Rivers West – Louis L'Amour, 1975 ★½

Throwing in the Towel, or Something

Rivers West is what happens when an author loses interest in a novel halfway into writing it. The craziest part is I can’t understand why, as this atypical offering from western-fiction legend Louis L’Amour starts out with much promise.

It’s 1821, and young Quebecer Jean Talon is negotiating a swampy path for what he hears are fresh boat-building opportunities along the great rivers of the American West. Suddenly a ghostly hand rises from behind a log. It belongs a British officer, stabbed fatally in the lung. He tells Jean of a very bad man, “a renegade, a traitor.” Before Jean can make up his mind about much of anything, events conspire to plunge him into the heart of the plot.

The novel’s opening scene is eerie and mysterious, not to mention possibly jarring in its verbless way to a seasoned L’Amour reader:

A ghost trail, a dark trail, a trail endlessly winding. A dark cavern under enormous trees, down which blew a cold wind which skimmed the pools with ice. A corduroy road made from logs laid side by side, logs slippery with mud and slush, with rotting vegetation from the swamp.

As the story continues, this eeriness grows. Just after the officer dies, an older fellow with a peg-leg emerges from the shadows to introduce himself as Jambe-de-Bois, and suggest he and Jean journey together. He claims a kind of karmic innocence about the murder: “Who is to say where a man should die? He dies when his time comes, no matter where. And only the body of the man is here. What was inside him is gone. Where he lies doesn’t matter.”

This aura of mystery feels odd for L’Amour, and yet is enjoyable while it lasts. Can Jean trust Jambe-de-Bois? What about some wanderers in a tavern at the edge of a swamp who take an interest in them? What is in a waterproof pouch Jean removed from the officer’s body? Will Jean abandon his search for boat-building work in order to foil plans he uncovers to steal away the Louisiana Purchase?

Rivers West is a novel that requires adjusting expectations. Instead of a Texas desert or a Kansas prairie, we begin in a primordial swamp in northern Maine. Instead of the post-Civil War era of Colts and Winchesters, we are in the days of flintlocks, when Monroe was president and St. Louis, Missouri the edge of western expansion:

Sometimes it made no sense. Men with good jobs, professions, or businesses talking of going west. Many of them had only to stay where they were to get rich, but there was a drive in them that went beyond money, beyond success. It was the drive to explore, to develop new country, to populate those vast empty lands to the west.

St. Louis as it appeared in the 1820s. Image from http://www.savagesandscoundrels.org/places/1820-%27national-completeness%27/.

You do get the usual L’Amour tropes, how people either befriend Jean for life or earn his lasting enmity the instant they meet him. People speak often either in exposition (to impart some historical lesson) or philosophy (to underscore a moral), to wit: “Peaceful change is the healthiest change, but if you look closely you will see what the so-called revolutionary who deals in violence wants is simply violence.”

There is a woman, Tabitha Majoribanks, a beautiful woman of fire and goodly passion, who awakens in young Jean feelings he neither can nor wants to control, and who sets the plot moving by being intimately concerned with the matter Jean stumbled upon back at that swamp. True, her chronic sneering at Jean is a drawback, but people around her encourage Jean not to lose heart: “If you’re going to have steam in the kettle, you’ve got to have fire in the stove.”

Major pluses Rivers West has going for it are an intriguing villain, Colonel Macklem, who we are told killed a frontier wrestler with his bare hands but operates more subtly with Jean; and an adventure story which employs some over-the-top elements. There is a steamboat made up to resemble a dragon, an army of malcontents being enlisted to aid in that Louisiana Purchase theft, and even a network of shadowy informants who keep Tabitha secretly informed about what goes on along the frontier.

All this is closer in spirit to the old TV show “The Wild, Wild West” than Hondo, so I wondered how L’Amour would do with it. The answer: not well.

The steamboat, the Western Engineer, gets a picturesque introduction, described as “The head of a giant sea monster or dragon, rearing up from the river and carrying a steamboat on its back.” It shoots fire as well as cannon as it plows forebodingly across the wide Mississippi. But the Western Engineer, once introduced, hardly lives up to its Bond-villain build-up, as its special powers are never used.

Likewise, the private army enlisted to subvert the Louisiana Purchase give Jean ample opportunity to declare his loyalty to the United States (despite him being Canadian), yet the army is barely explained before its fate is resolved in the form of background dialogue. Tabitha’s network of informants is referenced by her in a confidential meeting she nevertheless allows an outsider (Jean) to sit in on, then dropped.

A number of secondary characters are introduced as if they portend some critical plot development, only to have them disappear instead. Tabitha’s unpleasant beau, an older female friend, and a protective business associate all get big build-ups and only the briefest attention thereafter. Other characters disappear only to reappear later in a manner that is not explained but seems intended mainly to speed up the plot.

Even L’Amour’s vaunted historical accuracy goes out the window. Talon, our first-person narrator as well as protagonist, makes anachronistic mention of terms like “dinosaur” (a word coined in 1841, 20 years after the time of Rivers West) and “driver’s seat,” which I found especially egregious.

Of course, L’Amour wrote fiction for fast appetites, for reading over the course of an afternoon or evening. I’ve read that he often wrote his novels as single drafts, without outline, which appears to have been the method here. Especially as Rivers West roars to its truncated denouement, the suspicion is that as unready as you are for the next plot twist, L’Amour is at least as much so.

Louis L'Amour late in life. Like Jean Talon, he was of French ancestry, though his birth name was actually Louis LaMoore. Image from https://twitter.com/lamour_quotes.

L’Amour’s emphasis on forward narrative thrust over nuance and characterization may be a false dichotomy for good fiction, but I have seen it work in other novels of his. At its best, it augments the quality of escapism to which L’Amour often aspired. He creates a conflict, a challenge for our protagonist, which is met and overcome, and before stock is taken, it’s on to the next challenge, for him and you.

Rivers West certainly follows this formula. Early on, when the novel operates in more of a mystery vein, it’s a subtle matter of Jean taking stock of a situation without giving himself away. Later on, he is tested more vigorously, as when he takes on a local wrestling legend in a betting contest over some horses Jean wants. Here L’Amour not only writes a good fight scene, but pauses at the end to have Jean and his former opponent share some friendly parting words, a charming capper.

But the more the novel goes on, the more bluntly employed this formula becomes, until you can practically feel L’Amour clumping around his grab bag of shopworn clichés to come up with his next twist: Here’s a keelboat man and his beautiful daughter to rescue Jean at a critical moment. Uh-oh, now they’ve disappeared and left Jean all alone. Why, look, here’s an Omaha Indian to tell Jean where they went!

Rivers West has the set-up for an interesting western movie, but never did get made for the screen, no doubt because of a lack of authorial investment. It marks a strange detour in a remarkable literary career, showing that L’Amour’s imagination could go off to some unexpected places, beyond even where L’Amour himself was willing to follow.