he man who would become Louis L'Amour grew up in the fading days of the American frontier. He was born Louis Dearborn LaMoore on March 22, 1908, the last of seven children in the family of Dr. Louis Charles LaMoore and Emily Dearborn LaMoore. His home, for the first fifteen years of his life, was Jamestown, North Dakota, a medium sized farming community situated in the valley where Pipestem Creek flows into the James River. Doctor LaMoore was a large animal veterinarian who came to Dakota Territory in 1882. As times changed he also sold farm machinery, bossed harvesting crews, and held several positions in city and state government.

Though the land around Jamestown was mostly given to farming, Louis and his older brothers often met cowboys as they came through on the Northern Pacific Railroad, traveling to market with stockcars full of cattle or returning to their ranches in the western part of the North Dakota or Montana. For awhile Dr. L.C. LaMoore was a state Livestock Inspector, a post that required him to certify the health of all the cattle that came through the Jamestown area.

When Louis was very young his grandfather, Abraham Truman Dearborn, came to live in a little house just in back of the LaMoore's. He told Louis of the great battles in history and of his own experiences as a soldier in both the civil and Indian wars. Two of Louis' uncles had worked on ranches for many years, one as a manager and the other as an itinerate cowboy. It was in the company of men such as these that Louis was first exposed to the history and adventure of the American Frontier.

Louis at 12 years old.

Though the LaMoore household had a modest collection of books, it was at the nearby Alfred Dickey Free Library, where his eldest sister, Edna, was a librarian, that Louis spent many long hours exploring in depth subjects only touched on by the schools. He expanded his education by studying far afield of the local curriculum. In addition to the non-fiction study of history and the natural sciences, Louis was captivated by the fiction of Robert Louis Stevenson, Jack London, Edgar Rice Burroughs and others … letting them carry him away to the south seas, the gold fields of the Yukon, the Spanish Main, the center of the earth and the dying red planet of Mars.

By the beginning of the 1920s Louis and his adopted brother John were the only children left in the LaMoore household. Edna, had moved away to pursue a career as a schoolteacher. His eldest brother, Parker, was on his way to becoming a successful newspaperman and political aid. Second brother, Yale, managed a grocery store where John and Louis occasionally worked. The twins, Clara and Clarice, had died while infants and his beloved sister Emmy Lou had succumbed to the 1918 epidemic of Spanish influenza.

My father, Dr. L. C. La Moore (He altered the spelling).

The members of the LaMoore family were intelligent, well read people and all of them had a hand in Louis' education. Emmy Lou had taught him how to read. His father taught him the ways and wiles of animals, a deep belief in hard work, and the fact that a man could always find a way to solve a problem. The basics of learning he got from his mother who had once trained as a schoolteacher, and from Edna who passed along her insights into libraries and research. Parker provided examples of a reporter's speed and simplicity of prose and the public relations savvy of a veteran political aid. Yale showed Louis a spirited love of life, a sharp judge of character, and a gift for improvisation. Louis' adopted brother John was a spunky street fighter from New York and an example of a natural survivor, quick of wit and sharp of tongue

amestown, North Dakota had provided Louis with an idyllic childhood but hard times finally uprooted the family and set them on a course that would forever alter Louis' life. After a series of bank failures ruined the economy of the upper Midwest, Dr. LaMoore, his wife Emily, and their sons Louis and John took their fortunes on the road. They traveled across the country in an often-desperate seven-year odyssey. During this time Louis skinned cattle in west Texas, baled hay in the Pecos valley of New Mexico, worked in the mines of Arizona, California, and Nevada, and in the saw mills and lumber yards of Oregon and Washington.

Wood cut by me near Kalamath Lake [Oregon].

It was in these various places and while working odd jobs that young Louis met the wide variety of characters that would later become the inspiration for his writing. In Oklahoma they were men like Bill Tilghman, once the marshal of Dodge City; Chris Madsen who had been a Deputy U.S. Marshall and a Sargent with the 5th cavalry; and Emmett Dalton of the notorious Dalton Gang. In New Mexico he met George Coe and Deluvina Maxwell who had both known Billy the Kid; Tom Pickett who'd had a thumb shot off in the Lincoln County War; Tom Threepersons who had been both a Northwest Mounted Policeman and a Texas Ranger; and Elfagio Baca, a famous New Mexico lawyer who had once engaged over eighty of Tom Slaughter's cowboys for 33 hours in one of the west's most famous gunfights. During his years in Arizona Louis met Jeff Milton, a Texas Ranger and Border Patrolman and Jim Roberts, the last survivor of the Tonto Basin War and later Marshall of Jerome. But perhaps most importantly, during the years he was traveling around the country, young Louis met hundreds of men and women who, though unknown historically, were equally important as examples of what the people of the nineteenth century were like.

