Shalako (1962)

Louis L’Amour was at peak productivity in 1962 when he published Shalako; it was the only year in which he published five novels. Not only was L’Amour cranking them out, he was also at the top of his game, and Shalako has some of his finest writing. Happily, the reprint I have includes bonus material which sheds additional light on the book, as well as the movie that followed. My reprint also includes a map by William and Alan McKnight which helps us track the action across the desert of southwestern New Mexico.

The basic story line in Shalako is simple. A hunting party of European nobles and rich Easterners traipses into an Apache uprising in April 1882, and the title character is the only reason any of them survive. The intermittent but long-running war between the U.S. Army and the Apaches was nearing its end by then. The Battle of Big Dry Wash, which took place north of Phoenix in July 1882, was the last major engagement on American soil, and ended in a devastating defeat for the Apaches. Shortly before that battle, in April 1882, a band of warriors led by Geronimo forced a large number of Apaches to leave the San Carlos Reservation in southeastern Arizona and march to Mexico. They traveled through the territory where the action in Shalako takes place, lending historical context to the otherwise fictional battles that occur in the book.

The title character, Shalako, is presented as an enigma until the final chapter. Although we learn more about him as we go, all we get at the start is this classic L’Amour description from page one: “Lean as a famine wolf but wide and thick in the shoulder, the man called Shalako was a brooding man, a wary man, a man who trusted to no fate, no predicted destiny, nor to any luck. He trusted to nothing but his weapons, his horse, and the caution with which he rode. His hard-boned face was tanned to saddle leather under the beat-up, black, flat-crowned hat. He wore fringed shotgun chaps, a faded red shirt, a black handkerchief knotted about his throat, and a dozen scars of knife and bullet.” Shalako has been riding around in the desert like this, we are told, for ten long years.

And so L’Amour kicks off Chapter One of Shalako, thirty-five pages that are as good as anything he wrote. Having given us a description of the man on page one, L’Amour then turns about the desert country though which he rides. L’Amour loves to rhapsodize about the western landscape, and throughout Shalako L’Amour gives us vivid, detailed descriptions of the desert. There is far too much to quote, but for a taste of it, consider this from page two: “He lived from day to day, watching the lonely sunsets flame and die, bleeding their crimson shadows against the long, serrated ridges.” The imagery is fantastic; the serrated ridge of the horizon as a knife that bleeds out the sunset. It’s not only extraordinary in its own right; it foreshadows the bloodletting to come.

In Chapter One we also get a taste of the Code L’Amour, with a passage that could have been lifted from any number of his works: “If a man was big enough to make his own tracks and carry a gun, he was a responsible person, responsible for himself and his actions, and not to be pampered. A man in the Western lands was as big as he wanted to be, and as good or as bad as he wished. What law existed was local law and it felt no responsibility for the actions of any many when they took place out of its immediate jurisdiction.” If you like this sort of stuff—and as a teenager trying to decipher what it means to be a man, I ate it up—there is plenty more of it in Shalako.

L’Amour usually places his readers in the midst of the action from the get go, but with Shalako he takes his time. The first bit of action comes several pages in, when Shalako finds the body of a scout who has been killed by Apaches. By following the scout’s back trail, Shalako deduces that the scout was following a woman, so he takes after her himself. By sundown he’s caught up to her, and what does he see? “Not only a woman, but a young woman, and a beautiful woman. A lady, this one.” And later, “She was tall for a woman, slender but rounded . . . quite a woman.” It turns out that she is Lady Irina Carnarvon, of ancient Welsh-Irish nobility. Why L’Amour gave her a Slavic first name, instead of the Irish “Irene” is anyone’s guess. And I regret to say that we don’t get any further details about Irina, other than her big eyes, nor do she and Shalako make any physical contact.

Shalako warns Irina that there are Apaches nearby and escorts her back to her camp. L’Amour’s writing for the next several pages is masterly. Shalako and Irina spar as they go, and their dialogue serves both to get them acquainted and to provide a great deal of information for the reader which would otherwise have been taken up in tedious exposition. We learn that she is part of a hunting party led by a Prussian general, one Baron Frederick von Hallstatt, who led an army during the Franco-Prussian war. This fails to impress Shalako, who tells her that Hallstatt and his kind are no match for the Apaches. When she insists that von Hallstatt is a national hero back home, Shalaoko replies “We had one of those up north a few years back. His name was Custer.” Touche, Shalako, but Irina remains confident that their hunting party can handle the (ahem) “naked savages.” After all, there are twenty-four of them.

On they ride, while L’Amour continues to feed us information. In a sidebar, we learn that there is a particularly vicious Apache out there somewhere, with the annoyingly complicated and italicized name of “Tats-ah-das-ay-go.” A bit of research turns up a surprising source of the name. In Among the Apaches, an account by John Cremony from 1868, the author briefly describes a tough but misanthropic Apache warrior by that name. Among the Apaches is the sort of book that L’Amour would have read and added to his extensive library, and something about the brief mention of the warrior must have lodged in L’Amour’s brain for later use. We learn, too, that the hunting party includes a gunman named Bosky Fulton, who gets a great description: “He was a lean and savage man with a boy’s soft beard along his jaws, high cheekbones, and a lantern jaw. His thin neck lifted from a greasy shirt collar. The .44 Colt on his thigh was a deadly thing.”

