to-hand combat with an Apache brave, Vittoro takes the roughed-up Hondo to Angie, in keeping with the essential story line of The Gift of Cochise. There are several satisfying twists and turns, but that’s basically the plot, and it follows the movie closely.
Not for nothing is Hondo considered one of L’Amour’s best novels. The story and characters are strong, and the writing is consistently top notch. This is also the only L’Amour western that I know of in which a Native American plays such an important and nuanced role. Sure, Vittoro rides around with scalps on his saddle and burns out settlers per the usual Hollywood tropes, but he also shows restraint, leadership, humor, admiration towards Angie, and affection towards Johnny.
Although Hondo is the book that launched L’Amour’s career as a novelist, he was not by any stretch a new author. He had been honing his craft and his voice for years, and in Hondo he already employs some of his trademark turns of phrase, including the fighter who moves like a cat. There are also some fine passages where L’Amour gets up in his pulpit and gives us chapter and verse from the Code L’Amour:
No man knows the hour of his ending, nor can he choose the place or the manner of his going. To each it is given to die proudly, to die well, and this is, indeed, the final measure of the man.
To each of us is given a life. To live with honor and to pass on having left our mark, it is only essential that we do our part, that we leave our children strong. Nothing exists long when its time is past. Wealth is important only to the small of mind. The important thing is to do the best one can with what one has.
Old as life is the desire for sons. Old as all life upon the planet. It is this that carries on the species, and it is necessary for each man and woman to breed. That was the will of nature. All else came after. The species must continue, it must go on. . . . A man needed something on which to build. A man without a woman, without a home, and without a child was no man at all.
However, I am sorry to report that, despite best efforts, I could find few examples in Hondo of the authorial oddities and discrepancies that we hunt for with such pleasure in L’Amour’s novels. It’s slim pickings. At one point, someone in a poker game states “I’m out almost a hundred simoleans,” thereby using a slang term that did not come into use, according to the etymologists, until 1881 at the earliest. But does that even count? As for women in the story, well, L’Amour also establishes with his first novel a trend that will play out consistently throughout his westerns. The ratio of men to women is completely lopsided. I counted at least twenty-seven male characters with names or spoken lines. But women? There is Angie, of course, and she is compelling and well-drawn. Other than that, though, any women mentioned are off-stage. We hear about Hondo’s Apache wife, whose name is Destarte, but no other female character even gets a name, let alone a spoken line. This lends a certain poignancy to L’Amour’s description of the barroom where he beats the tar out of Ed Lowe: “It was a long and dingy room without color, without light, without women.”
L’Amour also drops a handful of historical references, as is his wont, including a reference to the Battle of Beecher Island in 1868, when the Cheyenne and Arapahoe mauled a unit of Army irregulars, and a nice discussion of the defeat and death of Captain William Fetterman and 81 men under his command, who were killed in battle with the Sioux on December 21, 1866. Less accurate is his use of Fort Huachuca as the main US Army fort in the area. The fort was not established until 1877, yet as noted above the action is set around 1874. Could we stretch the timing a few years, to 1877, to get the fort properly into the action? No. The officer in command of the doomed Company C is thirty-two years old, having graduated from West Point in time to serve in the last year of the Civil War. You had to be at least seventeen to attend West Point in the 1850s, and the course of study was four years then as it is now. Thus, even if Lieutenant Davis graduated from West Point in 1864 at the age of twenty-one, the action could not take place later than 1875.
Perhaps the most notable outlier, for L’Amour, is the presence in Hondo of real, sure ‘nuff sex. In one of the last chapters, Angie and Hondo are by the creek in the moonlight. They clinch, and then Angie makes her move:
“Don’t think I’m crazy, but tonight I just couldn’t bear to sleep under a roof with the moon and all. I’ll go get some blankets. . . . I want to feel like a squaw woman. Feels good. Real good.” She comes back with the blankets, they spread them on the ground, and then the chapter ends with: It was night, and there was no sound. Or anyway, not very much.
Yes, Louis! We love it! Can anyone identify another Louis L’Amour novel where the unmarried romantic leads go all the way? Sure, both Hondo and Angie have dead spouses in their background, but, still . . . . And, no, you won’t find that scene in the movie. For that, you’ll have to read the book.
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