In the years after leaving Jamestown Louis had a sporadic career as a professional boxer. Having been well taught by his father and older brothers, Louis made extra money from an occasional prizefight and, in the year just after his family left Jamestown, he often fought in the ring for the money to buy gas so that they could move on. On more than one occasion a run of luck allowed him to box full time. Over the years he spent time in dim gymnasiums in cities all across the west, first as a boxer, then as second and finally as a trainer, seeing the world of fighters, managers, gangsters and gamblers first hand. Louis ended his fighting career by coaching several successful Golden Gloves teams; the first few in Oklahoma, the last, an army team that went to the Tournament of Champions in Chicago. Louis freely drew from this experience for many of the boxing stories in the collections "Hills of Homicide", "Beyond the Great Snow Mountains" and "Off the Mangrove Coast".

The Steadfast, one of the ships I went to sea on.

On his own, Louis hoboed across the country, hopping freight trains with men who had been riding the rails for half a century. He wrapped newspaper under his clothes to keep warm while sleeping in hobo jungles, grain bins and the gaps in piles of lumber. He spent three months "on the beach," in San Pedro, California and circled the globe as a merchant seaman, visiting England, Japan, China, Borneo, the Dutch East Indies, Arabia, Egypt, and Panama with the rough and ready crews of various steamships on which he served. In later years he wrote stories about these times, his own experiences and those of people he had known. Many of these stories are now published in the collection "Yondering" and there are two more in "Off the Mangrove Coast". Fiction based on Louis' travels in the Far East can be found in "West from Singapore," "Night over the Solomons," "Beyond the Great Snow Mountains," and "Off the Mangrove Coast."

For a more in depth look at this fascinating time in Louis life you may check out the section "Around the world with Louis L'Amour" in the Great Adventure website. Here, you will read detailed stories written in Louis own words, view photographs from this time, learn a little history and and discover how and why this became perhaps the most influential time in his life and the inspiration for his great adventure stories! Click here to check out the section "Around the World with Louis L'Amour"

Traveling around the country and working in various remote locations gave Louis an intimate first-hand knowledge of the territory and landscape where the majority of his stories would be set. He spent time hiking around or traveling through what would later be the settings forSackett (the San Juan Mountains of Colorado), Bendigo Shafter (the South Pass area of Wyoming), Shalako (the boot heel of New Mexico), Son of a Wanted Man (the Utah Canyon Lands), Taggart (central Arizona), Mojave Crossing (the California desert and Los Angeles),The Man Called Noon (central New Mexico and Southern Colorado), Passin Through(Southwest Colorado), Fallon (Northern Nevada), Mustang Man (Northeast New Mexico),North to the Rails (New Mexico, Texas and Kansas), and The Empty Land (Northern Utah).

hough he left school in the 10th grade Louis had a thirst for knowledge. Throughout his life Louis haunted libraries and bookstores across the country and all over the world. Often he went without meals in order to afford to buy books. He sometimes worked long and hard so that he could quit working temporarily and afford to study full time. Louis liked to brag that from 1928 until 1942 he read more than 150 non-fiction books a year and that in order to do it he worked miserable jobs and lived in skid row hotels and campgrounds.

Choctaw, Oklahoma. Oak and myself shortly after we arrived from Oregon.

After several years in the Pacific Northwest, Louis' parents moved to a little farm that their eldest son, Parker, had purchased in Oklahoma. John had left Oregon a year before and had not been heard from since and so it was just the three of them who traveled across Idaho, Wyoming, Nebraska and Kansas to settle on the acreage outside Choctaw. They had a house, animals, occasional crops, and their lives returned to normal. They lived in a community in which they were not viewed as vagabonds . . . slowly the LaMoore family began to put down roots.

Louis always wanted to be a writer but in his early days he thought that his writing would take the form of poetry. For years he struggled to learn this craft without much guidance except his own intellect. Eventually, he broke out into a number of little magazines and began placing poems regularly. The name Louis L'Amour was seen in public for the first time. Poetry, however, didn't pay very well . . . in fact it didn't pay at all. He tried writing short stories that drew on his life experience, sending them to collage journals or literary magazines. This was not the answer to earning a living as a writer either. Finally, he sold a short story called "Anything for a Pal" to a pulp magazine called True Gang Life. (Click HERE to read this story on line.) He made less than eight dollars but he took it as a sign and committed his attention to writing for the pulps. The hoped for breakthrough took almost two years to come.

In 1937 he sold a short story called "Gloves for a Tiger" toThrilling Adventures Magazine and, this time, other sales followed quickly. Although he wrote in several genres, including a rare western or two, Louis' most financially successful stories were the adventure tales he wrote about the captain of a tramp freighter and his crew. Ponga Jim Mayo, Louis' fictional character, was a merchant captain whose tendency to find trouble had drawn the attention of a British Intelligence officer. Together, Mayo and Major Arnold kept agents of the Axis powers off balance in the years leading up to WWII. Ultimately, Louis did place some material with literary magazines "The Admiral" (collected in Yondering) was published in Story, one of the most prestigious periodicals of it's day; "It's Your Move" (collected in Off the Mangrove Coast), "Survival," and "Glorious! Glorious!" (collected inYondering) were published in Tanager; and "Dead End Drift" and "Old Doc Yak" (also inYondering) were published in the New Mexico Quarterly. His poetry, originally seen in many anthologies and magazines, was self-published in a collection called, Smoke from this Altar.

Louis Lamour