And still there is more to Chapter One. We get a great bit of dialogue guaranteed to make the ladies swoon:

“Horse is like a woman. Keep a strong hand on the bridle and pet ‘em a mite and they’ll stand up to most anything. Just let ‘em get the bit in their teeth and they’ll make themselves miserable and a man, too.”

“Women are not animals.”

“Matter of viewpoint.”

“Some women don’t want a master.”

“Those are the miserable ones. Carry their heads high and talk about independence. Seems to me an independent woman is a lonely woman.”

You are independent, are you not?”

“Different sort of thing. The sooner women realize that men are different, the better off they’ll be. The more independent a woman becomes the less of a woman she is, and the less of a woman she is the less she is of anything worthwhile.”

“I don’t agree.”

Didn’t figure on it. A woman shouldn’t try to be like a man. Best she can be is a poor imitation and nobody wants anything but the genuine article. Nature intended woman to keep a home and a hearth. Man is a hunter, a rover . . .  sometimes he has to go far afield to make a living, so it becomes his nature.”

“And where is your woman?”

“Don’t have one.”

This is fairly extreme, even for L’Amour, and I have a suspicion that Shalako is pulling Irina’s leg here, and L’Amour is pulling ours. Later in the book, Shalako ups the ante, telling Irina that “there’s no reason why a good provider shouldn’t have two, three, maybe even four women. Seems almost indecent, a man shutting other women out of his life like that.” But there L’Amour hints that Shalako is teasing her, and that Irina is in on the joke.

In any event, having thus made his first attempt to charm the lovely Irina, the two race their horses across the last mile of desert and into camp, with Shalako shooting his first Apache in the process. I thought I had caught L’Amour in one of his trademark inconsistencies here. A few pages earlier we read that when Shalako came upon Irina she was riding side saddle. I assumed that would make it impossible for her to stay on her horse while riding pell mell across the desert at night, but an internet search corrected me: in the 1830s a side saddle was invented that allows a rider to do virtually everything that can be done while riding astride.

Once they reach camp, Shalako continues to demonstrate his disregard for tact and social convention by insulting von Hallstatt and telling him “Unless you’re shot with luck every man jack of you will be dead within forty-eight hours.” He gives him advice on how to prepare the camp for attack, he borrows Irina’s best horse (“Thanks, ma’am, and good luck. You’re quite a woman.”), and he rides out. In the process, L’Amour indulges his love of historical references and gives us a clue about Shalako’s past. When von Hallstatt expresses contempt for the “naked savages” (L’Amour’s second use of that term), Shalako tells him about the doomed Fetterman expedition of 1866, in which U.S. Army Captain William J. Fetterman and eighty men were wiped out by Lakota Sioux who used the same tactics as Hannibal at the Battle of Cannae. Shalako goes on to tell von Hallstatt that “There isn’t a thing in Vegetius, Saxe, or Jomini an Indian doesn’t know, and more besides. He’s the greatest guerrilla fighter the world has ever known.”

Throughout Shalako L’Amour is in full name-drop mode. In addition to the military authorities noted above, I counted at least twelve other references to historical figures, going all the way back to Alexander the Great. I, for one, had never heard of Vegetius, Saxe, or Jomini, though an internet search turns up plenty of information. We’ve all heard of Hannibal and his elephants, but do we know anything about the Battle of Cannae? Why, then, do we get an odd thrill when L’Amour makes reference to these military authorities and historical events? I think it is because there is subtle flattery at work; L’Amour is winking at us as if, of course, we also know all about such matters, and we can nod sagely and read on with no one the wiser about our ignorance.

At last Chapter One comes to a close. L’Amour has skillfully introduced us to all of the main characters, and the table is set for the action that follows. In so doing, L’Amour also neatly sets out the hierarchy of bad-assedness in the West. At the bottom are the hoity-toity foreigners and their “tin-braided general.”  At the top is Shalako himself, followed by Tats-ah-das-ay-go and the other Apaches, then the U.S. Army, and somewhere in there the gunfighter Bosky Fulton.

The rest of the book follows a familiar plot scenario. Shalako comes back, of course, and the hunting party fights an increasingly desperate battle for survival. It is, in short, the plot of a monster movie, with the Apaches playing the role of the monster. (I can’t find the quote, but someone—Stephen King? Steven Spielberg?—described the basic plot of the monster movie as “There’s something out there. We don’t know how to stop it. Here it comes again.”)  As always, the suspense comes from our uncertainty as to who will survive. We can be sure that Shalako and Irina will make it, of course, but everyone else is fair game.

