An Old Addiction Is Back!

Herb’s Blog, Herbdate 23662 – 1227

Howdy Fans, Friends, Fiends, Foes, and Everybody Else!

Here’s the haps:

Some of you may know that I have suffered for years from an addiction. Sometimes I kind of forget about it and I think I’m done with it but then it comes back. What is this dreadful malady, Herb? Well, I just can’t stop reading Louis L’Amour books. I’ve tried reading blogs and I’ve read other books but… And the other day I was at the website of a cartoonist I follow and he mentioned in passing that he was thinking about creating a western character. I said, “Well I really like Westerns and I have read a lot of Louis L’Amour books.” He said that he had read his first book by this author the other day, Mojave Crossing by Louis L’Amour and asked if I could recommend others. That made me remember the first line of that book he’d just read and I had to go look up and see what the exact quote was. I picked up the book and read the first line and I remembered how easily I am hooked on these stories. “When I saw that Black-eyed woman a-looking at me I wished I had a Bible. ” And so we find out about Tell Sackett being a homely man from up in the high country in Tennessee. He goes on to explain that “…Where we Sacketts come from in the high-up mountains of Tennessee it is a known thing that if you sleep with a Bible under your pillow it will keep you safe from witches. Before they can do aught to harm you they must count every word in the Bible and they just naturally can’t finish that before daybreak, when they lose their power to hurt. Yet when I taken a second look at that black-eyed, black-haired woman I thought maybe it was me should do the counting.”

Of course, I was drawn in immediately and I read it cover to cover in a little over a day and a half. (If you knew how busy my life is at the moment you would be pretty impressed that I read anything, let alone a book cover to cover.) I got to remembering why I like his characters. His men and his women characters are no slouches but strong and tough and nobody to mess with. After I finished Mojave Crossing, I looked at the shelf where I keep all of my Louis L’Amours and I saw a book called The Cherokee Trail. I picked that book up because I remembered the woman main character and I remembered that I liked her but I couldn’t remember what, you know, exactly had happened. So I had to reread the book of course.

Then, as I replaced that book on the shelf, I saw side-by-side, Bowdrie and Bowdrie’s Law, and, of course, had to reread them as well.  So this past week I’ve read four books, which of course precludes writing in my blog because my time really is that limited these days. I can’t help myself, however, I just really, really enjoy reading just a little bit more. One of the several reasons L’Amour is so addictive to me is that every page has something happening on it. You just have to turn the page and turn the page and turn the page until you get done with the book. Another thing is the characterizations that he does. His characters are strong frontier people that are, in fact, typical of that era. The western United States in the eighteen hundreds was full of all kinds of people. There were bankers and military people and shopkeepers and bartenders and all manner of people in the West in what we call the Wild West. He captures not only, you know, the shoot-’em-up, bang-bang cowboys and Indians trope but he captures the real and different kinds of people. His characters are, to me, interesting and credible. The more Western people I meet in real life, even nowadays, in modern times, the more I realize that his people are not as far-fetched as one might initially think. Not just Western people but people from all over, who have something to fight for, something to believe in, all summon incredible strengths in times of trouble. And it’s not just his main characters but his secondary characters and even his tertiary characters are credible and likable or hateable (one or the other).

Bowdrie and Bowdrie’s Law are somewhat different because they are collections of short stories about one character. There are many other short story collections by this author but these are the only two that are about a specific character. The Texas Ranger, Chick Bowdrie, is of course the titular main character, however the other main character, in my estimation, is Bowdrie’s horse. It is described as a hammer-headed roan that was as ugly to look at as its ugly disposition. “Bowdrie had never known a horse with so much personality, and all of it bad.” The marshall in one town, hand on his prisoner while looking down the street after Bowdrie said, “They deserve each other.” He added, “They’re two of a kind.” This was after an incident that is famous with Louie fans where a thief had tried to steal Bowdrie’s horse and the horse bucked him off furiously, picked him up by the shoulder with his teeth and bit down into his shoulder and carried the screaming and crying horse thief over and dropped him into the water trough. All while holding on to him. Bowdrie and the marshall came out and found the horse holding on to the crook like that. That’s why I say that the horse is a main character, too. Now in some of these stories, there is also a secondary character named Rip Coker. He and Bowdrie work together on occasion. He’s not in every story, but he is in enough and he’s outstanding in his own right. I have a long-time best friend and we nicknamed each other after these two characters. He nicknamed me Bowdrie and I nicknamed him Rip. We worked together on many Sunday School projects and we’ve worked together in an office and we’ve done other stuff together. He’s one of the greatest guys around and a good man to have in your corner. And so is Rip Coker.