Louis L'Amour and the Paranormal

One of my all-time favorite authors is Louis L’Amour (1908–1988). L'Amour is best known for his western novels. He was born in North Dakota, and his father settled there before it became a state. Surely L’Amour’s Dakota upbringing shaped him and gave him a solid background for his writing. Over the course of his life, he authored over 250 short stories and 100 novels. By 2010, L’Amour’s works had sold in excess of 320 million copies! That is a metric fuck ton of sales, believe me. I will do somersaults and throw ninja spin kicks into the air while singing “We Are the Champions” when I hit one thousandth of that sales number. Seriously, I will.

President Ronald Reagan signed legislation in 1982 awarding L’Amour the Congressional Gold Medal. Reagan said that L’Amour had “brought the West to the people of the East and to people everywhere.” Indeed. Since my late teenage years, L’Amour’s stories had me daydreaming of the West. Had I not read the books The Daybreakers, Conagher, Lonely on the Mountain, Mojave Crossing, The Lonely Men, and countless others, I might not have sold my house and took off in an RV to explore the country—especially the West.

Unorthodox Ideas

Though L'Amour mostly wrote fiction set in the Old West, his books introduced me to concepts that stuck with me throughout my life. His books touch on subjects such as pre-Columbian explorers in the New World and mammoths and mastodons living into fairly recent times—things I have written about in my books. A 1985 Washington Post review of L’Amour’s Jubal Sackett mentioned the unorthodox ideas L’Amour inserted into his stories:

To some, the greatest appeal of this particular Sackett novel will be its hints of ancient wonders, of old tribes and lost races. L’Amour does not believe that American history began as recently as the schoolbooks told us it did. He has researched the venerable legends—of Madoc the lost Welsh explorer, of possible Phoenician or Carthaginian trade with North America’s Indians, of the lost race of bearded men whose ghosts reigned in Kentucky, of the giant Ice Age mammals which even [Thomas] Jefferson believed still walked the unexplored West. A hundred years after Jubal’s fictitious trek, Jefferson told Lewis and Clark to keep an eye out for mammoths and giant sloths on their journey to the Pacific. Indians as late as the early 19th Century reported having seen mammoths and hunted them, and L’Amour, like Jefferson, chooses to give them credence.

The “New World” is an older world than we have been conditioned to believe, and L’Amour does his readers a service by recalling ancient mysteries to bemuse them.

The Haunted Mesa and the Californios

L’Amour dabbled in the paranormal in some of his books. In The Californios and The Haunted Mesa, he wrote about portals or openings to other worlds. In The Californios, one of the villains in the story lets his lust for gold get the better of him in 1840s coastal California. He ventures into the mysterious realm of the “Old Ones” in the California backcountry where he happens upon a strange altar. Here, he is transported to “somewhere else.” After being missing for about a week, he shows up at a fandango. Ranchers and landowners from all around are at the party, and folks recognize him, but he has changed. Only days before he was young and strong, but during his brief absence he aged decades and turned into a feeble old man knocking on death’s door.

In The Haunted Mesa, L’Amour’s characters travel through openings between this world and an alternate, evil world. Their main access point is through a window in a kiva at an old cliff dweller site on top of a lonely, remote mesa. But there are other openings, too—unpredictable windows that can open and close at any time without warning. Ruthless people from the evil world tightly guard these openings. Moreover, they have set up operations here in our world to keep an eye on us.

I have always believed that L’Amour was right on the money with many of the untraditional ideas he weaved into his stories. I wonder if we get visitors from "someplace else"—could they be behind the "men in black" stories? Could these portals explain strange disappearances?

I discuss L'Amour in the fifth book of my Detours Into the Paranormal series. I recently released an audio version of the book narrated by a professional voice act

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