Title: The Empty Land
Author: Louis L’Amour
Publisher: Bantam
Date: 1969
ISN: 0-553-25306-9
Length: 182 pages
Quote: “Matt Coburn is a fine man, and maybe the best hand with a gun I ever did see…He has nerve, but most of all he has judgment…and I don’t like what this can do to him. You can’t run a town like this without killin’, an’ I don’t wish for Matt Coburn to kill anybody else.”
Too bad. Matt Coburn, the protagonist of this novel, is going to have to bring law and order to the tough little town of Confusion anyway. There are, L’Amour explains, real “Confusion Mountains,” and the characters he brings to the town of Confusion are fictionalized from records of real outlaws…except for Madge Healy. This is one “western” novel with a heroine as tough, improbable, and lovable as her hero. Madge travels with outlaws and has collected a lot of money on the stage, but seems, at least so far as Matt finds out, to have avoided the usual sexual abuse and social “ruin” that shortened most of her colleagues’ careers at this period. At the beginning of the book she’s married; if people don’t think much of her husband, they respect her marriage. By the time Matt gets to know her, if both characters have lost their “innocence,” at least they’ve learned to respect each other.
Not that the conventions of “a good clean western” with lots of fighting and little or no kissing are going to be violated. L’Amour knew his audience.
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