Book Review: To the Far Blue Mountains

Title: To the Far Blue Mountains

Author: Louis L’Amour

Date: 1976

Publisher: Bantam

ISBN: 0-553-02757-3

Length: 287 pages

Quote: “It is a far land to which I’ll go. There be savages there, and forests such as you’ve never seen.”

So says Barnabas Sackett, planning his move to the wild frontier of Virginia. Sackett is the progenitor and prototype of other L’Amour heroes—always brave, usually right—though, unlike most of L’Amour’s novels, his story is a complete biography rather than a tragedy or comedy. A comedy usually ends with a wedding or some sort of small success; a tragedy usually ends with the tragic hero’s ruin, defeat, or untimely death; a fictional biography ends with a summary of what the protagonist left to his or her heirs, usually at the end of a long and admirable life.

So you have some idea how this book ends but, it being Louis L’Amour and any of his fictional Sackett clan, you know there’ll be plenty of adventures along the way. Enjoy.

My enjoyment was marred only slightly by the perennial problem of writing seventeenth-century English for twentieth-century readers. Most authors don’t even try, and most make it a little easier on themselves by telling the stories of seventeenth-century characters in the third person. L’Amour tries to pretend that what he has Barnabas Sackett saying is seventeenth-century English. It’s not, of course. L’Amour might have been able to write seventeenth-century English but, if he’d done it, his audience would have rejected his book. This book is written in twentieth-century English with an occasional seventeenth-century phrase thrown in. (I open the book at random: on page 101, in the first paragraph Sackett says “Show up here looking the way an officer on the poop deck should look, and you’ll keep the job,” and in the third paragraph he says “Aye, but I’ve no wish to displace you.” That low grinding noise I hear is cognitive dissonance. I’m not sure what John Smith or William Bradford would have said, in that context, but I’m sure it wouldn’t have been that.) Since the nineteenth century, where most L’Amour novels are set, the English language hasn’t changed much; people spoke differently than they speak now, but mostly in the sense that they had different things to talk about. Since the seventeenth century the basic grammar and vocabulary of English have changed significantly; we can still read Milton, Spenser, or Swift, but we’re constantly aware of how much our common language has changed, and have to wonder whether we’d be able to converse with them. We could converse with Barnabas Sackett—which raises the question whether any of his contemporaries in the real world could have conversed with him.

Louis L’Amour saw himself as a serious historian who read about many places and periods, then wrote the kind of adventure stories his audience bought. In this novel, he was celebrating the United States’ Bicentennial, a very successful marketing theme that some believe helped reunite a nation torn by economic trouble following an inexcusable war. It is possible that visions of TV mini-series, which were starting to call for strong heroines and multiethnic casts, danced in his head as he created Abigail the perfect bride, big tough Lila (recognizably based on some of America’s legendary lovable eccentrics), Thorvald the noble Norseman, Potaka the friendly native American (from a lost tribe), Sakim the Muslim scholar, Kane the loyal Irishman, and the rest of the many likable characters in this book. Yet the prospects for TV mini-series don’t affect the real history. At this period the better organized settlements of European immigrants in North America were tight-knit, gossipy little villages that could fairly call themselves things like “New London” or “New Amsterdam,” where most if not all the Europeans had come from the same place and lived in extended-family intimacy on the long journey across the sea. Most of the history was written in such places. Yet at the same time smaller groups of adventurers were forming, breaking up, and re-forming as people’s adventures had led them; nobody was ordering these people to send regular reports to anybody, and while carrying everything they owned through the forests few of them bothered to carry pens and paper; such groups were often multiethnic, and made up of heroically quirky individuals, not necessarily less heroic than Barnabas Sackett and his little band of friends. If your American genealogy goes back nine or ten generations, or more, your ancestors probably included a few characters like these.