The end of Shalako is terrific. The Apaches close in and pick off the members of the hunting party one by one. A sandstorm blows in, obscuring everything, “sand rattled against the rock and their clothing, driving with force enough to draw flecks of blood.” Bosky Fulton dies, of course, though not in a gunfight with Shalako. Tats-ah-das-ay-go catches him and tortures him to death. Instead of a gunfight at the end, we get an epic mano a mano fight between Shalako and Tats-ah-das-ay-go which ends at the top of a cliff, with Tats-ah-das-ay-go falling to his death after Shalako breaks his arm. Most of the fights in L’Amour’s novels are by-the-numbers barroom brawls, with the the hero whipping the bad guy and winning in a knock out. By contrast, the final fight in Shalako is to the death. It starts with knives and ends with fists, and it is graphic and absolutely brutal. As Tats-ah-das-ay-go falls to his death, Shalako shouts after him, in Apache, “Warrior! Brother!” It’s L’Amour at his very best.

The last chapter also supplies Shalako’s full curriculum vitae, and it’s an impressive one. He left home in Texas at sixteen, and fought the last two years of the Civil War in a Union cavalry unit. Then he fought in South Africa with the Boers in the Basuto War, then in the Afghanistan Civil War, then with the French in the Franco-Prussian War. Pretty cool stuff, and worth a few internet searches. He also spent time in Paris, enough to learn French (he’s also fluent in German) and to meet Manet, Degas, and Zola. Shalako may be largely self-taught, but it's enough for Irina, who rides off with him on the last page.

Men greatly outnumber women in Shalako, as is always the case with L’Amour’s westerns, but the ratio is not as lopsided as usual. L’Amour writes in four women with speaking roles, all of whom are members of the von Hallstatt party, and each of whom has a distinctive personality. Of men, there are thirty or so who have names or speaking parts, but only a few with more than bit roles. Men still outnumber women significantly in Shalako, but not to the the same extent we are used to seeing.

As always, we look for inconsistencies and loose ends when we read L’Amour, but I only found a few in Shalako. When we first read about Bosky Fulton, L’Amour writes that “Bosky Fulton was a gunman who had never heard of either Tats-ah-das-ay-go or Shalako,” but when Shalako tells him a few days later that Tats-ah-das-ay-go is out there somewhere, stalking the hunting party, Fulton is shocked by the news. Also, L’Amour tells us that Shalako is named after the Zuni rain god, but an internet search states that the Shalako is actually an annual Zuni religious ceremony. The real howler is the plot set-up itself. The vainglorious von Hallstatt brings his hunting party into Apache country, ostensibly to hunt bighorn sheep, but really in the hopes that he’ll have a skirmish or two with the Apaches. Yet we are also told that the Apaches have only just recently left their reservation and joined with others coming up from Mexico, all of which catches the U.S. Army, not to mention von Hallstatt, completely by surprise. So which is it? Why would von Hallstatt think he would encounter the Apaches, if the country is completely pacified?

The edition I have has a nice post-script by L’Amour’s son, Beau, which covers some of this. L’Amour came in for criticism from the Western Writers of America for the premise that a European hunting party would venture way out yonder beyond the reaches of civilization. L’Amour countered with references to numerous instances of lavish game parties on the frontier, sponsored by European nobility and wealthy easterners. Even L’Amour, however, had to acknowledge that he could find no instances of such a hunting party blundering into an Indian war, writing “I used a fictional device in placing one of the many such parties in the midst of an actual Indian outbreak, but this is accepted practice.”

The bonus material supplied by Beau L’Amour in my reprint of Shalako includes an entertaining and informative account of how the book became the basis of a movie starring Sean Connery and Brigitte Bardot in 1968. The movie did fairly well at the box office despite mixed reviews. I have not been able to find a copy of it, so I cannot speak to it myself. However, summaries of the movie plot make it clear that it departs in many substantive ways from the book, and Beau L’Amour’s commentary states that Louis L’Amour, though pleased that the book was made into a major motion picture, wisely took a hands-off approach to the making of the movie.

I suspect that it was the publicity generated by the movie, however much its plot may have diverged from the book, that made L’Amour attach the name of Shalako to his proposed Old West town in southwestern Colorado. The town never got built, but that didn’t keep L’Amour from promoting the idea for years in the biographical summary on the last page of his novels. It’s no knock on L’Amour that this particular project failed. After all, as Robert Browning wrote, “A man’s reach should exceed his grasp, or what’s a heaven for?”

We cannot finish without tipping our hat to L’Amour’s colorful turns of phrase, his love of passing on lore, and of course the Code L’Amour. Here are a few samples from Shalako:

“Movement attracts the eye, draws the attention, renders visible. A motionless object that blends with the surroundings can long remain invisible even when close by.”

“He can track better than most Indians, and can ride anything that wears hair.”

“Every man should fight his own battles and saddle his own broncs.”

“You know how much of a hole a man leaves when he dies? The same hole you leave in the water when you pull your finger out.”

And, of course: “He moved now like a cat.”