Louis L’Amour

Haven’t several of your books been set in this area?

Four or more, I’d have to check them all out, some of them only partially set here. Passin’ Through (October, 1985) was set right on this ranch. In fact this house was in it. The granary right across here was where Passin’ Through (the novel’s hero) lived. Everything that was in that story is either on this place or in the close neighborhood.

We’re only the fourth owner the ranch has ever had . The first owner was a man named Davis and for a while it was a stage station. According to stories, which I haven ‘t been able to verify yet, there were six men killed in the living room, four by the Ute Indians.

This trail , when you turn off the highway, is the old Escalante Trail. Father Escalante traveled that trail when he was trying to find a way to Monterey, Calif., from Santa Fe. General Sheridan, General Sherman, General Arthur MacArthur all traveled this road at various times. But it was a stage station on a line run by a man named Pearly Watson that ran from over near Cortez, probably to Dolores, on to Durango. And it came right down this line.

It was quite an exciting area. We came back and we stayed at the Strater Hotel (in Durango) first. We loved the old Strater because it was like the real McCoy. Then I found this place and fell in love with it. We have a thousand acres here.

When you tell a story in a country, you know how long it takes to get from one place to another and where the water is. When you go into an area, do you try to hike over the country, ride, drive, or what?

Usually what’s happened is I’ve known the country before. You see, when I was first knocking around when I was in my early twenties, part of that time was Depression time, and it was pretty bad. In those days there was a lot of interest in mining.

You could go into a town, like Durango, for example, or like Kingman, Ariz., or like Flagstaff nearly every butcher and baker had a mining claim up in the mountains. It might not be worth anything, but he was always hoping there would be a strike up there. But he didn’t want to do the assessment work, which meant getting out there and doing some hard physical labor.

Now most guys didn’t want the jobs, because they were temporary jobs. Some family man there in town might be out of work, but he wouldn’t want this job because a good-paying, permanent job might show up that he would miss. But I was a drifter, so I would take these jobs that would last anywhere from three to fifteen days. They’d drive me back up in the country and leave me there and I’d do the work, and usually hike around the country some of the time.

But these claims were always way back in the boondocks, so I got into corners of the country I never could have found otherwise. I always had a pretty good eye for terrain, so I would study the country and hike around a good deal. A lot of my background came from that. But also sometimes I’ve gone over the ground again.

There’s a fella over in eastern New Mexico, an old cowboy over there, and when I was first introduced to him he said, ” You know, I know you pretty well, I’ve ridden a lot of your trails.” He had followed some of the trails I’d written about on horseback. I love it when that happens.

You know, it’s kind of interesting how it all started. I’d been knocking around a lot, and always intended to write. Like a lot of other fellas, when I first started, I wrote about fictional places.

Then one day, I wrote a short story for a pulp magazine about a shooting that took place at a line cabin. I wrote it about a real place that I had visited. Sometime later, I got a letter from two cowboys. They had been in that very line cabin. One of them was lying on his back in a bunk reading that story when suddenly he realized, this was where it happened.

He got up and told the other guy and they checked everything out and then wrote me this letter. Well then I thought, “Boy that’s where it is: Write about the real places. Tell the real story, the factual story.” And from that time on, it’s all been that way.