The Cowboy Rides Away: A Review of Louis L'Amour's The Man From the Broken Hills.
From Monday, 2 January 2012 to Monday, 9 January 2012, I read Louis L'Amour's The Man From the Broken Hills (NY: Bantam Books, Inc.; 1975 [15th printing: April 1981]; ISBN: 0-553-24956-8; 217 pps.). This is the first novel that I started and finished in 2012.
This edition was labeled as being the 13th in L'Amour's Sacketts series, but his Wikipedia page doesn't group it with that series: it's listed as one of his novels about the Talons; the main character's mother was a Sackett, and she appears here only in flashback. The Sacketts series is 17 novels long, plus a few ancillary short stories and tangentially-related novels, that follows the fortunes of the Sackett family from the 1600s to the late 1800s; apparently the novels are loosely connected, and may be read in any order.
The protagonist and first person narrator of The Man From the Broken Hills is Milo Talon, who chances to join up with the cowhands of the West Texas ranch (Stirrup-Iron) of Henry Rossiter, a blind old man whom Talon and his kin had some not-so-pleasant dealings with on their ranch in Colorado, the Empty (for "M-T"). Talon is coming off of three years riding the Outlaw Trail that ran between Canada and Mexico (sort of a black market NAFTA of its day, I guess) and seems to be trying to talk himself into going back to his family's ranch and settling down, even though he doesn't think that he's really a first rate cattleman. By aligning himself with Rossiter's cowhands, if not precisely or entirely with Rossiter himself, Talon finds himself dragged into the unpleasantness between Rossiter and the ranch of Balch and Saddler: the cattle of both outfits, particularly the "young stuff" (to use L'Amour's phrase), have been gradually disappearing over the last two or three years, and both outfits naturally suspect each other. The situation is complicated when Talon learns that an ex-Confederate officer, Major Timberly, has also been losing his "young stuff," which means that the three major ranching operations in the area have virtually no cattle younger than three-years-old. The situation is ripe for a range war, and matters are complicated even further by hotheads on both Rossiter's and Balch and Sadler's payroll, with the wild cards being the daughters of Rossiter (Barby Ann) and Major Timberly (Ann), with a couple of other females thrown in just to keep the pot simmering.
This was the first western by L'Amour that I read; I'd previously read a collection of his Ponga Jim Mayo stories about a fightin' merchant captain in the 1930s and 1940s, West From Singapore. The characterization in The Man From the Broken Hills is slightly better than that in the Ponga Jim Mayo stories that I read, but it's still paper thin; there are a lot of clichés mined and hobby horses ridden here, and while the book is never exactly boring, it's never really exciting or even entirely interesting. The plot is advanced largely through coincidence piled atop coincidence, until you may find yourself longing for a blue pencil to slash through at least some of it. L'Amour may have written and published like a man living on borrowed time, but he appears to have been a rather lazy writer who was content to spiel a yarn that was "good enough" and not fret over whether he might be causing any readers to lose their suspension of disbelief.
That said, there are some pleasures to be had here: L'Amour seems to know his ranching, cowboy, and trail lore well, and enough bits of information pertaining to it are dropped to keep the reader filing away mental notes (such as when Talon observes, "A good horse will smell screwworms [in a steer] when a man can't see the steer for the brush, and he will locate cattle where a man can't see them" [p. 42; Chapter 6]; although I questioned the scene of Talon and his co-workers castrating steer [p. 139; Chapter 17]: I'd heard that bulls were castrated by having wire tied tightly around the tops of their scrotums until they fell off a couple of weeks later); unfortunately, L'Amour makes only one class conscious remark here, in reference to a rancher's daughter's preferred choice in a husband (in Chapter 5; p. 34). The chapters devoted to the box supper or box social -- wherein unattached females of marriageable age prepare a supper, put it in a box, and unattached males interested in romantic liaisons leading to marriage bid on each box supper in an auction, for the chance to converse with the woman who prepared it while he devours it -- are full of probably unintentional mirth to the sophomoric minded, such as myself. (Lines such as "'I wanted your box'" [p. 61; Chapter 8] and "'All the boys want her box, and most of the older men, too'" [p. 63; ibid] amused me more than they probably should've. Blazing Saddles this ain't -- and more's the pity.)
However, there are also a fair bit of eye-rolling Preachy McTeachy moments, as when Talon tries to school a young Stirrup-Iron cowhand named Danny about the difference between being brave and having a chip on your shoulder (pps. 117-18; Chapter 15), and when he warns Balch that he needs to put one of his young hotheads, Jory Benton, on a shorter leash, and lectures him about the difference between boys and men (with a sidebar about fathers and sons, as when Talon says, "'..a man carries a lot of pride in a son,'" which makes Talon's obtuseness at the end all the more inexplicable; pps. 136-37; Chapter 17). I could've done without L'Amour trying to present Talon as kind of an Old West James Bond -- or, more to the point, Have Gun -- Will Travel's Paladin: when Talon meets Major Timberly, he impresses the major with his choice of tipple, á la Bond (p. 110; Chapter 14), and name-drops a bunch of high-hat, fancy-pants, long-haired writers at the major's daughter to prove how gol'darn smart his pa (and, by extension, he himself) was (pps. 180-81; Chapter 23). One expects that an author as experienced as L'Amour was at this point in his life would have been better able to impart this information than by simply shoehorning a snob's shopping list into his narrative; however, Ian Fleming never outgrew this, so perhaps L'Amour may be considered as the Ian Fleming of the Old West: it would certainly put his box socials in a different light.
*Cross-posted fr my LibraryThing account.
This edition was labeled as being the 13th in L'Amour's Sacketts series, but his Wikipedia page doesn't group it with that series: it's listed as one of his novels about the Talons; the main character's mother was a Sackett, and she appears here only in flashback. The Sacketts series is 17 novels long, plus a few ancillary short stories and tangentially-related novels, that follows the fortunes of the Sackett family from the 1600s to the late 1800s; apparently the novels are loosely connected, and may be read in any order.
The protagonist and first person narrator of The Man From the Broken Hills is Milo Talon, who chances to join up with the cowhands of the West Texas ranch (Stirrup-Iron) of Henry Rossiter, a blind old man whom Talon and his kin had some not-so-pleasant dealings with on their ranch in Colorado, the Empty (for "M-T"). Talon is coming off of three years riding the Outlaw Trail that ran between Canada and Mexico (sort of a black market NAFTA of its day, I guess) and seems to be trying to talk himself into going back to his family's ranch and settling down, even though he doesn't think that he's really a first rate cattleman. By aligning himself with Rossiter's cowhands, if not precisely or entirely with Rossiter himself, Talon finds himself dragged into the unpleasantness between Rossiter and the ranch of Balch and Saddler: the cattle of both outfits, particularly the "young stuff" (to use L'Amour's phrase), have been gradually disappearing over the last two or three years, and both outfits naturally suspect each other. The situation is complicated when Talon learns that an ex-Confederate officer, Major Timberly, has also been losing his "young stuff," which means that the three major ranching operations in the area have virtually no cattle younger than three-years-old. The situation is ripe for a range war, and matters are complicated even further by hotheads on both Rossiter's and Balch and Sadler's payroll, with the wild cards being the daughters of Rossiter (Barby Ann) and Major Timberly (Ann), with a couple of other females thrown in just to keep the pot simmering.
This was the first western by L'Amour that I read; I'd previously read a collection of his Ponga Jim Mayo stories about a fightin' merchant captain in the 1930s and 1940s, West From Singapore. The characterization in The Man From the Broken Hills is slightly better than that in the Ponga Jim Mayo stories that I read, but it's still paper thin; there are a lot of clichés mined and hobby horses ridden here, and while the book is never exactly boring, it's never really exciting or even entirely interesting. The plot is advanced largely through coincidence piled atop coincidence, until you may find yourself longing for a blue pencil to slash through at least some of it. L'Amour may have written and published like a man living on borrowed time, but he appears to have been a rather lazy writer who was content to spiel a yarn that was "good enough" and not fret over whether he might be causing any readers to lose their suspension of disbelief.
That said, there are some pleasures to be had here: L'Amour seems to know his ranching, cowboy, and trail lore well, and enough bits of information pertaining to it are dropped to keep the reader filing away mental notes (such as when Talon observes, "A good horse will smell screwworms [in a steer] when a man can't see the steer for the brush, and he will locate cattle where a man can't see them" [p. 42; Chapter 6]; although I questioned the scene of Talon and his co-workers castrating steer [p. 139; Chapter 17]: I'd heard that bulls were castrated by having wire tied tightly around the tops of their scrotums until they fell off a couple of weeks later); unfortunately, L'Amour makes only one class conscious remark here, in reference to a rancher's daughter's preferred choice in a husband (in Chapter 5; p. 34). The chapters devoted to the box supper or box social -- wherein unattached females of marriageable age prepare a supper, put it in a box, and unattached males interested in romantic liaisons leading to marriage bid on each box supper in an auction, for the chance to converse with the woman who prepared it while he devours it -- are full of probably unintentional mirth to the sophomoric minded, such as myself. (Lines such as "'I wanted your box'" [p. 61; Chapter 8] and "'All the boys want her box, and most of the older men, too'" [p. 63; ibid] amused me more than they probably should've. Blazing Saddles this ain't -- and more's the pity.)
However, there are also a fair bit of eye-rolling Preachy McTeachy moments, as when Talon tries to school a young Stirrup-Iron cowhand named Danny about the difference between being brave and having a chip on your shoulder (pps. 117-18; Chapter 15), and when he warns Balch that he needs to put one of his young hotheads, Jory Benton, on a shorter leash, and lectures him about the difference between boys and men (with a sidebar about fathers and sons, as when Talon says, "'..a man carries a lot of pride in a son,'" which makes Talon's obtuseness at the end all the more inexplicable; pps. 136-37; Chapter 17). I could've done without L'Amour trying to present Talon as kind of an Old West James Bond -- or, more to the point, Have Gun -- Will Travel's Paladin: when Talon meets Major Timberly, he impresses the major with his choice of tipple, á la Bond (p. 110; Chapter 14), and name-drops a bunch of high-hat, fancy-pants, long-haired writers at the major's daughter to prove how gol'darn smart his pa (and, by extension, he himself) was (pps. 180-81; Chapter 23). One expects that an author as experienced as L'Amour was at this point in his life would have been better able to impart this information than by simply shoehorning a snob's shopping list into his narrative; however, Ian Fleming never outgrew this, so perhaps L'Amour may be considered as the Ian Fleming of the Old West: it would certainly put his box socials in a different light.
*Cross-posted fr my LibraryThing account.